Tag: percussion

Sounds Heard: Brian Chase—Drums & Drones

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Frank J. Oteri - Albums, Listen

A lot has been written about the new resources that electric guitar-wielding rock musicians have brought to the realm of composition—a keen sense of subtle timbre transformations gleaned from tweaking amps and effect units, a melodic vocabulary where bent notes are given free reign, etc. There’s a different and equally riveting approach that results when a rock drummer grabs the compositional reigns—a sound world where pitch, while rarely absent, takes a back seat and other elements, such as rhythm and sonority, are allowed to be the primary focus. There’s a particular primal rawness to many of the solo compositions and improvisations that have been created by these musicians—whether the drum machine experiments that Ikue Mori created following the dissolution of the seminal No Wave band DNA, the process-oriented stripped down rhythmic patterns created by Wilco drummer Glen Kotche, or the ascetic thraks of Oneida’s John Colpitts (a.k.a. Kid Millions) for his Man Forever project.
Unlike most of this music, Yeah Yeah Yeahs beatmeister Brian Chase’s Drums & Drones, as its title implies, foregrounds pitch, albeit in a new way that is perhaps only possible for someone whose primary musical activity is playing in one of the most visceral of New York City’s post-punk bands. I’ve been a fan of Yeah Yeah Yeahs since their initial eponymous EP from 2001. While I’ve always been floored by Karen O’s abrasive wide-ranged vocals (which have been what has garnered the lion’s share of accolades for the trio), Brian Chase’s primal throbs have caught my attention more than any other aspect of the band’s sound: while Karen O’s shrieks get under your skin, the music stays there because of what Chase is doing behind the drum set.

While listeners familiar with YYY might be surprised by the heady “new music” direction of the material on his first solo release, Brian Chase comes out of Oberlin Conservatory—from the same milieu that produced ICE and eighth blackbird—and has a long history of collaboration with experimental musicians. In fact, according to Chase (whose lavish annotations on the music accompany the recording), the material featured on Drums & Drones was initially inspired by the time Chase spent at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s legendary Dream House installation where he had volunteered as a “monitor,” spending periods of 4 to 5 hours sitting directly outside the gallery space listening to the complex drone emanating from within. In February 2007, Mary Halvorson curated a month of concerts at John Zorn’s club The Stone and asked Chase to participate, at which point he unveiled the first incarnation of a series of electro-acoustic works based on applying just intonation theory to drums and other percussion instruments. This material gradually evolved over a four-year period—which involved tours across the United States and Australia, travels to Indonesia, and YYY’s 2009 album It’s Blitz—into what is contained on Drums & Drones.

Although in classical music circles, drums are frequently mislabeled as “un-pitched percussion,” the reality is that every sound has a pitch component; it is just easier to isolate specific pitches in certain sounds than in others. Struck drums typically produce a numerous simultaneous pitches, each of which contains its own overtone series. The result, when one attempts to analyze its pitch content, is often akin to a tone cluster. By isolating individual sonorities and focusing on their pitch content through electronic processing, Chase is able to make drums sing. The result is a mind-bending recontextualization of the perceived function of percussion instruments in most musical traditions. Several of the most compelling of the album’s ten audio tracks are derived from the sound of striking a single instrument—the crash of a cymbal, the sound of brushes on a snare drum, a foot pedal on a bass drum. “Feedback Drone,” the most overt LMY homage, presents an unchanging drone of upper harmonics derived from processing the resonance of the drum head of a 16-inch floor tom-tom that had been tuned to a specific frequency. Perhaps the least static track is “Melody Drum Drone,” which exploits the harmonic nodal points on a single drum head to yield a rich, melodic tapestry that is somewhat akin to the music produced on jaw harps.

