Boiler Room streams Jonny Greenwood's Manchester concert

Boiler Room has put its film of Jonny Greenwood's concert with the London Contemporary Orchestra online, streaming it on a loop for 72 hours. The night, billed as a one-off, was at the Albert Hall in Manchester on Friday 10 October. Greenwood and the orchestra play together again on 21 February 2015 at St John the Evangelist in Oxford.

During “Self Portrait with Seven Fingers”, a slower Greenwood work after the interval, a web link came up on the projector screen, people opened it on their phones and played tones on them, and the sound filled the hall. Alex Daniel, reviewing the night for The Mancunion, calls it the most memorable moment of the concert and gives the night 9.5 out of 10.

Nobody had an assigned seat, and the audience could move around the hall as they liked. The bill had Greenwood on electric guitar, the tanpura, an Indian drone instrument, and the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument, and Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint as the centrepiece, which Greenwood played himself. The programme also took in excerpts from his scores for There Will Be Blood and The Master, billed as their first live performances.

The pieces were short, with breaks between them for the audience to talk, Greenwood tells Chris Woolfrey of Boiler Room. I felt really high afterwards. Lots of things just seemed to work. Not necessarily the pieces, but the idea of playing them like that.² There are things that people don't like, and I find it really interesting that you can have that sort of reaction straight away, with certain things not going down well.²

Jonny Greenwood and the London Contemporary Orchestra, Albert Hall, Manchester, 10 October 2014· Boiler Roomwatch on youtube →