jwilzewske: Soundscape: The Large, Ambient Instrument We Occupy

T wo thematic elements threaded through all of the works performed at last night’s KCEMA event in Kansas City, ‘I See You’ [ICU]: (1) exploring modes of urgency/emergency/criticality, and (2) confronting the natural tensions between aural and visual perception.

James Mobberley—‘Going with Fire’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; James Mobberley, sequencer and tape)
Matthew Dotson—‘Song Cycle for Haruki Murakami’ (Bart Woodstrup, video; Matthew Dotson, electronics and tape)
Peter Lawless—‘Tim Sequence’ (Timothy Eshing, viola; Peter Lawless, sequencer)
Jacob Gotlib—‘Filaments’ (Rebecca Ashe, flute; Jacob Gotlib, sequencer)
J.T. Rinker and Carolyn Tennant—‘Directed’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
Len Lye / Per Magnus Lindborg—‘Tusalava’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)
Jeff Herriott—‘Barnwork’ (Matt Sinchak, saxophone; Jeff Herriott, electronics)

T he first piece, by composer James Mobberley, is a rich and compelling work, powered by Rebecca Ashe’s incendiary flute playing Walter Piston-esque chromatics and 12-tone phrases against a sequencer track that covers an astonishing range of timbral and rhythmic textures during the 7-min work. The electronics and the flute form a duet, with phrases in the flute part carried over into the synthesizer part, turned over and mutated, pitch-bent, and—freed once again—on their independent way. The piece has jungle-ous percussive sounds admixed with rustling and emulations of wind in the trees...

EQ spectrum of simulated wind with drum sticking

followed by aqueous ripple-ey sounds that suggest a soundscape in nature.

G oing With the Fire’ is the third in a series of works that utilize only the solo instrument as the source for the taped sounds. The piece embodies the flash of creative fire that takes over as a work begins to gel. After the inevitable frustration period, with idea after idea, suddenly the grid unlocks, the boundaries slip away, and I find myself giving up the formal structures and preconceived notions, and simply going with the fire.”
— James Mobberley, program notes.

T he experience for us in the audience is ‘immersive’, and the reality that the music conjures is a coherent story of ‘going’, of ‘discovery’—a spontaneously-forming linear narrative that has an immediacy and an arc that makes sense.

T he Dotson-Woodstrup piece likewise has a playfulness and spontaneity. Excerpts from Haruki Murakami’s novel ‘The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle’ form the text around which the music and video are organized. The animated text fragments projected in front of the audience engage in a duet with the musical utterances—at times corroborating each other, and at times carrying on a dispute.

S onically, Murakami’s work made it evident to me that, in the words of his main character, it should be ‘something concrete’... The material was derived from several ambient recordings that took place both inside and outside of my apartment in Chicago... symbolize the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds.”
— Matthew Dotson, program notes.

E shing’s viola and Lawless’s sequencer tracks plumbed the reverberous La Esquina acoustic space. In fact, the rhythmic patterns of the piece engaged the room beautifully, invoking the performance hall itself as a large, ad hoc ‘instrument’, waiting to be played. The ‘surfaces’ of each part; the interface between each pair of them—the ‘liminality’ of our expression and its inevitable fading so soon after we have uttered/played it—are illuminated by this beautiful piece.

T usalava’ is a 9-minute black-and-white animation created in 1929. ‘Tusalava’ is a Samoan word denoting the idea that ‘eventually everything is or becomes the same.’ It originally had a piano score written by the Australian, Jack Ellitt, who had known film-maker Len Lye in Sydney. The original score has been lost, and Sinchak and Herriott perform using a new score written in 1999 by Norwegian composer Per Magnus Lindborg. Transmute and augment the sounds of traditional instruments, creating novel sound scapes and acoustical/expressive spaces!

T usalava’ was constructed using 4,400 drawings or animation ‘cels’, each of which was photographed—the classical process known as cel animation. The film begins with the screen divided into three rectangles, with vertical arrays of dots and circles wriggling and twisting. Eventually, they collapse into two rectangles, and the wriggling shapes continue to mutate and form intricate patterns. Out of one of the rectangles a totem figure appears and is parasitized by a wriggling shape, with several suckers. The shape scrolls off the screen, displaced by a number of spirals, which are in turn consumed by a primeval black dot.

T usalava’ is an abstract film, in a 1920s surrealist idiom. Lye (a New Zealander) was influenced by Australian Aboriginal art, though, so what strikes us as surreal may simply be exotic ‘otherness’. Tusalava references organic shapes that sprout bio-arms and devour each other, not Modernistic shapes or mechanistic parts and actions. Reportedly, Lye was a doodler and sketcher, activities that he viewed as ‘pre-conscious’ truth bypassing rationality. ‘Tusalava’ can be seen as a film about morphogenesis—in and of itself; and about movement as an irreducible evidentiary primitive. It has a concretism about it, a literality that is not concerned to symbolize other processes.

Jeff Herriott, Per Magnus Lindborg ‘Tusalava’ score

T his entire concert is, I sense, opposing the oculocentrism of most of Western culture. Aural vs. Visual space. A new dialectic, one that grants equal rights to ears.

O h, in Western culture, sight has been ever-predominant—philosophers since ancient times have been sighted people, who held that ‘The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears and other senses’ [Heraclitus]. We have the Mind’s Eye; before now, we never had the Mind’s Ear.

T he historical prominence of eyes, while understandable, needs to be shaken up from time to time—as the artists performing at La Esquina tonight were able to do.

T he notion of a ‘Shared Sonic Environment’ was introduced ... Public Sound Objects (PSOs)? The works performed last night each revealed the disrupting effect of acoustic velocity and the latency in musical communication over room-sized distances, with studio monitors splayed out around the hall about 2 meters above the seating.

T he Gotlib composition juxtaposes the human voice of the flute with the alien, matrix-oid sequencer/tape. Sounds are transferred and colored, such that each part constitutes a ‘sonotope’. The trajectory of the piece has the flute becoming more dispassionate and automatized, while the synthesizer part becomes progressively more ‘human’—my impression only; barely implied by Jacob’s program notes. The failure to merge leads to the re-individuation of the parts’ personalities and a satisfying resolution to the encounter.

T wo threads—the flute and the electronic sounds—struggle to merge and connect. They meet briefly in the calm middle section of the piece before falling away again.”
— Jacob Gotlib, program notes.

T hese works rely on story-crafting that is considerably different from conventional compositional methods. They are not assemblages of abstract sounds or disparate textures; they are not comprised of ‘movements’ in any classical sense. Instead, they have ‘scenes’ and ‘acts’—they are closer to opera than to traditional chamber music idioms. The videos predominantly serve the role of ‘set’ and ‘props’—creating the atmospherics that enable the narrative and contextualize the other performers. The performers’ ‘inhabiting’ their roles and delivering the inspired performances that they do—these things don’t happen just anywhere: they happen here, situated in this soundscape, in this video scenery.

S o, beyond ‘set’, the video and the soundscape—the aleatoric front door opening and slamming as people come and go from La Esquina; the antiphonal freight trains rumbling-scritching by on steel rails 200 feet from the building; the rustle of shoes on the concrete floor—all comprise a larger, ambient ‘instrument’ in which the performers and the audience are together immersed. Hard not to be caught up in the hyper-moment. Bravo!

jwilzewske

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Soundscape: The Large, Ambient Instrument We Occupy

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