For the truly intrepid, a DVD is also included with Drums & Drones which pairs Chase’s percussion-based drones with austere videography by Ursula Scherrer and Erik Zajaceskowski. Scherrer’s video for “Aum Drone” accompanies Chase’s pitch bending experiments on a 20-inch tom-tom with a seemingly static image of what appears to be a thick forest—as you watch, branches begin to sway and at some point it almost seems like ghosts float by; it’s mesmerizing. Zajaceskowski’s video for “Stick Shot Harmonic Drone,” on the other hand, is not for the faint of heart. Very bright images are intercut with a black screenshot. It’s like a visual on/off switch which shifts as rapidly as Chase’s pulses from the striking of two sticks; it moves by so fast that it is impossible to ever know exactly what you’re looking at. It’s kind of like staring directly into a halogen light and blinking incessantly. It’s fascinating, but probably not something I’ll find myself returning to frequently.

Drums & Drones is a recent release from Pogus Productions—a small, independent label devoted primarily to uncompromising electronic and experimental music that has been run single-handedly for years by Al Margolis (a.k.a. If, Bwana). Being on this label—which has issued important material from such contemporary music luminaries as Pauline Oliveros, Roger Reynolds, Philip Corner, Annea Lockwood, and the late Kenneth Gaburo—connects Chase’s music to an extremely vital stream of iconoclastic music. It is appropriate company for Chase’s intellectually probing music to be placed in. It will hopefully get fans of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs more excited about these important American experimentalists, and perhaps (just as interestingly), make more fans of the avant-garde excited about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs!

NewMusicBox Mix 5: Percussion Focused

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Alexandra Gardner - Listen

This edition of the NewMusicBox Mix is all about, well, hitting things! All of these recordings feature percussion in a variety of settings. Each track is streamed separately on this page, with information about the recordings and purchasing links to encourage further exploration and continued listening.
These artists have very generously donated their tracks to this project, and we encourage you to support them by purchasing their albums and letting them know if you enjoy what you hear!—AG

Dylan Ryan / Sand, Barocco
Performed by Dylan Ryan, drums; Timothy Young, guitar; Devin Hoff, bass
Sky Bleached
Cuneiform

Bill Ryan, Rapid Assembly
Performed by Billband
Towards Daybreak
Innova

David Kechley, Dancing – IV. War Dance
Timetable Percussion: Matthew Gold, Joseph Tompkins, Matt Ward with guests Eric Poland and Chris Thompson
Colliding Objects
Innova

Stephen Gorbos, Push
University of Houston Percussion Ensemble
Everywhere Entangled
Albany

Robyn Schulkowsky, Armadillo Part II
Performed by Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion; Fredy Studer, drums; Joey Baron, drums
Armadillo
New World

Carlos Sánchez-Gutíerrez, Winik/Té
Performed by Makoto Nakura, marimba
Wood and Forest
American Modern

John Cage, Second Construction
Performed by Third Coast Percussion
John Cage: Works for Percussion 2
Mode

Joseph Byrd, Animals
Performed by ACME
Joseph Byrd: NYC 1960-1963
New World

Christian Wolff, Percussionist 5
Performed by Christian Wolff and Joey Baron, percussion
Christian Wolff: 8 Duos
New World

Sean Noonan, Thank You
A Gambler’s Hand
Songlines

John Luther Adams and Glenn Kotche go on Spirit Journeys with Ilimaq

Posted on December 7, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

Glenn Kotche and John Luther Adams’s collaborative relationship took root several years ago in Alaska. While on tour with the rock band Wilco,[1] Kotche rang up Adams and suggested dinner, and this initial meeting lead to a friendship as well as a collaboration on Adams’s newest work, Ilimaq. Though Kotche is best known for the Wilco gig, he is no stranger to the world of new music. He has collaborated with eighth blackbird and has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and So Percussion among others. On the other side, Adams has a rock band background as well, so the two already had a great deal in common before that first dinner.

