Linear Projection in a Jump Cut World - Tim Brady
Mr Brady's Room - Roger Doyle
Resilient Hope - Michael Keeney
Pandemonium Architecture - Tim Brady
The Canadian guitarist-composer Tim Brady aims "to create a new voice for the electric guitar".
I doubt anything could defeat Brady as a player. He is a true virtuoso. But on the evidence of his lunchtime concert yesterday at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, his compositional voice is still experimental. Its vigorous eclecticism brings the electric guitar into soundworlds not usually associated with that instrument, but common currency in electronic music.
All four pieces in the programme, which opened the Bank of Ireland Mostly Modern series, were for tape and solo guitar, and all cheerfully challenge conventions of musical meaning.
The piece most disciplined in its use of material was Resilient Hope by young Co Donegal composer Michael Keeney. Its opposite was Roger Doyle's Mr Brady's Room, in which Brady munched a Mars-bar and nonchalantly improvised, surrounded by the sounds of his Montreal home - conversation, a radio, a neighbour playing the piano (badly).
As with everything in this composer's mammoth and continuing The Babel Project, compositional conventions are a non-issue.
Brady's Linear Projection in a Jump Cut World and Pandemonium Architecture (from Strange At- tractors) are nearer Keeney than Doyle. Their ready embrace of North-American minimalism, contemporary jazz and electronic art-music is by no means shapeless.
But their impact depends on the subtle panache of Brady's playing.