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Halal Kebab Hut - High Brow Low Art Music | |||||||||||||||||||
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 High Brow Low Art Music, released on Earth Monkey Productions by London-based Halal Kebab Hut, is a collection of seven pieces created by several performers using diverse instruments, according to structures defined by Simon Katan. Halal Kebab Hut has an open door membership policy, and has been together in some form since 2004. The heart of the band appears to be Katan, who produces "rigourous, non-linear, rule-based structures" that the performers use as a guide for each piece. This is reminiscent of John Zorn's game pieces, and Katan explains this in a paper entitled Halal Kebab Hut – Techniques of Composition. To live out these machinations, the performers arm themselves with tin cans, water balloons, bubble wrap, whoopee cushion, food mixer, vacuum cleaner, electronic children's toys and anything else they can find that might conceivably produce a sound. The instrumentation appears to vary between pieces, but is consistent throughout a piece. This is appears to be part of Katan's design, to help prevent the listener from becoming hopelessly lost in a miasma dreamt up by a randomised computer-based composer. Despite the premise, each piece appears to have a certain level of freedom beyond what one would normally expect from algorithmic composition. The performers explode into life from the moment the first track, Carpet Bowls , starts -- then quickly change pace as they follow the ebb and flow of Katan's instructions. A feedback conversation between devices occurs, and instruments and themes are repeated throughout the piece. In the next piece, Forking Paths, the performers appear to explore space more than the sounds their unique instruments might produce. The instrumentation and playfulness of Carpet Bowls is full of references to toys and youth, and this is apparent even through the highly abstract nature of the piece. SPStone verges on pure noise at times, but the improviseurs de junk bring in the rains to create something on the verge of consistent. As Katan's paper explains, High Brow Low Art Music represents Halal Kebab Hut at a particular moment in time: interpretations of the game rules may vary and the band members may have changed. However, his paper is so detailed (even including screenshots of the software used to generate the compositional instructions), that anyone who wants to reverse engineer High Brow Low Art Music is at liberty to do so, giving it an extra dimension that makes it all the more compelling. Review by Alex Young
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