Strangers on a train

By Charlie McCann

Beck is a slippery musician. In single songs and across albums, he can slide from folk to lounge jazz to unctuous R&B. Considering his reputation as a maverick, he’s in fine company at “Station to Station”, a month-long extravaganza of artistic “happenings” happening at the Barbican in London, where he performed last Monday. The artist Doug Aitken, the prime mover behind “Station to Station”, has brought together 100 collaborators—including the legendary synth-punk duo Suicide, the minimalist composer Terry Riley and the choreographer Trajal Harrell—who are singing and dancing, playing and painting, talking about their art and others’, in a dizzying number of events. The project’s tagline is “No two days will be the same”.

Beck’s performance embraced the idea that juxtaposing the unexpected and unlikely can make something new. “Word Reader”, as his event was called, set out to explore the neglected borderland where the spoken word meets music. He invited a motley crew to help out: the London Contemporary Orchestra, Sonic Youth’s beanpole guitarist Thurston Moore, seven poets including Simon Armitage, Luke Wright and Lavinia Greenlaw, and a trio of actors dressed up as cowboys. The event was all over the place—intentionally. As Aitken’s visuals, projected on overhead screens, showed trains passing through arid scrublands and along rocky coasts, the poets and musicians took us from Liverpool to Frisco, Dixieland to Hagmuir, evoking the longings and longueurs of travel.