Gig Review

10 July 2023

The promise of a world for collective dreamers: Afrodeutsche and Manchester Camerata

Peter Shukie Gig Review Afrodeutsche, Manchester Camerata, Shukie Writes 0

Manchester changes faster than other places. So it seems to those of us that have the city as a geographical barometer of our lives. Over four decades of knowing this city there has been a continuous climb upwards. Not just the buildings. Maybe we see it most immediately in the buildings. Lots of this sky creep feels alienating and the sense of Gotham exploding over less than a decade shrinks me, physically and spiritually. This happens through age, waning familiarity mixed with a flooding of memory, our own changing perspectives and the new worlds spinning alongside us. Long spent nervous energy on trains from Wigan to the Hacienda, Conspiracy, Oldham Street, forgotten pits and dark encounters wandering rainy dark streets soaked with night-long friendships, evaporated. Resistant to romanticised versions of corporate versions of the eighties and nighties means the necessity of clinging to that sense of something special always getting tougher. Our own past getting drained out into a communal cultural past that tests memories which were always going to be hazy given the states they were in at the time of collection. Memories fade but Manchester remains as a place that made lots of me, has a resonance I know is there even if it is not always glowing. A place of found friends and lost ones and wild excesses and desperate wanderings. Manchester is complicated and the massive transformation demands an engagement with it. Not sure why place does this but all places do, drag down or lift-up and generally a messy and incoherent mixing of both. How we respond to places, and the spaces in them, defines us more than anything ese. Our differences and commonalities most acute in the ways we respond to a place in the world.

Factory International, now Aviva Studios, is part of that smashing together of past, of recreation and memory and reframed territories of another time. It has a cultural focus with a significant place in a city that has its people, people demanding representation in amongst the glass and steel and ever lengthening shadows. It is a place many of you will be visiting, it has a mission already placed there before the first sod was cut, or historic slab was pneumatically drilled open to reveal what ever hard core lay beneath. And somebody there at that inauguration was Afrodeutsche.

A familiar voice from the wireless, a nationwide people’s party in which a beautiful voice wraps together tunes and Friday uplifts with a velvet vocal thread. This brought lots of people, a familiarity in the unfamiliar and a recognition of our wider cultural belonging and being welcomed.

New spaces require an invitation.

What makes a city is differences recognised, not all the same, but all together. This choice of Afrodeutsche, not born in the city but made by it and making it in return, was perfect. Russian, German, Ghanaian, south western England, Mancunian, the formative places acknowledged and we know our own backgrounds of everywhere countries and classes and cultures melded in this urban crucible are just perfect. Nobody owns place, not important places anyway. Where ownership is clear and confirmed, life is already dead. What this new space in place needs is to throw open doors and recognise it is alive by virtue of those that come, that help reshape. Melding an individual, complex, emerging, transforming, with Camerata musicians so perfect in their ability to open doors into our own selves, that was something of genius. Not a single actor, but a combination, a transformation aided by courageous opening up of vulnerability and new worlds for one person that allowed us to think about that in our worlds and people and selves. Together we approached this with no ownership, no priorities of knowing what a camerata is, or encyclopaedic knowledge of electronic soundscape artist or classical composition. Some knew parts of this, experts elsewhere in here no doubt, it did not matter. With great events your body knows impact, just listen to that. Like listening to the SunRa Orchestra walking the streets of Wigan, we walk differently with other creations that link us to the universal. We feel our way.

In this new world, we had a reality shaped by psalms and faith, candlelit musicians conjuring sonic magic, huge visuals later presented everydayness and humanity in cinematic scale, not just as a visual but in the ears and in the soul and the ways we see ourselves together. All of us up there and in here. Places made by people, not as obstacles to abstracted architectural perfection, but as the fleshy corporeal gorgeousness of us as a collection of souls and bodies and faces and movement and love and anguish and our lost and our found. This was no Friday night People’s Party (it was Wednesday for a start) but it did the same thing. Midway through a serene evocative pert of the performance a family arrived, ‘sorry love, coming through, murder finding here innit?’, it was, it took a while, new places on old ground. My time to offer warm invitation, smiles, my sense of the place changed now. I felt the broader warmth immediately, my people here, not my family but could be. This event allowed us each a place together that we could be ourselves. That was what I saw and felt, down there on stage, next to me and around me in the cushioned seats, up there on screen, an invitation to be part of this. It was courage from Afrodeutsche, each of the few comments opening new doorways to an exposed humanity, of autism, faith, perceptions of how we each love, what that means. The most intense of invitations, to look at ourselves completely, and to do it all together. Another kind of people’s party this, for sure.

