gavin bryars - the sinking of the titanic

It’s been a while from me, have had a lot of work on at day job Bad Idea, and also been doing some writing for the Guardian’s music blog among other things; latest on that is about PIAIL fave Johnny Jewel. Prior to that I wrote about Gavin Bryars’s piece The Sinking Of The Titanic - I interviewed both Bryars and Titanic performer Philip Jeck for it and jolly nice they both were too. Read that feature here.

Me and Jen went to see Titanic performed as part of Touch’s night at the Roundhouse last week, alongside the awesome Hildur Gudnadottir and BJ Nielsen, and the thoroughly tedious Biosphere, the less said about the latter the better. But Titanic was fantastic. It opened with a prologue from Jeck - “what I’m trying to set up, it’s like an empty ocean, with bits that are like a premonition for things that are going to come”, as he told me - which teased out booming tones and strange squeaks from battered old records, gradually Bryars’s ensemble started to play the mournful hymn “Autumn”, the piece played by a string sextet on the deck of the ship as it went beneath the waves.

Adding in some great electric guitar that sounded like an iceberg cracking, and another quartet made up of his kids (to represent “women and children first”), and it became a massive reverberating eddy of sound. Little sampled choral motifs were brought in, a new addition to the score, as well as the bass clarinet and euphonium that have been used before. We both found it very moving, and although I don’t know how long it lasted, it was long enough to have you completely submerged in it.

There’s been a number of recorded versions of this - one on Eno’s Obscure label, one on Philip Glass’s Point, and perhaps the best is a 2004 recording on Touch. Another excellent version is from Belgium’s Crepuscule label in the early 90s, which is getting reissued on LTM Records next month; it’s a live recording of a performance done in a water tower. The echoing space allows a reverberent performance, even more impressionistic than usual. Fans of Rhys Chatham’s A Crimson Grail will love it. Here’s the first six and a half minutes of the hour-long performance:

Gavin Bryars - The Sinking Of The Titanic (Bourges version)

Jen’s buggered off to South East Asia for a month by the way - she says she’s living on a musical diet of J-Pop boybands on MTV Asia. Expect some crazy Thai cassette posts when she returns.