Playlouder - Music is the Network

Anyone who’s accidentally wandered in to the Union Chapel at Highbury Corner this Saturday afternoon could be forgiven for thinking they’d crashed some sort of New Age Hippie Music-As-Healing prayer service.

I say that because it’s exactly what I thought, and I forgave myself. Virgin Passages were nowhere to be seen as yet and on the stage were two hippies, (as opposed to six).

I didn’t know Radiant Voyages were playing; had I known, I’d have arrived earlier. Michael Ormiston and Candida Valentino are the UK’s foremost Mongolian Khöömii singers and weave soundscapes and folk songs using (amongst other things) Ancient Tibetan Singing Bowls, Symphonic Gongs, Mongolian Horse Fiddles known as the Morin Khuur, Dombra, Jews' harps, Harmonic flutes, Ney, Native American Flutes, Shaman Drums, Esraj, Flat backed Bouzouki, Tobshuur and Djembe, with a weaving of live electronic treatments.

If you put that in your pipe and smoke it, you’ll probably wake up with Nazca lines all over your gaff. However, listening to it on a sunny afternoon in an airy church it’s actually momentarily possible to forget you’re in one of the world’s most irritating cities, and to find moments of not just peace, but real sublime beauty. (And this coming from a ‘goth’.)

Virgin Passages have a really tough act to follow, and the already tiny afternoon crowd thins when they take the stage, presumably to purchase ice creams and mobile phones and forget the name of the Islamic people from north of Tibet for whom even the fickle lefties of the west don’t give a shit. (I think it was the Hui, but my memory’s not all it used to be.)

The former fact, as well as the latter, is unfortunate, as Virgin Passages are fine ambassadors for drone folk and calm choral harmonies. Their duelling guitars, synths and clarinets aren’t quite as crisp and clean as the expert arrangements of Radiant Voyages, but that’s sort of the point.

They are a rare example of a group without any real focal point, who make songs equally sombre and soothing, which also have no focal point; but to call them pointless would be… erm… missing the point.

Their sound, often misidentified as some sort of American-influenced modern anti-folk affair, is a sort of aural impressionism which owes in equal parts to post rock and Pentangle.

Lovely.