Strings and voice, composition of some immense power. Lighting and sound, the films themselves superb, evocative. There is no need to engage in a piece by piece dissection of these as the combination is what matters most, the effect overall.

This is not for your critical mind. Your body will know. Your soul too.

The immensity of the event was seductive and it was also familiar. Up there on the screens, here in amongst the sounds, it was the everyday that was made brilliant, grand scale, evocative. Not actors or single voiced. How perfect to remember all of us, each other and those revelations of just a few years ago, our collective humanity. Afroduetsche reveals individual depth but in a cauldron of us all, adds to it but does not dominate it and we are invited to see this place and ourselves as together, not leaders and followers, communal. What comes through here, for me, is the human as worthy of reflection.

Not heroic individualism that darkens the auditorium and lightens the tiny few as in the Arena. Not the stage of reified absolute perfection and mannered quietness and convention of the Bridgewater. Both influential spaces, both important. But here needs to be and can be different. A grandeur and significance, not of the few but of us all, as place in need of space. A recognition of the hidden that come to be the ones that shape where we are in communal spaces. Hacienda not as DJs but as dancers, cities not of individual heroes but collective cultures.

This whole venue needs a review of its impact once it gets underway but the seeds of that power of place are already bursting through with this event. These are not seedlings really, this is a winter garden already in full bloom. There is influence here I know of, of faith and psalms and pasts and identities and displacement and togetherness. Others I have no clue about, about Bach and compositions and scores and technical skills and historical resonance. Neither matters. The body knows these sensations and it was through the buzz and the sparkles and the waves and the calls inward and upward that I felt this was special. It needed this crowd, this crowd, everyone one of us a part of the event. Mesmerised out of everyday sleeping through space and place into full awareness of the body in this space, in this place. Mesmerised by sound, by visuals, by the reclaiming of a cinematic grandeur of each other, of being here, tonight. You’ll get the same, but different, your crowd, with you in it.

Places need spaces to make them. Sometimes those spaces are threatening and exclusive even while symbols of new prosperity and other futures. It is a special space that can take our histories and futures, mix them in a present and get the richness of it all. Not histories of a singularity, either, not some curated preferred version that legitimises powerful voices and loses the rest of us. It is early days for sure, but what Afrodeutsche and Manchester Camerata do is make other possibilities possible. Faith, identities in transformation, musicians together with audience with space, a venue that is for these brief hours seemingly all of that, out but in, together but feeling that as connection not as alienation.

Culture is crucial to space and to place. Culture is not what you go and see, it is not a series of images or events of people you come to know and learn to revere. Or at least, it need not be even if that is often how it seems. Culture can be what shakes it all up and makes things fizz and lets global influence land in places and help reframe places and do what has always happened to stop stagnation, to keep us alive.

The power of cultural spaces is not that they tell us what to think. Tonight, these prayers and reflections, sonic mindscapes and visuals, collective gatherings of vulnerabilities alongside others asserting presence, others unsure, others immersed, were dream building moments. A beginning of things, not the end. Mysteries of ‘other people’s brilliance’ can play a part, intimidated or impressed, but can also be left behind. The real value of a culture place is what it leaves in us, in you, what we want to do now that we have been part of that. It is a challenge, the statistical measure means that often we become reduced to numbers, how many of us, how much we paid, how often we attend. All of that is mere consumption logic. The real value is harder to measure, of what sparks are generated, where they light and what they help build. Who walks in a different way now and thinks a new thought that makes tomorrow something it would not have been otherwise. Not products purchased but dreams begun. Manchester is built on dreams from darkness, all great cities are. Factory International harks back to memories curated differently to my own of same places and events, but these would not have happened without the hundreds, later thousands, that turned out in those rainy first days and found the dreams of others and dreamed ones of our own. Dreamers that built dreams and fed other dreamers and here we are again merging those worlds of dreams and creation. It can never stop and there is no perfect space.

