Manorexia
The Stargazer's Assistant
Simon Fisher Turner
St. Giles In The Fields, London
Wednesday November 21 2007

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It's almost more temptation than mere human will can stand to start this review with a merry cry of 'YOU'VE GOT FOETUS IN YOUR CHURCH!' But now I've got that out of my system, here's the real deal. Yes, we are in church tonight: in the austere sixteenth century surroundings of the parish church of St. Giles In The Fields, now situated many miles from the nearest field but very handy for Oxford Street.

And tonight, courtesy of an away match, as it were, hosted by the Southwark arts venue Corsica Studios, we are indeed in the presence of Jim Foetus - or JG Thirlwell, as he is now known in respectable company. This performance (it seems churlish to refer to it as a mere gig) is the European debut of Manorexia, a laptop-ambience project which, in its latest incarnation, incorporates a string quartet alongside the electronics. Not so much Foetus Art Terrorism as Foetus Art Infiltration, then.

Simon Fisher Turner also has a laptop - it's the instrument of choice for every avant-garde muso these days. He also has a nice line in vaguely disturbing surreal poetry, at least some of which, on closer inspection, he seems to be reading to us from a slim volume of Harold Pinter. His laptop-generated electronics unfurl in a stream of fluid plings and plongs and liquid rumblings beneath the words, and sure enough, Harold Pinter is indeed his unwitting collaborator - and not only via the medium of his published poems.

Mr Fisher Turner explains to us that he is in the habit of frequenting a restuarant favoured by Mr Pinter, and surreptitiously recording his conversations with a view to making sonic art out of the results at a later date. This throws up a neat little conumdrum - when do 'found sounds' become stolen sounds? When does a vocal sample become an invasion of privacy? All of this is slightly academic at present, since Simon Fisher Turner's 'found' collaboration with Harold Pinter has yet to see the light of day. But hey - in an area where concept is king, that's a pretty good one.

We edge just a little closer to the world of rock 'n' roll now, for The Stargazer's Assistant turns out to be a band, of sorts. Why, they even have a drum kit and a guitar. But at this point our journey is abruptly diverted, for The Stargazer's Assistant make a roiling, recirculating, spiralling, avant-noise symphony, which starts from the minimal keen of singing bowls, scales heights of rampant, percussive, snake-like coils of sound and - eventually - falls back to whence it came.

There are no songs. No neat little bite-size packages of tunefulness, where a musical proposition is resolved in three or four minutes. The entire performance is one long musical serpent, eating its tail and winding its way around old St Giles as if beating the bounds of the parish. It's really quite psychedelic, in a way, although in the real, mess-with-your-head manner, rather than any of that aw-maaaan-I'm tripping flimsiness. For that, we must be thankful. Snakes and stars in harmonious cacophony.

Unassuming and taciturn, JG Thirlwell appears before us wearing a leather coat and a downbeat, scholarly air. He's certainly travelled a long way from his rumbustious Foetus persona. The parade of parodic rock star moves that so enlivened past Foetus performances are conspicuous by their absencetonight. Instead, JG sits at his laptop and exudes concentration as his string quartet, pianist and percussionist take a constiutional through his compositions.

As the music swells and billows, taking natural advantage of the fine ecclesiastical acoustic, JG plucks samples out of the air and treats them and manipulates them, squeezing the sound into new shapes and feeding the resulting sonic origami back into the mix. It's a fascinating process to observe, even if the results are often a little too subtle to appreciate audibly, especially as there's no way of knowing what the music might sound like in its laptop-free incarnation.

Churlish though this may seem, given that this is JG Thirlwell's very own project, I suspect it wouldn't sound all that different if he wasn't there. Was that funny little scritching sound the result of JG Thirlwell's electronic manipulations? Or was it the percussionist getting busy with something abrasive on a stick? Was that sepulchral boom a piece of the Thirlwell whirl, or a bit of miked-up reverb from the bowels of the piano? In short, it's often difficult to figure out just where the sounds are coming from, and just what JG Thirlwell himself is actually doing.

This, of course, may be at least part of the point, and certainly Manorexia make an intriguingly effective trompe de l'oreille chamber ensemble. Structured around repeated sequences of notes - there may be no 4/4 beats here, but there's certainly structure - the pieces sound at times tantalisingly close to traditional chamber music...with Throbbing Gristle playing in the basement. Then, when the vibraphone kicks in, it all goes a bit Modern Jazz Quartet. But it all grabs and retains the attention of the audience, no mean feat given that this is, at heart, a rock crowd, while the music is utterly bereft of anything resembling rock music.

Maybe that's the point of Manorexia right there: that there's life, bubbling and throbbing with tangents and new territories, beyond dear old rock 'n' roll.

Essential links:

Manorexia: Website | MySpace
The Stargazer's Assistant: Website
Simon Fisher Turner: Website | MySpace

Corsica Studios: Website
St. Giles In The Fields: Website