Micachu & The Shapes with London Sinfonietta: no bricks required

King's Place
1 May 2010

The pre-show whispers from back-stage included the phrase 'bricking it', understandable for a one-off special performance in the august surroundings of Hall One at Kings Place. All very grown up it was, with some informal in-the-round performances in the sunken lobby spaces as people gathered, including the mesmerising Six Marimbas by Steve Reich, played on six... oh, you're there before me.

The opening part of the performance proper had the LS playing a series of very minimal pieces, some of which, it was explained, were written as improvisations to be played within certain parameters. Themes and methods explored here turned out to inform the second half of the concert, when M&TS joined the by now 7-piece Sinfonietta on stage.

Playing a series of continuous structured improvisations between each song, the LS effectively became a kind of living sequencer, able to deliver all manner of tones, timbres and rhythms to support the typically inventive range of scratchy scrapings, strums, beats and crashes from the band. None of the music played came from Jewellery, although I am not sure whether any of these songs were written just for the occasion.

The collaboration was clearly a live experiment, as it was designed to be, but there were a number of truly sublime and delightful passages, not least when using several musical bottles as novel wind instruments, and smiles onstage acknowledged the success of this and other of the climactic moments. At the close, with typical modesty, there were just a couple of bows and then the players left the stage, despite the applause ringing on for much longer.

Projected visuals were edited live by Dori Deng, integrating Micachu's signature geometric scribbles into stylised live footage from the stage, and was an effective addition; hopefully a film of the event will be available at some point, as there was a full-on AV presence recording the proceedings.