Southbank Gamelan Players are a thirteen-member ensemble playing a range of the traditional Javanese instruments, predominantly mallet percussion, which make up the gamelan – metallophones, xylophones and gongs, with the addition of bamboo flute, traditional two-string fiddle and the players’ voices.  Plaid are an electronica duo, formerly members of The Black Dog, who have been signed to the highly-respected Warp Records label – also home to Aphex Twin, Boars of Canada and Autechre among others – since the early 1990s.  According to the rather unlikely promotional claim, gamelan (the blanket term for the style of music but, more formally, the name for the group of instruments) has influenced much western electronica “but both genres have never shared the same stage, until now…”.  How, then, do musicians from such different backgrounds, all sat cross-legged in black on the same floor, go about collaborating?  Do they approach each other’s styles reverentially or confrontationally; is it a musicians’ love-in, or will sparks fly?

Plaid are essentially billed as the headline act and treated as one in that the Gamelan Players have the stage to themselves for most of the first half of the show, which is probably for the best, as they are by far the more interesting performers tonight.  The first third of the show is a tour through styles of gamelan music, from the somewhat piercing ‘loud style’ unison playing of the traditional welcoming piece ‘Gendhing bonang Tuking’ via English gamelan composer Symon Clarke’s ‘Strange Attractor’, a much more engaging and meditative display both of the instruments’ versatility and the players’ virtuosity.  The playing style of the gamelan metallophones is strange to see, with the weight of the mallet doing most of the work and the player’s wrists bending to allow the flat of the hand to damp the previous note, and the odd flow of the movement of hands is like a bewitching and strangely coordinated dance. 

It’s hard to see (perhaps just from where we’re sitting) who, if anyone, is leading the group in their steadily building looping phrases, gentle crescendos and subtle, distinct and sometimes instantaneous section changes, and it’s very reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians – which makes sense, as Reich studied Balinese gamelan in the 1970s, going on to produce work which was to influence the left-field of western music from krautrock to electronica and now our very own Foals.  Some of the pieces are more accessible to western ears than others, and the tonality, while warm and rich much of the time, lapses easily into the more challenging eastern tonality redolent of John Cage’s prepared piano works.  It’s obvious when a steady thumping rhythm emerges on a drum that a western work is coming, and sure enough it’s the Southbank Players’ own arrangement of Aphex Twin’s ‘Actium’ from Selected Ambient Works Volume 1, which is one of two clear high points of the night – Aphex Twin’s original with its multiple melody lines and gentle texture gives a lot for the gamelan to work with, and in their hands it sounds not only entirely natural but an actual improvement on the original (high praise from this writer!), and hints at the multidirectional lines of influence between gamelan and the left-field of western music.

Plaid arrive and seat themselves on the floor in the centre of the stage, surrounded by gamelan, for two collaborative suites – ‘Plinth of Sieves’ by Southbank Player Malcolm Milner, and (after the interval) ‘Rubber Time’ by Plaid, Southbank Gamelan Players and gamelan composer Rahayu Supanggah.  The combination of gamelan and Plaid is not so unusual a meeting as it might initially appear – Plaid’s eyes seem to have been looking east for a number of years, both in the clean, soft percussive timbres and hints of eastern tonality they’ve had since the mid-90s, and more obviously in their recent work on soundtracks for Japanese feature films.  However, their tendency to adopt gamelan-style sounds anyway does at times make one wonder what they’re adding to the show; the ‘collaborations’ generally consist of a sort of tag-team performance where Plaid start on something that sounds designed to ‘fit’ with the gamelan, which joins in for a while, before Plaid start doing something else and the whole stops again.  There are bewitching moments and the whole is very absorbing, but the benefit that Plaid bring is really in texture, in washes of sound and in glitchy rhythms that the gamelan can’t produce, which doesn’t quite deserve the centre-stage position they’re given.  It’s easy to conclude that their role would work better if they tried less to fit in and emphasised their difference more than their similarities. 

Having said all that, the time flies by and it’s never dull – the audience is invited early on to come and go as they please, but nobody goes – and the only disappointment is a sense that it could have been more.  Which, it turns out, is definitely the case, when for an encore the group play one of Plaid’s pieces overlaid with a traditional gamelan song, apparently attempted for the first time only the previous night.  It’s head and shoulders above everything else they’ve played, and finally delivers on the promise of the billing – Plaid drive the rhythm and structure, while the gamelan gives full and rich percussion and vocal, and it feels at last like the two sides of the stage are both in their element, almost sparring, confident and energised.  Obviously there has been a level of collaboration through all the joint performances, but for the majority of the set it didn’t feel like the meeting of minds that could have yielded the most interesting results: either Plaid fitted themselves in around the gamelan sound too much, ingratiating themselves with sounds and textures that are only very subtly distinguishable from the gamelan itself, or sat apart playing washes of sound and sparse rhythms while the gamelan players wait in silence for their turn to play.  If we’d had more of the final piece, where both sides spread their musical wings and showed what they can do, it would have been an unmissable show; as it was, it was an interesting curio and a very engaging ride, but not an essential one.  Plaid’s name has been used to draw a young crowd who wouldn’t seek out gamelan, though the gamelan is definitely the star of the show.