John Luther Adams (left) and Glenn Kotche

In true rock and roll fashion, the headliner [2] required an opening act, and On Fillmore, featuring Kotche on percussion and Darin Gray on bass, played just that role. Dovetailing with the pre-concert audience patter, bells began to peal at irregular intervals through antiphonally positioned speakers in the McCullough Theater on the campus of UT Austin. Also in keeping with rock and roll tradition, it was really loud and served eventually to transition most of the crowd from their how-do-you-do’s into full concert mode. Any stragglers were wrangled into place by bassist Darin Gray’s entrance. Looking a bit like a cross between a Stop Making Sense-era David Byrne and Tom Waits at his most junk-kit gravelly, Gray walked from the side of the room across (and above) the audience’s chairs armed with a variety of noise makers. Gray’s duck calls, whistles, clappers, and static generators (the last of these likely one of the wind gadgets overblown like crazy, making me occasionally yearn for the quiet peace of the antiphonal bells which were actually drowned out once or twice…) had an organic, natural quality and acted as an appropriate precedent to the Adams. Gray eventually made his way to the stage to join Kotche in a series of tunes peppered with reverb and other effects. Listening to two seasoned veterans lock together is always a thing of beauty, and Gray and Kotche delivered the goods; largely simple grooves and bass lines that took the listener from rock show to slightly surreal art presentation and back again. The latter description was delivered via the occasional noisemaker and the use of orchestral percussion (glockenspiel and crotales in particular) which, when used along with the insistent bass lines, obligated me to make the note, “Tom Waits Christmas” with a big smile next to it. It was fun, well played, and a great warm up for the Adams.

The second half of the concert was dedicated to the 45-minute Texas Performing Arts commission Ilimaq. The three-movement work was divided into three instrumental groupings on the stage: bass drum, cymbals/gongs, and drum kit. The first movement was in essence an extended bass drum roll, but eventually moved listeners away from the individual sound events and immersed them in a larger texture removed from time. Starting at a modest volume, the roll began to echo through the speakers placed around the hall. Kotche accelerated, decelerated, crescendoed, and decrescendoed throughout, but these small-scale changes were less important than the overall effect, which was that of a hypnotic thrumming. Despite the fact that I was listening to someone beat the hell out of a bass drum, I honestly felt like I could fall asleep in the middle of the whole thing. This was not out of boredom, however; I think that Adams was actually able to tap into the whole shaman/hypnotic thing and it was really quite effective. Adams creates the sense of “really big space” (and McCullough is not particularly expansive) in many of his works, and the opening movement of Ilimaq is no exception.

In the second movement, Kotche moved to a set of cymbals and gongs. Slow rolls played on crash cymbals were barely perceptible and came across like small waves crashing. The use of soft mallets made for little or no attack, and presented a great contrast to the visceral and constant attacks of the roll(s) in the first movement. Adams talks about creating an “aura” for the piece, an electronic background texture which reads/sounds like a bit like an ambient synth bed over which the percussion rides. This aura swirled around us through the speaker system, at times coming to the fore, but for the most part playing second fiddle to the percussion. This “all rounded with no edges/attacks” quality took a turn as the piece progressed, and more aggressive rolls resulted in the bite of the cymbal becoming all edge. This section was brief, however, and with a strike on the bell of the cymbal the movement ended.

The final movement saw Kotche move to a large drum kit positioned in the center of the stage. Armed with eight toms, eight cymbals, and two kick drums, Kotche seemed poised to play any number of epic rock drum solos, and Adams finale didn’t land far from that mark. Huge rolls, this time more akin to rock drum fills played across the kit, were punctuated with cymbal hits. Patterns of increasing and decreasing rhythmic values gave shape to the phrases, but any evaluation of the finer points and proportions is probably missing the point. This was about energy, movement, and frankly, sheer power, and Kotche gave it everything he had. I don’t think I heard a single individual who didn’t have something to say about the endurance required to play either of the outer movements, much less both of them. As the lightning and the thunder subsided, the bowing of a small gong signaled the end of the work.

Adams was in town for several days and spoke at two or three locations on campus about the work and the collaboration that took place. In one of these talks he spoke about writing music that embodies the out-of-doors as well as writing music that actually requires performance outside; music that should not be played indoors at all. Ilimaq could well be a harbinger of things to come, and not for the volume level alone. The hypnotic repetitiveness of the first movement, the introspective quality of the second, and the visceral, athletic elements of the third all begged to be let loose, to be performed and experienced in a venue as big as the music, and Adams’s great outdoors would be the perfect place for the next rendition of this work.