This may well be a very special place, time will tell, but what it needs is all of us to make that work. Not some of us. My first time is over and it left something new in me, but did not steal anything away from the past to build it. If you can, get there and see this, help grow it some more. This place and this event even will be noisily judged first on what can be counted and I hope the numbers make people happy and help things continue. The real value, the difference it makes, is down to you and something you should make sure you get to experience, to reshape and to make. This place tells us many things and Afrodeutsche and Manchester Camerata are perfect in helping us locate that knowing. What future we get is entirely based on how we act in the present. Make sure that includes your dreams.

Review first published in MagNorth.

15 March 2023

Sunday Mass

Peter Shukie Gig Review 0

I have spent many a Sunday in a Catholic Mass, and one or two other denominations when the Cubs walking day ended in unfamiliar territory. Never did Mass of any type bring the intensity that was to be found in the Bridgewater Hall this freezing Sunday in March. Billed as an epic celebration, that barely does credit to what was the most phenomenal religious experience I can remember having since Wigan won the FA cup with an 90th minute winner. To experience that Wembley elation I had to spend decades of trials and tribulations, to learn pain and pleasure in a collective, an education of a lifetime that led to a glorious crescendo and subsequent collapse.

As we bounced out of the Bridgewater Hall as a newly converted congregation of zealots we felt that wallop of total conversion in just two hours. Converted to what, I was not quite sure, but it was pure and beautiful, like sizzling atoms whipped about the body and soul in ways beyond easy comparison to fleshy experience. Life, that was what was glorified, made red and gold in a hotchpotch of raucous anarchistic joy intermingled with deep soulful renditions of those tensions of psalm and bible. A life affirmed, in ways I could not grasp at so I just let go and simply felt it. In awe, not shock. Every reservation of being in this otherworld cathedral, a short time before I had been so anxious about entering, blasted away.

There was story to this, a narrative in its creation and in its purpose. A history of Jackie Kennedy commissioning Leonard Bernstein to create a monumental opening to the JFK Dramatic Arts Centre. Of the names and lives of those biblical in scale and impact, resonating now in this northern arena. The story itself one of conflict and coming together, of collapse and renovation. It was all there on stage but it would be a false claim to say I was at any point carried along by this as a story. The Latin elements as distant in this as were my past experiences in churches where ignorance was soothed by well drilled rote responses of kneeling, standing, repeating the right phrase at the right time. Nothing about this scintillating musical universe welcomed a well-trodden response.

Part of the marvel of the ancient cathedral builders came in the ability to construct in stone and marble the triggers to a deeper self that left the body and found the heavenly. Here, architecture was crowd and sound. Combined to bring to the physical sensations that, like that first orange farmer wandering into the Seville Cathedral, transported to a deeper purpose that the body understood when the mind could not.

What I was aware of was a growing deeper, a new understanding of the power of collective brilliance. The whole event was a celebration of five decades of the Royal Northern College of Music, supported by singers from Chetham’s School of Music. Each in their own way a million miles from my experiences at a Further Education College. Yet here there was nothing but a union of their work, that echo of Bernstein’s own brilliance written not quite two years before the opening of the RNCM. A union that made me revel in those attempts we make to take the expectations of our own worlds and make it bigger technicoloured, iridescent with hope and optimism.

The plan ahead for the RNCM, a wheel of Students, Music, Society, I had felt already before I read their vision. Yes, I had gingerly stepped into that hall in ways I would not if it was somewhere I felt I belonged. Yes, that is a legacy of my working-class trepidation in what I thought would be another world to which I did not fit, could be found out. What the performance brought was a massive welcoming surge, a powerful and engaging call to be enveloped here, to be transformed. The sight of 300 or so vocalists, musicians, arranged on a gigantic stage, a wall of noise that was vibrating every atomic layer in ways not felt before.

I was no longer uncertain, trepidation zapped into dust, we were in a world of us now. The priestly baritone, William Dazeley, was a pinnacle amidst the mayhem. His were the travails of the narrative that we could follow if such plot lined sequencing was at any point required, it never was for me. This was a whirlwind, of massive noise and then deep silence. The familiarity of a Catholic Sunday crept in so changed from their usual form that their uncanny strangeness drove any last vestige for controlled understanding to flee.

I wanted everyone I have worked with, taught with, learned with, to be here with me, to feel this shattering sensation that was immediately rebuilt in a new form of some other world. This was history, sound, feeling, hope, togetherness and admiration, It was as if leaving this building, when that time came, would be to enter another world than the one I left just two hours before.

