That evening the music continues. We travel underground to Kings Cross Place, get lost in a dark, harsh hail storm ; a shower of ice and hard snow that blows us from pavement to road. We fall into a pub called the Driver Bar to escape the weather and eat a sticky sweet salad and chips and an upmarket burger with nice mayonnaise. The barmaid is blond and friendly and trendy and wants me to taste gin and cucumber and I sip my drink and watch men in suits, looking smart, drinking beer with curious male camaradery. Later, we slip through glass doors into a huge open space with chocolate brown poofs shaped like mushrooms. Our tickets are booked to see an experimental music concert, part of the Multiplier Series, curated by composer graham Firkin. ' ..... with three oustanding ensembles exploring single instrumental timbres, The Veya Saxophone Quartetn Elysian Strings and duo Parkinson Saunders, performing music by French hard hitting iconic composer Louis Andriessen, English purist Howard Skempton, American pioneer Alvin Lucier and the rhythmic persistence of Joe Cutler and Firkin himself'.
We sit in cabaret style clusters and in front of the stage are huge piles of silk cushions in fushia, burnt orange, green and turqouise blue. We are invited to listen and lie. The music envelops, shakes and shudders; brusquely changing moving, waking. I am an intrepid explorer of this new territory, and my ears are delighted by what they hear.
When we leave the concert it is snowing outside. Huge white flakes are tumbling from the black night sky and gently coating the grey city pavements. We grin and make our way back to our hotel room.
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