Music

See Concrete and Glass art events

London is the most fertile spawning ground for musical talent in the country, as we never tire of telling our provincial relations. However, until now, there hasn’t been a central event that has allowed us to crow about this on a global scale. Enter Concrete and Glass, a two-day extravaganza aimed at highlighting London’s importance to music (and art) fans of all dispositions and time zones. The emphasis of this Shoreditch-based event is on introducing groundbreaking new artists to a hip, edgy, knowing audience. That’s you, by the way.

The festival’s unofficial epicentre is Rough Trade East, and all of the venues are within ten minutes’ walk of it (25 if you factor in losing your friends and stopping for bagels). Thankfully, the nights are grouped loosely by genre, which should guard against any Camden Crawl-style panic-dashing between venues if you find a sound you like. Feature continues

The line-up is chock-full of Time Out favourites, from last month’s On The Up headliner Polly Scattergood to fast-rising and awesome-sounding psychedelicists The Wave Machines. The night we are most excited by – so excited, in fact, that we’re putting our own name to it – is Friday’s bashment in the Shoreditch car park. It’s being headlined by TV On The Radio, the forward-thinking New York quintet who look ready to finally set the charts alight with their recently released second album. There are few bands who pull off experimental rock music with as much panache, and success, as TVOTR (although linchpin Dave Sitek’s work with Scarlett Johansson might have been pushing the envelope a bit far). A less intimidating, more unifying outing than their debut ‘Return to Cookie Mountain’, it should, with a fair wind, make them as big, or as beloved, as Radiohead. This could be your last chance to see them in such intimate, concrete-y surroundings.

The support acts are no less exciting – the evening is kicked off by obtusely inclined eclectro-pop ingénue Micachu and ever-improving krautrock-indebted dance-rockers Fujiya & Miyagi. Dirty electro tinkerer Caspa Codina will be DJing between sets, and the whole shebang continues until the grand old hour of 3am, so make sure you tell your mum and dad to leave the door on the latch.

The rest of the line-up is equally scintillating, if more familiar to cool types such as ourselves. However, being town mice, we certainly have never seen Finnish classical accordion player Kimmo Pohjonen’s ‘Earth Machine Music’, which is being adapted for an indoor stage especially for the occasion. And it will have taken some work, given that it’s a semi-improvised concerto for farm equipment. Pohjonen did tour this production earlier in the year, playing the outbuildings of four farms around England, sampling the specialist machinery of each and assimilating the sounds into his score. The performances consisted of Pohjonen triggering loops while farm hands played the relevant hardware. All of which makes The Wurzels’ bragging about their combine harvester look like pretty small potatoes.

Due to the massive variation in farming techniques and equipment, each performance of ‘Earth Machine Music’ requires Pohjonen to visit the performance space well in advance and get in touch with the land. This also allows the farm to give something back too – the audience at Manor Farm in Cocking was refreshed with a specially brewed ‘Earth Machine Music’ beer, while Park Farm in North Aston staged an exhibition by their food artist-in-residence. That’s something to tell the kids about as they munch on their in vitro hot dogs in the near-future.

Most of the music starts in the evening, giving you the whole day to feed your intellect with art and think of clever things to say (if you get stuck, our helpful visual arts correspondents have already thought of some for you).

Sponsored by Time Out, ‘Concrete and Glass’ runs Oct 2 & 3. Adm one day to both art and music events £22.50, student concs £18; two days £35, student concs £28. More details and booking at www.concreteandglass.co.uk.

See Concrete and Glass art events