Viceland Today

Viceland Today

Posts Tagged ‘Instal 09’

A night in Glasgow: Avant-garde cello art and the violent collapse of society

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

cello

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. Read more »