A few days ago I saw Paul Granjon’s latest show in Cardiff’s Chapter Arts Centre. He rattled through demonstrations of mechanised military technology before performing a ’70s disco song with a tiny miniature robot. Now here’s another Frenchman! Pierre Bastien may not play in a constantly inflating sumo outfit but he’ll instill the same sense of wonder and dreaminess into you via hand-crafted gadgets and glorified Meccano instruments. It’s where art meets joy meets bloody robots. Don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like robots. Or music. Or the French.
Toy Music: Pierre Bastien + Male Instrumenty
at Arnolfini
(Thu 21st Oct 2010 / 7.30pm / £9)
A dazzling evening of performances by artists/musicians who make music using miniature mechanical toy orchestras and children’s playthings. Engage in the musical flights of fancy of two wonderful and thingamajiggy artists, one the world famous Pierre Bastien and the other Polish five piece Małe Instrumenty. French composer and surrealist inventor Bastien has been building musical machinery since the 1970s, working with artists as diverse as Robert Wyatt and Issey Miyake, and releasing on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. When he sets in motion his spellbinding clockwork automata and toy curiosities the results are delicate, playful and somehow movingly human. Sharing the bill is Małe Instrumenty, who use a bewildering array of toys and small instruments in their ingenious compositions.
“Bastien never lets the spell break. The way each new tune grows from the last is as pleasing as a rabbit from a hat, and it makes this musical machine add up to so much more than its wheezing, spinning – and very moving – parts” ****The Guardian
Promoted in association with Arnolfini
