Unique and adventurous jazz at the Science Museum։ Video, Photos

Time Loops, a performance by Icebreaker at the Science Museum.

Formed in the UK in 1989, Icebreaker play new music (from Louis Andriessen to Kraftwerk via Philip Glass and Brian Eno), always involving amplification.

For this concert, in which their musicians were dispersed around the exhibits in one of the galleries, they utilised electronic devices old enough to be in the museum’s collection: the Watkins Copicat tape-echo unit from the late 1950s, the VCS3 and VCS4 portable synthesisers from the ’70s, and the ShoZyg instruments made between 1967 and 1975 by the late composer Hugh Davies, once a member of the Music Improvisation Company and Gentle Fire.

The audience was free to wander around the perimeter of the performers’ space, able to observe at close quarters as the musicians — a cellist, a violinist, two flautists, two saxophonists, a percussionist, a guitarist, a bass guitarist, an accordionist, a number of keyboard and synth operators — went to work on three commissioned compositions.

The first, “Time Loops” itself, a 42-minute piece by Shiva Feshareki, began with high harmonics from the bowed cello, joined by similar high frequencies — from pan pipes, bowed guitar and bowed vibraphone, among other things — as the layers built up, with a synth adding loud floor-trembling bass rumbles to counterpoint the scratches and whistles that sounded like outtakes from the NASA space noise Terry Riley used in Sun Rings.

Then the textures gradually thinned out again and the piece ended with discreet guitar feedback. I found it a very enjoyable sonic space to inhabit.

The first affordable echo unit was celebrated in the second piece, Sarah Angliss’s “Copicat”. I was looking forward to this, since the first band I was in, at the age of 13 or so, managed to acquire one Charlie Watkins’s inventions to help us on our journey through post-skiffle, pre-Beatles rock and roll.

Angliss subtly evoked its original use in the minimalist twang of the guitar and the bass, but began with solo violin before incorporating accordion stabs and swells, a pair of bass clarinets, toy piano, and alto flutes. Watkins’ voice was also sampled in a 20-minute piece I’d gladly hear again, live or on record, not only in order to decipher more of what he was saying.

Electronics were a more salient feature of “Concerto Grosso for ShoZygs”, Gavin Bryars’ salute to his old friend. The ensemble realigned itself into three parts: a “rhythm section” of guitarist, bassist and percussionist (the latter standing between a gran cassa and large gong with a mallet in each hand, sustaining a steady, surging pulse), a chamber group of violin and cello, alto and baritone saxophones and accordion, and a very active quartet of electronicists, manipulating devices from the pre-turntablist era, including the home-made ShoZygs.

Also 20 minutes long, this was the piece that was hardest for the listener to get a handle on, given the topography of the space, but Bryars, who sat listening throughout by the mixing desk, deserved the applause with which he and this adventurous ensemble were greeted as he took a bow at the end of an intriguing and worthwhile evening.