Music review: Red Note Ensemble, Perth Concert Hall

It may have been a little too ambitious for its own good at times, but Martina Corsini’s climate change-inspired composition Sub mari still proved disarmingly effective, writes David Kettle

Red Note Ensemble: Sub mari, Perth Concert Hall ***

In his brief introduction, Red Note’s artistic director John Harris admitted it was a leap of faith for the audience to come to Perth Concert Hall at all to hear a brand new piece – the first by the ensemble’s creative fellow Martina Corsini (collaborating with Chilean bassist/composer Manuel Figueroa-Bolvarán), and one that tackles the greatest challenge facing humankind: the climate crisis.

There was no doubting the ambition of Sub mari, which brought together stunning but worrying visuals of melting ice and parched desert landscapes, spoken text from the Chilean Mapuche people whose way of life is already in danger, a remotely recorded youth choir, lighting effects, Red Note’s fiercely committed musicians, and Corsini herself purring a jazzy pop song to a gentle groove from the guitar, bass and drums. Did it all come together into a cohesive whole? In truth, not really. But equally, it was hard not to be swept up and engaged by the sheer sincerity and ambition of it all.

Corsini and Figueroa-Bolvarán were unapologetic about their jarring stylistic clashes, colliding together avant-garde scrapings and atmospherics with tribal rhythms pounded out across the ten-piece ensemble, each vivid sound world captivating in itself, but making quite a disparate collection without much of a thread running through them. Aside from Red Note’s own musicians, that is, who responded with equal enthusiasm to everything Sub mari demanded of them, whether delicate bird and insect noises, hypnotic ritual beats or foot-tapping jazz.

If Sub mari had a unifying theme, however, it was its sense of beauty and delicacy, even – paradoxically – in its images of microscopic plastic waste floating among coral reefs. Not so much a scream of fury, it was more a reminder of what’s at stake, and of the fragility of what we may lose. In that sense, though it was rather too ambitious for its own good, Sub mari was disarmingly effective.

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