1. I know I’m getting old when instead of saying “Wilco” I say “The Rock Band Wilco”

2. Well, Kotche was the headliner but since this concert revolved around Ilimaq, I’m going with the piece as the headliner.

Sounds Heard: Third Coast Percussion—John Cage: The Works for Percussion 2

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

John Cage’s centennial year has resulted in a gaggle of new recordings, multimedia offerings à la 4’33”, as well as festivals and events around the country. Whether or not one embraces wholeheartedly Cage’s later integration of chance procedures and conceptual thought into his works, there is no denying that some of his most compelling music is the early compositions for percussion, which provide a wealth of insight into the composer’s internal musical landscape. At the time these pieces were created, his sonic palette, which consisted of pretty much everything and the kitchen sink, was somewhat revolutionary, though it has now become a common language for percussionists. The Chicago-based ensemble Third Coast Percussion has released a new CD and separate surround sound DVD on Mode (available either individually or together) of six early percussion works that will perk up the ears (and eyes, if you choose to include the DVD) of anyone even remotely interested in percussion music performance and/or John Cage.

The discs begin with Cage’s three Constructions, presented in reverse chronological order. Third Construction features the widest selection of instruments, with metal, wood, and skin categories all represented in force. The constantly grooving rhythmic complexity and the extensive instrumentation make it a milestone in percussion repertoire. Second Construction begins with a gamelan-esque arrangement of oxen bells, joined by a repeating rhythmic melody on piano grounded by snare drum brush work, and an assortment of shakers and small drums. First Construction (in Metal) is just that—a metallic rainforest of thundersheets, tam-tam, cymbals, and “piano innards.”

The 1936 work Trio is a short three-movement composition scored for bass drum, woodblocks, bamboo sticks and tom-toms. Heard after the Constructions, its dance-like, often gently bubbling rhythms sound relatively simple in comparison, and it is illuminating to hear how Cage’s future sense of rhythm and structure grew out of this work.

The Quartet for unspecified instrumentation has been sending percussionists on junkyard treasure hunts since it was created in 1935. Here Third Coast has separated the four movements into separate instrument groupings of primarily wood, metal, and skin, and the third movement employs the harp of an old upright piano as the primary instrument to create a beautiful and otherworldly soundscape.

The final piece, Living Room Music, finds the performers inside architect Bruce Goff’s Ruth Ford House, literally playing the space—metal beams are struck with spoons, carpet is scraped. There is the open-handed thwacking of wooden surfaces in the first movement, “To Begin.” For the second movement, “Story,” they relax in comfy chairs and, as the liner notes state, “rap” Gertrude Stein. Slide whistle is featured in the “Melody” movement with a background of spoons and a very familiar computer bleep sound that many will immediately recognize. “End” is all glass objects all the time. While every one of the performance films is beautifully presented, with lots of close-ups of fascinating instruments and the hands playing them, the video of Living Room Music captures the space and the performers in a way that makes you really wish you could be there, hanging out with them.

In my experience, Cage’s percussion music is best fully appreciated live; being able to see performers play the arrays of coffee cans, flower pots, drums, utensils, and bells brings the music’s visceral character to the forefront of the listening experience. In this case, an added benefit is being able to watch Third Coast Percussion obviously having a blast performing all of these works. The DVD beautifully conveys both the richness and the delightful quirkiness of Cage’s percussion music, instilling a deeper appreciation of the composer’s creative outlook. The recordings alone are of exceedingly high quality and satisfying in and of themselves, and the DVD adds another layer of depth, personality, and—quite literally—color to the music that is well worth the investment.

Sounds Heard: Meehan/Perkins Duo—Travel Diary

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

If I’m completely candid, the two large dinosaurs dominating the cover were what first attracted my attention to Travel Diary, a CD of works for percussion duo composed by Tristan Perich, Nathan Davis, David Lang, and Paul Lansky. Flipping the jewel case over to find the image of an airliner cruising through the clouds, I couldn’t imagine what sort of Jurassic Park-meets-Lost storyline this music might be treading. But was there any way this album could end without someone being eaten alive?

