A Good Thing To Lose #6: Instal 09 by Aidan Moffat

On the screen there are one hundred almost identical black and white video shots of Nikos Veliotis (that naked guy isn’t him, he’s just another perverse cellist) playing his cello. They differ in only one way: he is playing a different tone in each little square so that we can hear the entire one hundred possible tones of the instrument all at the same time. It’s an ominous, hellish drone but it sounds fantastic. On stage, in the flesh, Nikos and his partner begin to dismantle and destroy said cello, chopping it up with an axe and dropping the pieces into a wood-chipper, then transferring the chips into what looks like a common kitchen blender where they are reduced to sawdust. What the point of it is, I’m not entirely sure.

This dust – or Cello Powder as the piece is called – is then poured into one hundred identical pots to be sold to the audience as souvenirs. Maybe he’s saying that everything is transient, emulating birth, life and death with a stringed instrument? Or maybe he just wants to take what many would consider to be the most beautiful and erotic instrument in the world and use it to make an uncharacteristically aggressive noise and then destroy it in some sort of highbrow punk statement? Whatever his intentions, I find myself absolutely loving it. Or at least I do until I find out that the cello was worth €6,000, making each pot of wooden crumbs £60 in today’s exchange rate. Couldn’t he have used a cheaper instrument? Perhaps the expense of the cello is necessary to the power of the performance, but I can’t help feel that it raises some ethical issues. You could do a lot with that sort of money and he’s just pulverized it, and I can’t imagine he can convince one hundred Scots in the middle of a recession to part with sixty quid for a jar of chippings and a CDR. It would have been more effective to give them away free, and to expect to be paid for these is more than a little preposterous and only serves to alienate the audience that were previously supportive. And who paid for the cello in the first place? Does he get arts funding in his native Greece for this? And how much was he paid for the gig? Now I’m just confused.

This is not the only performance to leave me bewildered at the Instal 09 festival in Glasgow, which hosts experimental and avant-garde music from all over the world. The very mention of experimental and avant-garde music is enough to make most people run for the nearest karaoke bar, but if you have even the slightest sense of adventure I would recommend you try it. You won’t like everything and some of it might seem plain silly, but that’s okay – it probably is. It can be baffling, beautiful and quite often terrifying, but the very fact that it exists at all is cause for celebration. In these days of P2P file-sharing and the Live Nation monopolisation of venues, promoters and ticket sales, Arika – the curators of the festival – and their myriad sponsors offer a truly alternative, human, mind-expanding experience.

My personal favourites were Eva-Maria Houben, who played little more than one note on the Glasgow University Chapel organ for about an hour; Smack Insecten, a collaboration with Glasgow’s own Nackt Insecten and Karen Constance, which was all psychedelic feedback swirls and digital noise; and Rolf Julius, who plays pre-recorded sounds from several iPods through little speakers inside little bowls and various other little things, and it often sounds like a digital tropical forest, very gentle and very gorgeous. I’ll be there next year.

My one criticism of the festival, on a purely selfish level, is that I wish it had been on during the week so I didn’t have to endure the horrors of the city at the weekend. I rarely venture into Glasgow on a Friday or Saturday these days, because by and large the place is usually filled with fucking lunatics. I suppose that not so long ago I could’ve been considered to be one of those fucking lunatics myself, but the older I get the more I realise that weekends are better spent with family, TV and maybe even a book. I just can’t cope with pissed children anymore.

The last train home was nice and quiet though, nothing of concern at all until we pulled into my local station. I spied a woman having incredible difficulty navigating the steep staircase up to street level and, being the chivalrous gentleman I am, offered an arm to help. Had I not, I imagine she would’ve tumbled down the stairs and snapped her neck – there’s an awful lot of steps in my station. I helped her to the top and began my goodbye but just as I turned she stumbled and I catch her. She’s clearly incapable of going anywhere on her own, so the good Samaritan in me suggests I walk her home. She thanks me as she takes my arm again, but also wants me to know that she’s a bad person. “Well, you don’t seem that bad to me,” I say, and she really doesn’t. Judging by her clothes, hair and all those other subtleties that inform a first impression, she appears to be an otherwise respectable lady who’s just had a bit too much of the sauce, and I think she says this is due to a lover’s tiff but I can’t quite understand her garbled tale. Anyway, on our way down the road, something falls from her bag. “Hold on, you’ve dropped something,” I say, and stop to pick it up. It’s a knife.

“Fuck me, have you got a knife?” I say, surprised but almost amused. The first impression she made on me must have been very convincing, because without hesitating I automatically hand it back to her as if it were a lipstick or a mobile phone. I somehow know she’s not going to hurt me.

“I would never use that,” she slurs, “it’s just for protection,” and then she mentions Moira Jones and I know exactly what she means. Moira was brutally raped and murdered in Glasgow’s Queens Park, which is practically just round the corner from where we are. The park is known for night-time ne’er-do-wells and ruffians, but the murder was a great shock to the community. Moira had been parking her car a few feet from her front door when she was attacked and dragged through a hole in an iron fence into the park, where she would spend the last few minutes of her life being raped and repeatedly beaten, kicked and stamped on.

So as I say, I know I’m safe with this knife-wielding woman. What really surprises me is that she tells me she’s a police officer, and has been for 17 years. Can there be any sadder and more frightening analogy for the state of our cities’ streets today? Even off-duty WPCs have taken to carrying illegal weapons because they think they’re not safe, and I’d like to think that they would know what they’re talking about.

I wait until I’ve seen her front door close and click behind her, and then I begin to head home. I hear a commotion on the main road and decide to take a detour, checking over my shoulder every few steps of the way until I reach my flat.