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MUSIC - Solaris
Unsound Adelaide

DIANA CARROLL - Reviewer
INDAILY - 18.3.13

UNSOUND Adelaide was damned by faint applause at the Town Hall on Friday night for the one and only performance of Solaris.

Polish writer Stanislaw Lem published his most famous novel, Solaris, in 1961. It was the height of the Cold War and the divide between literature of the East and West was marked. Solaris developed a cultish science-fiction fandom and was definitely more abstruse than similar titles of the time. Was the story about outer space, individual cosmologies, limits of perception, or something else entirely?

The work seen here was commissioned by the Unsound Music Festival to mark the novel's 50th anniversary and has been performed in Reykjavik and New York and across northern Europe. Musicians Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnason scored an interpretative soundscape for strings, percussion, prepared piano, processed guitar and electronica. Frost and Bjarnason took centre-stage with an ensemble of local musicians, many of whom are ASO players. A filmic accompaniment, devised by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson, featured imagery from the 1972 film of Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky.

The music was technically interesting but surprisingly unchallenging; apart from a few passages of chandelier-shaking bass there was little to stir the imagination. I found the distressed pianism very engaging and the guitar effects created a suitably sonar counterpoint. I was less impressed by the digital imagery. It could have been brilliant or beautiful or cryptic or ironic but it was really just there as a backdrop. The Sheldon sitting near me said the effects could have been created on a Commodore 64!

Ultimately, the audience votes with its applause, and this was only just on the right side of polite. Perhaps being kept waiting 20 minutes for a performance that lasted less than an hour dulled their enthusiasm.

ENDS.