Yes, I looked around but didn't see any familiar faces, although  the place was packed.

Well it was very interesting, not to say challenging. Essentially it was playback with MC himself doing some mixing at a desk in the middle. There were speakers encircling the audience, with some facing away. We were requested to face forwards, so clearly the geographical spread of the sound was important to his conception of the piece. The piece itself was called 'La Vie in Prose' ("I'm  trying to figure out what a music in prose would be"). In a brief introduction he referred to it as a symphony with four 'movements' he likened to a scherzo, allegro etc. As far as I can gather the material had been gathered around the world and worked on at various times. It consisted of all manner of concrete sounds, as you would expect, from vocal sounds to urban sounds, bangs, creaks, rustles etc

Calling it a symphony set up a certain amount of expectation that there would be use of thematic material, development, transformation etc. However, as I listened it made me think how extraordinarily difficult it is to use concrete sounds in this way. Fragments of all sorts swirled around, making kinds of patterns. But trying to discern overall shapes or movement across those patterns and how they related to each other was near impossible, on first listening at least. It did make me think about memory and sound - how difficult it can be to hold some disassociated unfamiliar sounds in the mind, whereas other more familiar sounds, with their various associations, are almost impossible to ignore and lodge themselves without any invitation to stay. Which makes it difficult to discern any structure, especially over a long one and a half hour piece, which this was. It is rather like trying to hold a vast, sprawling collage in your mind and find a some kind of topography in it. It was noticeable that when some percussive music (sounded like a carnival band in Rio) was featured for a short while the contrast in being able to insert yourself into a flow, the rhythmic structure delineating movement and allowing a kind of time-thinking which was much more difficult without it. So plenty of food for thought. 

Musically it is I suppose a sort of throwback to the 'pure' musique concrete of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, who composed on tape, using found sounds. Whereas someone like David Toop use far more digital techniques to radically alter and restructure the sounds, MC seems to prefer retaining the acoustic properties of the sounds themselves. Anyway you can judge for yourself if you are interested when a double CD is issued next month. I would be very interested to hear it, as I suspect it might benefit from the opportunity to hear it a few times and possibly in shorter chunks. I would be very interested to hear any other reactions, as it is entirely possible they will be completely different to mine.

Ian