Florin Salam with band
I showed up to the garden the next afternoon for the artist talk by
Octavian Nemescu, one of my favorite composers in terms of democratizing every instrument, whether it be a computer, a synthesizer, a piece of percussion or an oboe, and then making outrageously expansive music. (I am really hoping his book “The Semantic Capacities of Music” gets translated in my lifetime.) Sensibly, though, the talk was in Romanian, so I just listened for the sonics of the language.
Afterwards, on the same little side stage, trumpeter
Mazen Kerbaj played a solo. If you’ve never seen him live, he augments the trumpet with all sorts of accoutrements, and takes it apart as he sees fit. I was watching Nemescu watching Kerbaj and nodding his head in approval; now that’s a proper history of music. Kerbaj moved his trumpet around the microphone like a fly around a carcass. A guy near me in the audience was crushing and uncrushing his water bottle in what seemed like a passive-aggressive protest regarding the subtlety and quotidianity of Kerbaj’s sonics; he was softly admonished and stopped. Mazen himself had several cups that he used to mute the trumpet and swirl marbles around inside, and then he crushed his own cup. With his trumpet perpendicular to the ground and held between his knees, he put a small drum head on top and swirled more marbles in it as the drum head wriggled from the breath coming at it from below; another guy in the audience slowly cascaded his fingers across his girlfriend’s arm in the same rhythm, totally fitting since everything Kerbaj does is so loving, of sound and situation.
On the same stage, an iteration of the
PFA Orchestra, a varied collective of improvising musicians from the region stretching from Romania to Hungary and Serbia, performed with guitar, bass, voice, percussion and voice, violin and voice, saxophone and voice, and voice plus effects. It was quite disjointed, which surprised me since Diana Miron and Bogdana Dima from the night before had made such exquisite music in the quintet. The members of the band themselves were dissatisfied after the performance, which was sad to see because they are great people, and failure is an inherent part of improvisation. I wrote a poem while I listened:
team receptacle
team donut
team reward
team turbulence
team tender
team stranger
team contraption
team off
team conditions
team colors
team corner
team trample
team company
team diminish
team horizon
team coupled
team wretched
team cascade
team cessy
The festival transitioned to the main stage in the garden for a concert by the Austrian musician
Stefan Fraunberger. For this set, he played a small cymbalom over a dense, electronic drone, somehow combining heavy metal and new age music into the perfect soundtrack for an early-evening head-massage. I got a sense of the power of invisibility.
The nice thing about drinking beer the temperature of a horse’s mane is that you won’t get swept up by the river, your mouth will be a flyswatter, and the hydraulic will not discover the regularity of your heart palpitations in its thyroid. Kenya’s
Ogoya Nengo and the Dodo Women’s Group came on next. A young mother near me held her three year old child sideways, and played her bum like a drum. Phenomenal vocal juxtapositions from the multiple singers were punctuated by a variety of hand percussion, and the combination of such fundamental sounds made the band seem close no matter how far away you were.
The name
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force makes me uncomfortable. Celebrity techno producer Ernestus assembled a group of Senagalese mbalax players, dancers and singers into a band to tour for European audiences. I get it: the band wouldn’t exist without him. And I’m sure they need his name to sell the project, and I’m sure the musicians are happy to have gigs and get paid. I also don’t really care about arguments regarding in/authenticity, because whatever sounds good, sounds good. But after seeing so much live music over the weekend, music that came from the depths of the artists’ beings, this project sounded stiff and packaged. The drumming was solid, the dancing was mesmerizing, but the overall performance seemed like something I was being sold, not a heartfelt gesture. It was the first time all weekend that I felt like part of a demographic rather than a member of an audience of music-lovers, and it was discomfiting.
The final set of the festival was manele's biggest star,
Florin Salam. Because manele is controversial in Romania, and Salam the genre’s biggest name, the anticipatory energy for this performance was metaphysically present everywhere, from the sand in the garden to the sky we were breathing to the tables in the bar covered with sticky alcohol spills to the words being spoken between two fresh acquaintances. Salam plays private parties almost exclusively, so the chance to perform in front of a public was momentous. I had been schooled on manele, and Salam in particular, over the last several days, and even I was jittery before he took the stage. The band came out and did a long intro for him, full of midi and synth and percussion. When he finally appeared, night had fallen, and the crowd howled. The saxophone sound veered between Blurt’s Ted Milton and Spyro Gyra’s Jay Beckenstein, somehow smoothly. Salam’s stage presence combines the audacity of Gucci Mane and the chaotically happy theatrics of Sammy Davis, Jr. The band played amped-up, popped-out, freakified csardas, with a vibe similar to that of super-popular narcocorrido ensembles like Los Bukanas de Culiacan or Los Tigres Del Norte. The sense of the intensity of the set for the audience––public performances being so exceptionally rare––and the specialness of the moment was also visible for the members of the band, as they took selfies and pictures of the giant wave of undulating audience members. For Salam in particular, you could see the tears of joy and gratitude on his face as he finally got an opportunity to sing to his people.
Outernational Days 3 runs September 19-23rd; come join us and get revelationary.