I have been to this venue once before, to see Hacienda Classics. The guest vocalist, Shaun Ryder, was sent off and to be found over the road in The Briton’s Protection with an hour of the performance still to go. The character of that night was familiar, a return to a nostalgia for Manchester nights that had no end. The performance of Mass was something else, something beyond even those nights from thirty-five years ago. Yet it shared a wonder for how we might be in the world. That individuals were there and could be heard, could add something precious, but always as part of the MASS.

Anarchic yet reflective, a wild reverence that took us apart and reassembled through the operatic, the cinematic, the gospel, through jazz and sounds and combinations that challenge any definition beyond that of the spirit, of the body. By the time we were hit with a kazoo chorus, the first of those fuzzy buzzy harmonicas I had heard since last year’s picket lines, I was already mesmerised. This was something society did need, I was convinced. This is what they mean by Music, Students, Society. Not as an anaemic line to a corporate mission statement. A call to action that only through experience can we know what it means. You cannot read about this or simply understand this but you can feel it and you will grow from it.

If only I was here with a handful of my Blackburn students, that these seeds of change were not contained only in me. The sense of being here was an overcoming of trepidation and an introduction to a world of history and of future. It was epic, and that is exactly what we need and seek as every mill town had as many cinemas as they had churches. It is not pure escapism, it is energy that gives us the will to go on and find optimism in darkness. Escape not from action but into it. Those new talents were more tonight than they could be individually, no matter how brilliant they become – and they will become brilliant, they already are.

It was here that we could see the powerful necessity of the cultural pulse of a city. Here investment is not clumsy and financial, it is immediate and far-reaching shining light into darkness that evades easy measurement through certificates and awards. This was an event that bonded and inspired. At times I was elsewhere, not in a self that I recognised, a whooshing intoxication these collected shamanic magicians brought to town. It was not magic, it was work, effort, timed and rehearsed, imagined and made real. The power of this was the detail and the drive to take that gigantic enterprise through to this final performance. A belief it was possible and a revel in the virtual becoming actual through a community of diversity made whole. Bernstein faced challenges of Vietnam and intelligence agencies, of subterfuge, of secret agents, of threats and uncertain worlds influx. In our world of Artificial intelligence, the threat of diminishing human experience, we can find in Bernstein’s vision a deeper humanity that cannot be replicated by machine.

The students and musicians, the creators of this massive event shook my world and I hope did so to every soul in that arena. For me, it was a performance that reminded me that the epic is made up of the atomic. I bounced out and the world had changed, I was filled with ideas, of possibilities for my work with others, knowing we are part of frequencies that vibrate across ourselves and into the world.

I would recommend seeing this any chance you get, and that is thing, there are not many opportunities. Fabulous though the mission of RCNM and Chetham’s might be, they are tiny and our Society is huge. Every town and community needs the scope to be part of such a movement, to realise the value of intoxication through art and music, of transformation we each play a part in. The brilliance witnessed in the Bridgewater Hall tonight was greater than the sum of its parts; but each part was so carefully developed.

It is a care that we can insist on in all communities and allow the richness of our society to shape new MASS, new masses. Like me, large swathes of the people have never seen a cello closer than I did today, despite knowing and responding to that transcendental sound whenever we hear it. I wondered what could happen if we allowed musical aspiration to stop being celebrated as hairbrushes in mirror and the untutored strums of borrowed guitars for so many of us. We could not all have cellos, the Great Dane of the orchestra, who has room for one in the house, flat, room? We could have schemes where they are borrowed, taught. We do not all have access to venues purpose built like the Bridgewater when our school theatres are too limited. But we do have ingenuity, inventiveness, innovation, creative and opportunistic skills and approaches to space.

As the collected choristers fanned out across the Hall for the crescendo tonight, we can see those webs moving out the door and down streets, into wild venues of market halls and actual churches, of warehouses and mills. The spirit of the rave has made it into Bridgewater Hall, maybe a reciprocal visit might empower even more. The depth and power of an orchestra, of voice and instrument, of composition, staging, drama, performance, of new audiences taking the seeds provided and proliferating in venues still in shadow but desperate for some light.

Thanks to those that gave so much, worked so hard, cared to such a level of detail that they could transform that Sunday night like no other mass has ever done before. I look forward to a future where I can see first time visitors stood alongside me in Accrington Market Hall or Blackburn Daisyfield Mill. When we listen together, experience together, we can dream together and build together. Thanks to everyone involved for the chance to dream.

Header Image: Bridgewater Hall

Review first published in MagNorth.