VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

It might seem nonsense to talk of an outlier in an event as experimental and diverse as conductor Ilan Volkov’s annual spring weekend of new music, Tectonics, but Saint Abdullah’s 40 minutes in the Old Fruitmarket warranted that description.

Following so recently on the BBC SSO’s evening in the Finnieston night-club SWG3 with Ayanna Witter-Johnston, here was music that might have been more at home there, but instead happened in blackout in the middle of a Sunday afternoon.

Saint Abdullah is the label used by Iranian-Canadian brothers Mohammed and Mehdi Mehrabani – although only one of them appeared to be onstage here. Their acclaimed recent collaborations have been with Brooklyn-based percussionist Jason Nazary and Irish producer Eomac (Ian McDonnell), but this intense tapestry of sound required no other ingredients.

Playing at maximum volume to begin, with industrial beat loops and what sounded not unlike a deconstructed recording of trombonist Joe Bowie’s Defunkt band, the set found gentler moments. Those included a long alto sax passage, what appeared to be an electronic concertina but resembled early Soft Machine in sound, birdsong and a chorus of children.

Most of this, obviously, was recorded and sampled, but the live ingredients were crucial to the immediacy of the music. Despite the relentlessness of some of it, you were left wanting more.

The world premiere that ended the SSO’s concert in the Grand Hall later that evening was similar in its encompassing of a great deal in a comparatively short time. Flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell’s Clues from the Rippling of Space-Time would indeed be difficult to pin to a specific date, but revealed long and deep knowledge of 20^th century American music for large ensembles, both orchestral and big band, stretching from the interwar years to much more recently.

Mitchell herself was a soloist, and so too was her pianist duo partner Craig Taborn. Both altered their sounds electronically, Taborn producing a growly underscore at one point and plucking strings inside the Steinway at another, but their amplification was subtle and effective.

An equally large range of possibilities was, of course, available from the orchestra, and Mitchell seemed to exploit most of them in her half-hour piece, with some startlingly original orchestration as well as those passages echoing earlier styles. Everyone was very busy from start to finish in one of those works that it was impossible to appreciate fully on a single hearing.

It was the most successful of the programme, although Czech composer Martin Smolka’s Until time takes back its gift, the other brand-new BBC commission, was often fun. Its seven short pieces also covered the waterfront, opening with a strange diatonic scale on harp and ending with lush strings playing, seemingly oblivious to the discords elsewhere on the platform. This was investigative music, never happy to pursue a single direction, and occasionally very filmic, notably in the violins of the second piece and Lynda Cochrane’s piano in the fifth.

Noami Pinnock’s visual art-inspired I put lines down and wipe them away – a UK premiere – opened the closing concert and seemed to have taken us little further when it ended. Its restricted range was surely intended and some of its most original sounds – including a quartet of sanding blocks – were attractive, but it never became more than its limited ingredients.

In some ways the GBSR Duo’s Oliver Leith-composed good day good day bad day bad day was also a Tectonics outlier, because the piece, written specifically for – and indeed about – the couple, is now approaching a whole decade old. It followed Saint Abdullah in the Old Fruitmarket and simply listing the ingredients of George Barton’s percussion set up would be a mammoth job. His tasks began with varying the pitch of wine-glasses using immediately-discarded pipettes, featured a swanee whistle on a harmonica neck stand, and finished with a spoked wheel that could be plucked like a thumb piano or ethereally bowed.

Siwan Rhys might have been less mobile, but her keyboard skills, playing very different music on concert grand and electronic keyboard simultaneously, were extraordinary. Leith’s eight-movement journey through the banalities and anxious moments of a day was fascinating and often very beautiful.

Keith Bruce

Highlights from Tectonics will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s New Music Show on Saturdays 9 and 16 May and available on BBC Sounds for 30 days thereafter.

Pictures of Ilan Volkov and GBSR Duo at Tectonics 2026, credit BBC.