Ultimately, of course, it was the artistry of Todd Meehan and Douglas Perkins, the two percussionists behind this title, and not the surreal illustrations which truly hooked my interest. Opening with Tristan Perich’s work for crotales and six-channel 1-bit sound (the composer’s aural calling card), men and machine show themselves to be well paired. If you have ever lain awake in a canvas tent during a light rain, you can conjure a hint of the sound world Perich has created in Observations, the bubble-pops of tone relentlessly sparkling throughout the track’s nearly 12-minute runtime. The span of pitch being rather neatly fixed, the real game to watch here is in the intricate play of steady rhythmic evolutions.

Where Observations keeps up a hummingbird’s pulse rate, The Diving Bell by Nathan Davis stretches the line out to cast an echoing shimmer. Using microphones and electronic processing, the work demonstrates just how exotic and fascinating a sound world lives inside a simple triangle. David Lang, on the other hand, blows up the palette to encompass entire racks of instruments, all of which sound in Table of Contents (the title mirroring Lang’s original image of how the instruments would be laid out for performances). In this case, the music is drawn in the contrasts of timbral color.

The Meehan/Perkins Duo performs an excerpt from Paul Lansky’s Travel Diary (Movement III: “Lost in Philly”)

Meehan and Perkins devote the bulk of this record to its namesake, Paul Lansky’s Travel Diary. A work in four movements, Lansky sets the stage in the opening “Leaving Home,” which is part “hmm, what shirt should I take along?” leisurely mallet work on marimba and vibes and part “oh my god, what the hell did I do with the damn tickets” anxiety, the deep echo of struck drum heads speeding the beat of the listener’s heart in sympathy. In the end, it’s out the door and on to “Cruising Speed,” the time and miles ticking by in a steady stream. The road is not always smooth (the drums again stepping in as the disruptors) but it is in the third movement that the composer, the music, and therefore the listener all find themselves “Lost In Philly.” The emotional undercurrent here reads primarily as curiosity to my ear, with only shades of nervousness over the sudden dislocation. If Lansky had found himself lost in Pittsburgh, I suspect that balance would have been swapped and it would have been quite a different composition. The piece lands on “Arrived, Phone Home,” the landscape perhaps less familiar, but the goal safely achieved. Throughout the journey, Lansky’s subheads imply the route, but the music itself delivers postcards to the ear that leave plenty of room for listener exploration.

According to the ensemble, this album was intended as a way to showcase the duo’s “on-going efforts to commission and collaborate with an eclectic mix of contemporary composers to create a new and unique body of percussion duo repertoire.” In this case, I’d say the goods on offer each sound so intriguing that I’d volunteer to play them all. At least until I remember that I don’t actually play percussion. For those who do, I suspect you’re going to discover something you might want to try out for yourself.

Percussion In Our Midst!

Posted on March 15, 2012 by DanVisconti - Columns

Last weekend I was in Minneapolis for a premiere, in which I gave a somewhat slapdash and intermittently relevant concert talk which still ended up being a lot of fun (and all the more so as I finally got to meet fellow NewMusicBox blogger Colin Holter in the flesh!). One audience question in particular threw me off balance, as loaded questions and statements-disguised-as-questions so often do. Only half-jokingly, someone asked: “How to you manage to compose contemporary music without percussion?”

After laughing off his question and answering with a comment about the percussive sounds already included in the piece’s writing for traditional instruments, I took my seat immediately came to a harrowing realization: oh crap, I *did* include percussion in my piece! I had completely forgotten the inclusion of a rain stick and wind chimes, perhaps because these auxiliary instruments are so inherently un-rhythmic, and more like color washes.

This situation provided for some amusement when I took to the stage and exclaimed, “Woops! Guess it’s not possible to compose a piece of contemporary music without percussion!” But I wish that I had been granted a little more time for going off-topic, because the gentleman’s question—and my hilariously garbled response—brought up an important point.

