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The Long Count

@ Barbican, London, 3 February 2012
2-5 stars

by Rob Watson

The Long Count - Photo by Mark Allan

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It would seem by looking at the CVs of wunderkind brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner that they must be the most sleep-deprived musicians in the world. Leaving aside for a second their day jobs as principal songwriters (alongside lyricist Matt Berninger) for The National, their monumental work rate encompasses whole side acts (Clogs), festival curation (MusicNOW in New York), classical commissions from luminary artists like Kronos Quartet and film scores.

Perhaps the best indication of the influence the unassuming twins have in the American music industry is their organising the benefit record Dark Was the Night, which dragged in a smorgasbord of hipper-than-thou artists from across the indie spectrum to record new material - including work with long-term collaborators like Sufjan Stevens, Bon Iver and Cat Power.

As befits the restless creativity that seems their stock-in-trade, they took on musical collaboration with multimedia artist Matthew Ritchie, conceiving an idea based around the Mayan creation myth of two twins and the origination of the countdown to doomsday in 2012. A wildly experimental piece of operatic theatre, mixing classical and modern music, an orchestra, some famous guest singers and some largely incomprehensible video art, it's a frustrating evening that veers between musical brilliance and structureless noodling.

The orchestra are already onstage as the audience file in, the hubbub of the bar replaced by a hushed realisation that the performance has already begun - a quiet and intermittent female voice counting down to zero as we take our seats. At zero, the lights dim and Bryce and Aaron enter from opposite sides of the stage each holding one end of a rope with a guitar tied to the middle, which reverberates as it bounces on the floor. It sets the deliberately obtuse tone for the evening - later a guitar is treated almost as a pióata - which feels a bit too forced for its own good.

Moody orchestral pieces accompany a series of short films which, while beautiful, feel like art-house projections rather than integral parts of the story, while actual tracks - with guest singers like TV On The Radio's Tunde and The Breeders' Kelly Deal fare better. Their attempts to get into the swing of things - Tune awkwardly wearing a silver headdress that made him look like a cyberman and Deal scratching the floor with a long shard of plastic - were admirable but only really added to the sense of confusion surrounding the piece.

It's a little unfair to pick holes in the brother's noble attempt to do something markedly different from anything they've been involved with before. The fact that they can swing easily between pounding Mogwai-influenced instrumental noise (Dry Creek) and something called Hunanpu Drones (which, rather unsurprisingly, does what it says on the tin) gives you a sense of what these polymaths can achieve when they set their minds to it. Unfortunately, The Long Count seemed to have an identity crisis - rock opera, indie supergroup and the avant-garde mix a little uneasily, and the lack of a coherent structure or story is alienating. The audience file out none the wiser after a bewildering evening punctuated with the odd moment of transcendent beauty - a difficult slog, but a worthy one nonetheless.