event - london openframe 2010: day one at café oto

4th November

This year's OpenFrame marks ten years of ROOM40, the Brisbane-based label led by composer and sound artist Lawrence English. The festival arrived in London for the first time last year, and this time is taking a few stops up and down the country. Tonight there are three performances from a range of collaborators with the label.

Primarily a drummer, Italy's Andrea Belfi wires

cold ambient in and out of his sparse, dry rhythms. Neither component dominates the sound, instead they ring around each other with thudding precision. His approach is improvisational, drawing subtle changes from his synthesizers on one hand, and from his careful assembly of percussion on the other. His otherworldly metal discs are intertwined with microphones and stranger metal objects still, foregrounding the hazy kick-drums. The entirety of his short set is an exercise in looping, the sounds he makes tangibly being fed into his electronics. The overall effect is one of calming balance.

Next up is a rare performance from David Toop + Scanner + I/O3, the last itself being a group comprising Lawrence English, Tam Patton and Heinz Riegler. Having five musicians on stage is something of a shock after

Belfi's quiet and restrained performance, but they don't compete for space. They use their different talents to bring in an incredible palette of sounds, as showcased on their album A Picturesque View, Ignored. Sometimes David Toop leads at the front of the sound, pouring what look like seeds from a jar into a tiny dish, shaking them with precise movements. At other times it's Scanner, pitched at the front, who responds to this heady mixture with methodical glee, looping and sampling with his novel array of tabletop instruments. Lawrence English's spacious, wavelike sounds form a considered backdrop to the onstage dialogue, giving a constance to the piece. Trip-hop beats emerge from time to time, as do Toop's electronic flute, which he nonchalantly picks up from time to time. Towards the end guitarist Heinz Riegler injects some more obvious emotion into a performance that, while not exactly studied, is never overwrought.

Chris Abrahams' solo piano performance comes in three parts, getting progressively more interesting. It begins with lush, unwinding melodic cycles reminiscent of Philip Glass, which cascade gracefully up and

down the keyboard of the baby grand before falling on a single note. This note is played out for the middle part of the performance, testing out different tempos and rhythms, conjuring up different notes in the ear of the listener as the intensity varies, but resting ultimately on this one note. It takes great skill to come across like a virtuoso on the basis of one piano key, but with careful control over the intensity with which he plays, and the creation of complex rhythms Chris Abrahams gets away with it. Moments after reaching an incredible speed, more and more notes start to return, and the performance culminates in a cacophony of dirge-like minimalism. It's mesmerising and overwhelming, and a great shame when it's over.