P Jørgensen

"Hello. I'm Gareth." Who decides in which genres solo artists require a stage name, and in which they can just follow the birth certificate?

On Sunday I went to see the electro-racket onslaught that is Team Brick (something like an Alec Empire set being invaded by operatically trained Gregorian monks. Most worthwhile), and there's only one of him - but he's so thoroughly Team Brick that he doesn't even put his real name on his website. Whereas tonight's purveyors of minimalist drone are simply P Jørgensen and Gareth Hardwick, and that's somehow fitting in a way that it wouldn't be if they were making loud noise with banks of synths and pedals.

Anyway.

Friday night, a description thereof, here we go: The two acts on tonight showcase two different forms of minimalist drone: a guitar put through a pedal which stretches it out into shimmering washes of fragile sound; and a laptop used to cue up and merge various loops and ‘found sound' (bird song, crowd noises basically, whatever catches Jørgensen's ear) into barely-there audio landscapes.

This means the two artists complement each other very well but are different enough to provoke thought about exactly where the contrast comes from and why you find yourself liking the two artists in different ways. That's kinda important in this sort of music: because the sounds and songs are so sparse, so minimal, you have to listen actively and really concentrate on what you're listening to, and that contrast between the two acts is a good jumping-off point to fix your attention on.

Hardwick's sound is, as these things go, the more traditional of the two. Not really definite enough to fill the room, but it does certainly wash through it in a manner sufficiently forceful to be immersive. The baseline is one developing, shimmering drone, which rises and falls and gently merges from note to note, and within that Hardwick plays occasional runs of notes which loop softly just behind the main curtain of sound to shape some of the space behind it without ever actually filling it.

There's not a tune there, but it's certainly tuneful sound, and big enough to lose yourself in as you watch Hardwick's very economical, studied movements from guitar to pedal. The grand finale of a wall of reverberating feedback which lasts an almost painful length of time is sorta surprising, and I still couldn't quite guarantee that it was meant to happen; but it did work in a strange, backwards way.

Where Hardwick's minimal set-up and range of techniques nonetheless create quite a full sound, Jørgensen's songs/sound pieces/noise art/whatever you wish to call it use a wider range of techniques and sounds, but the end result is so fragile and spare that it's not overly far away from concentrating on silence. This means that it's a rather demanding thing to listen to, because you really have to focus and pay attention. And silence is definitely necessary, because anyone talking is going to drown out the set completely: people cross their legs, and until you see them moving you think the rustling is part of the set, one of Jørgensen's ‘found sounds'.

As Jørgensen sits behind a laptop and doesn't do anything to put on a show, there's nothing to really watch - one only looks at the stage by default because, well, your eyes have to rest somewhere and the stage is the logical place. There's no actual show involved; and that's probably for the best because when a song is as sparse, as barely there, as Jørgensen's, it'd be a bit rash to distract people from listening to it. If you're not paying attention, you're going to lose the song. Which sounds, well, not like something one would want to put oneself through in one's free time on a Friday night.

And yet - for a start, there's the simple discrepancy between the minimalist nature of the set and the massive investment it demands if you're going to get anything out of watching it. The impact comes from what you put in, rather than what the music takes out or forces on you, and there's something impressive about so little being able to ask so much; something so sparse pulling so much energy out of an audience. Spending a little time listening to something so close to silence, and emerge from the other end of it feeling like you've just come up for air from some very dense listening, is a pleasingly counter-intuitive and thought-provoking way of kick-starting the weekend.

P Jørgensen and Gareth Hardwick played at CB2 in Cambridge on Friday 6th November 2009