Urban Rituals Festival: a no-man's-land of sound

Les Brigittines and Recyclart – two neighbours – have joined forces for the Urban Rituals Festival. Over three evenings, the festival will present music that is “hard to situate in terms of time and space”. It features some unusual concepts, including a Bach cantata performed by deaf singers and fascinating combinations such as hurdy-gurdy music and electronica.

Anyone who knows Recyclart is aware that trains regularly pass overhead there. If you go along to hear rock or for a sizzling techno party, you will hardly notice them, but at “quieter moments”, the railway traffic at Recyclart will soon get on your nerves. So, for the first time, the folks at the underground railway station are moving around the corner, to the Les Brigittines chapel. Those premises aren’t 100% soundproof either, but they are definitely better suited to this mix of old and new music.

The starting point for the Urban Rituals Festival is, it turns out, a pair of very interesting questions: to what extent is the avant-garde outdated and how refreshing does what is called early music still sound? The programme itself includes crossover stuff that actually pushes those questions to one side: the sound served up by the artists taking part is located in a sort of vacuum, a no-man’s-land that, for want of inspiration, is often described as “experimental”.

Take, for example, the Brussels-based British composer and musician Stevie Wishart (26 and 27 April). Back in the 1980s she used to tour with rock bands, while at the same time studying early music and learning improvisational techniques from two heavyweights, John Cage and David Tudor. If you have ever seen Wishart playing her hurdy-gurdy – a sort of mechanised violin, a somewhat “forgotten” instrument – you will know that it is an unforgettable experience that leaves you hungry for more. She moves easily between religious and profane medieval music, which she sees as points of departure for her own contemporary music. In improvisational sessions Wishart has no hang-ups about combing her hurdy-gurdy with sequencers, samplers, and laptops. Timeless? For whoever cares: this lady makes fascinating music and still sounds completely contemporary.

Ich rufe zu dir Herr Jesu Christ is a religious cantata for four-part choir by Bach that was first performed in 1732. For this festival the Brussels composer and musician Baudouin De Jaer has adapted the cantata for deaf singers and narrators and an orchestra conducted by Bernard Woltèche (26 and 27 April). The idea is not actually an original one: the Polish artist Artur Zmijewski did it before in his 2002 video Singing Lesson #2, in which “deaf and dumb” students perform Bach’s cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben – in Saint Thomas’s church in Leipzig, no less, where Bach himself served as cantor and where his tomb is still to be found. The result is – eh – unheard-of and profoundly moving.

On the final day of Urban Rituals, emotions are quite likely to run high again, when the Ensemble Phoenix Munich performs a live version of Requiem for a Pink Moon. This exceptional – timeless? – concert is a reinterpretation of the legendary album by the late Nick Drake as if it had been composed at the end of the 16^th century – in the glory days of Elizabeth I of England, Shakespeare, and – in music – the madrigal.

Urban Rituals Festival 26 > 28/4, 19.30, €10, Les Brigittines, Korte Brigittinenstraat 1 Petite rue des Brigittines, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-502.57.34, www.brigittines.be, www.recyclart.be