Gig review: Songs for an airless room

Published on Monday 22 February 2010 18:55

SONGS FOR AN AIRLESS ROOM **** CAMEO, EDINBURGH

IN RECENT years in Japan there has been growing concern about hikikomori – young people who deliberately shut themselves away in their homes. Research suggests the condition is specific to Japanese culture, and more widespread than simple agoraphobia.

Hikikomori is the inspiration for electronic composer Martin Parker's new "opera for cinema", although Parker offers no more insights into it than the impressionistic 20-minute documentary by Otakulab which opens his show. He's more interested in making music evocative of isolation, helped along by the thundering percussion of Joby Burgess and the squeals, groans and demented howls of experimental vocalist Phil Minton. By turns claustrophobic and expansive, as Parker's washes of sound were punctuated by Burgess's rapid-fire stop-start rhythms and Minton's haunted babble, it was easy to imagine this as the sound of someone at home alone, muttering into the dark.

It was thrilling, absorbing stuff, even if the accompanying visuals – footage from computer games, fragments of text – weren't quite enough to make the case that the hikikomori theme was much more than a convenient excuse to perform music in an appealingly resonant space.