The reason so much contemporary music involves percussion is probably because percussion represents the intersection of several trends in new music: rhythmic music derived from rock and primitivism, the closely-related influence of minimalism, and on the other hand percussion’s ability to satisfy timbre-hungry composers more interested in gesture and color than rhythm per se; and as any music fan knows, percussion is also one of the most visceral and visually appealing families of instruments to watch during a performance. Couple this with the fact that complex rhythm patterns and organizing ostinati feature prominently into much non-western music that only began to be taken seriously by “classical” composers half a century ago, and it’s easy to see why so much contemporary music—of diverging styles and schools—is involved in a love affair with percussion. Bang on a Can (and countless imitators with percussive monikers) use percussion as part of the ensemble-namesake, partly to emphasize the importance of rhythm and percussion for the group.

Percussion has become such a ubiquitous presence on the new music scene that (as the above experience attests) it can be easy to forget it’s even there! Given the recent explosion of timbral interest in recorded popular music from Gil Evans to the Beatles and onward, the bar for interesting timbres and percussive excitement has been raised for concert music as well—and as far as I can tell, the trend isn’t reversing anytime soon.

“Matrices and Entropy” from the Austin Museum of Digital Art

Posted on February 1, 2012 by AndrewSigler - Field Reports, Headlines

This past Saturday, the Austin Museum of Digital Art presented “Matrices and Entropy,” the most recent concert in their performance series focused on experimental music and digital performance art. AMODA has presented a variety of series over the years, including educational presentations, electronic concert music, and live interactive exhibitions. Though AMODA has no physical address (and really, isn’t that what you’d expect from a purely digital outfit?), their presence has been felt throughout the Austin area, and I was anxious to see what they had in store.

The show opened with Sam Pluta’s multimedia presentation data structures/monoliths ii (for chion)[*] which featured a variety of clips (with their original audio attached) from popular mainstream films manipulated in real time via Supercollider. Presented initially in short, two- to three-second bursts, the clips eventually began to take their place as structural elements of the piece despite their familiar origin. Patterns began to develop as the work progressed, though it was difficult to say whether these were intended or simply my brain trying to get its head around all the disparate input. The clips began to fly by more and more rapidly, leading to a climactic moment before slowing down and becoming arranged in such a way that their relative volume levels also decreased. This was followed by an extended (and thrice repeated) scene from the opening montage of the film Carrie which was, shall we say, somewhat calming relative to the hyperkinetic rapidity of the first section. Additionally, the Pino Donaggio music which accompanied this particular scene, all strings and slowly plucked guitar, was quite a “puppies and rainbows” setup for the deluge that followed. Fortunately, I’ve seen Carrie, so when the final iteration ended and gave way to a faster, louder, and more violent series of clips, I at least was able to keep my composure. This fugal section continued without respite, save for one clip featuring a man reaching for an electrical panel from which electricity was arching. This particularly calming image was the respite. Fortunately, the piece screeched to a halt before the guy blew up.

Line Upon Line performs Anders Vinjar’s +/-. Photo by Craig Washburn.

Percussion trio Line Upon Line performed Anders Vinjar’s +/- for assorted percussion and multichannel tape. The piece began with sparse offerings from non-pitched instruments that gave the impression of call and response or birdsong. Slowly, more clearly organized rhythms emerged from the spare texture, coalescing in short unified patterns and phrases and even the occasional pulse. This section came to a close after which the members pulled out sticks and went to work on the heads and sides of snares, timbales, and bongos. Grooves developed, stated even more clearly than before as smaller hand percussion was folded into the larger drum figures, recalling the introductory material and heralding one of the few instances when the pre-recorded audio gained prominence. Following the large, low frequency recorded bit, a section featuring cymbal scrapes and other metallic elements built to a climactic ending involving virtually every drum on the stage.

(from left) Steve Parker and Sam Pluta. Photo by Craig Washburn.

Steve Parker joined Pluta for an improv set featuring trombone and electronics. Following a prolonged silence, Parker began working for a living. Breath effects, short riffs, and flutter tongue were immediately processed through a variety of effects, from common delays and reverbs to stuttered bit-crushing in what became a canonic tit for tat between the two performers. Parker took the trombone apart, played with mutes, removed the bell and created suction with the slide (with his thumb over the tube) to create high pitched, pinched squealing effects. Most notable in this performance was Parker’s ability to go blow for blow with modern technology on a bunch of twisted tubes that are a few hundred years old.

