I can’t believe how amazing Glissendo were at Greenwich today.
Halfway through I realised they could only be French, they had the same deadpan street theatre look in their eyes as the mechanical spider crew in Liverpool last September.
Men wearing eyeliner, dressed in black priestly robes, gliding eerily across the pavement, playing customised brass, wind and percussion instruments (including a kind of tuba worn in a coil around the player’s black conical form), with jets of fire blazing on top of their wizardly wire hats, under the command of a woman wielding two firey rods which she used to keep her musicians from escaping into the crowd and created hearts and channels of fire on the pavement.
I had lured my friend Franck there with the aim of seeing the Galvonium, a re-enactment of a late eighteenth-century musical instrument which generates sound vibrations by passing electrical current through frogs legs. They weren’t real frogs, which was ultra disappointing, but the people who make it do loads of cool stuff with sound and historical technology so I hope I’ll have a chance to work with them at some point.
But Glissendo. Words cannot describe. See them if you possibly can!
