Music / Industrial Revolutions, Ronan Apcar. At Smiths Alternative, October 12. Reviewed by ROB KENNEDY.

Without industrial revolutions, we wouldn’t be where we are today, if that’s a good thing, it’s debatable. But in a program more about human experiences than revolutions, Ronan Apcar created a complex view of a disturbed world.

After finishing his music degree at ANU, Apcar has spent the last two years at the Australian National Academy of Music. On his way to several residencies in Sydney, he stopped off in Canberra to bring a program of mayhem and magic music back to his old stamping ground.

In a concert for solo piano and other things, beginning with the American composer Leo Ornstein’s Suicide in an Airplane, Apcar thrashed this black, iconoclastic piece. Like a firestorm in sound, while underneath there seemed to be a familiar tune intermixed with a scream for help, it was frighteningly surreal as it rumbled itself to death.

In eight short skits, Kate Neal & Sal Cooper’s Commuter Variations is an extended eclectic work. It’s neither tonal nor atonal. It sat somewhere in the middle, wherever that is. With the inclusion of an animation and a backing track of connected sounds, the music acted like a dialogue comically explaining the scenes. Apcar’s timing to the animation was impeccable.

Why Wait? Tomorrow Has Already Been Cremated In Hell, by Lynden Bassett is played inside and outside the piano. An accompanying prerecorded soundtrack of voices and various audio effects added to its depth. This was a challenge to write about. Apcar used mallets and scrapings on the strings of the piano. It certainly hit the industrial end of the concert spectrum. It was terrifying stuff as Apcar screamed out a confused, angry dialogue amidst a wall of noise.

After the interval, the energetic and playful, Abraço by Gerard Brophy. Phrase by phrase, it crossed many genres. Like multiple conversations, even with a slight ambient feel in places, all this wrapped in a comical tune that was extremely ear-catching.

Then an Apcar improvisation, which, as he said, was a random process. It produced an unearthly soundscape with a synth sound background. It was difficult to describe other than to say it came across as a sound experiment.

The final work was Frederic Rzewski Winnsboro’s Cotton Mill Blues, from Four North American Ballads for Piano. It went from the quiet to a wall of thick sound clusters. Like a grinding death inducing machine, this black and white music rumbled to reflect a storm of human misery. With clusters treading up and down the keyboards, it ground relentlessly before a hidden blues tune revealed itself.

In a small upstairs room at Smith’s Alternative, Apcar brought a world of sound, visual and music experiences together in a dynamic concert.