Line Upon Line returned to the stage to perform Cage’s Variations II, which falls squarely into his “meditative/contemplative” category. As much about the silence as the sounds that punctuate it, Variations II allows the listener to become so focused on the silence that when the metal slabs are stroked, struck, or slammed, the sounds serve as markers or borders for that silence. The only downside of the experience was the air conditioner which droned on throughout the work, about which I imagine Cage would have been profoundly indifferent.

Line Upon Line and Sam Pluta. Photo by Craig Washburn.

The closing work was Pluta’s Matrices featuring Line Upon Line flanked by two televisions. These were the regular old 4:3 CRT monitors (as opposed to the ubiquitous 16:9 flatscreens) tuned to a static channel. With Pluta on laptop, the piece began with loud, piercing oscillations bursting from the speakers, sounding somewhat like the scratchy static from dirty guitar pots. The screens responded to the audio output, horizontal lines dancing up and down, forming, disappearing, and breaking into snowy static as the percussionists and Pluta performed. Each of the percussionists faced microphones and had different instruments to use. These were (from left to right, respectively) two handheld fans, the blades of which were allowed to slap against the mic, a balloon and a paper bag, and a bowed flexatone. In an alternating quasi-rondo form, the music basically alternated between two sections, the first featuring the above instruments played furiously by Line Upon Line and processed by Pluta , the second, shorter, featuring piercing rolls on two blocks of purple heart wood. The dichotomy of the jumpy action of the first section versus the short uniformity of the second was echoed in the juxtaposition of Line Upon Line’s physicality and Pluta’s immobile figure behind the laptop. Further, the piece followed the form of the concert in general, as it was in like a lion and out like a lamb.

AMODA held its concert in the Mexican American Cultural Center, its performance space a relative newcomer to the scene. It was a large “white box” of sorts with a backstage area separated by a delicately curved wall that seemed more like a spot to hang art than a dividing object. The crowd of around fifty was quite diverse, though the average age skewed a bit high, perhaps due to the eight to ten p.m. Saturday night time slot. The show ran straight through with no intermission and little in the way of formalities, short of a brief introduction. It was clean, neat, and well played sir, well played.

* The first piece performed was actually data structures/monoliths ii (for chion), not American Tokyo Daydream I (Calypso Sunrise), as was indicated in the printed program. The swap was brought to our attention after the post of this report, and we have updated it to reflect that change.

Sounds Heard: Michael Gordon—Timber

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

When the recording of Michael Gordon’s Timber dropped last fall, critics justifiably drooled a little on the impressively weighty, laser-etched, inch-thick wooden box (with magnetic closure, no less) that held the CD and its booklet inside. I’m a sucker for a pretty cover myself, but while I appreciated that the Cantaloupe label had effectively packaged the disc in a representative sample of the featured instrument (okay, not really, but I doubt I’m the first to try hammering on the case with my fingertips while listening, regardless), it was actually the recent experience of hearing Mantra Percussion play the piece live here in Baltimore that drew me more deeply inside the transfixing power of a score designed for six percussionists and lumber.

Slagwerk Den Haag, the ensemble that recorded and jointly commissioned the piece from Gordon, led the composer to the unique sound when they turned up a number of wooden simantras (a simple Greek percussion instrument) in their storage space during the work’s development. Gordon had embarked on the commission with the desire “to clear my mind of pitches and orchestration […] I thought of composing this music as being like taking a trip out into the desert. I was counting on the stark palette and the challenge of survival to clear my brain and bring on visions.” The simantras further inspired this concept.

The resulting five-movement, 55-minute piece puts the musicians in a circle of sound, literally and figuratively. In their recording of the work, Slagwerk Den Haag offers a sharp, precise delivery of the intricate rhythms and ever-undulating dynamics, haloed by the rich overtones the instruments generate. The sonic focus moves around the stereo field in a languid hula-hoop of generally dense, rapid-fire mallet-against-wood action. In live performance in a reverberant acoustic space, that constant spiral moves the sound around the room with almost spiritual power, perhaps harkening back in some ways to the whirling dervish who inhabited Bill Morison’s film for Gordon’s Decasia.

In their concert presentation, Mantra Percussion performed the work in near-darkness, with specially designed and timed lights to accent the movement of the piece. Out in the audience, the sensory deprivation added to the immersive effect and made the concert experience feel particularly intimate—even though the circular setup of the hall with the performers at the core meant everyone was staring at someone’s back. The shifting light emanating from the center of the room gave the impression of a campfire, the music as storytelling by firelight.

You might expect that nearly an hour of relentless pounding would leave your ears, if not you entire psyche, a bit bruised by the journey. In my experience of the work, however, time actually fell out of focus. It wasn’t until well after the last echoes of the piece faded from the room that the hypnosis drained away and the clock began its proper forward motion once again.

Sounds Heard: Alexander Berne—Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

The opening moments of Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra’s Flickers of Mime suffocate the ear, a crush of sustained organ tones overwhelming the space with a mysterious and vaguely threatening assault. The puncture of a drum roll lets some air into the room, but the off-kilter trajectory doesn’t abate. It’s a disorienting plunge into dreamscape (or perhaps nightmare), tangled in swirls of soprano saxophone.

For indeed, the path through this 11-movement work—paired here in a 2-CD set with Berne’s equally fascinating Death of Memes—weaves in its course. Beginning with an ambient base layer of sound out of which distinct sonic events emerge and retreat, Berne creates the sensation that we are watching the landscape of a foreign country through the window of a moving vehicle, the sights only half glimpsed and even less concretely understood. The vaguely Arabic timbre to elements of the tracks—particularly noticeable in the woodwinds (which include a saduk, a very cool sounding Berne-built invention), though present in the strings and percussion as well—add to this exotic imagery. For as visually evocative as the music feels to the mind’s eye, however, the only truly navigable handrail available is by ear, of course, offering endless opportunities to hit delete on conjured images and begin the journey again.

As the work develops, it seems roused from its Nyquil haze, instrumental lines taking up more firmly pronounced physical residence in the aural space as the tracks progress. This is especially striking in the immersive “Flicker VII”, the placement and volume levels of the various instruments in the mix building an almost tangible structure around the listener.

If Flickers of Mime took the ear on a sonic safari, Death of Memes ships it off to Battlestar Galactica. The romance and anguish in Berne’s woodwind writing remain, but “Meme I” finds them singing in a metallic cage of percussion and marching drum beats. From there, however, the tenor of the following eight tracks turn away from the foreign odyssey that Mime suggested to concentrate on a meditative, inward-looking space. Though the overall vibe develops a more aggressive and ominous character as the work moves toward its conclusion, it maintains a certain atmosphere of introspective solitude.

On a closing note, though you perhaps shouldn’t judge a CD by its cover, it’s certainly fair to give props for a particularly excellent one, and Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes‘s hardback book-style packaging with its silver-inked text and cover art (design and layout by Shelter Bookworks/drawings by Karolien Soete) definitely puts a well-earned gloss on an exciting project.

I Hear the Gongs Singing—Percussive Adventures in Chicago

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Devin Hurd - Field Reports, Headlines

Tatsuya Nakatani is the very picture of dedication to his music and the carefully constructed sound world that he fully inhabits. His stage incorporates an expansive collection of gongs, mallets, bows, and drums that he loads and unloads from the van he drives, touring for months at a time in order to bring his immersive percussive sound to an assortment of ears in towns and cities across the country. He builds his own bows and engineers his own metal frames. He sells CDs and vinyl records to support his singular approach to a music rich in standing waves and complex overtones shaped by his finely honed intuition for his improvisations. His rapport with the audience and other musicians is understated and disarmingly humble. This is in stark contrast to the focused intensity and disciplined technique that goes into his transformative performances.

A solo, improvised set of music from Tatsuya Nakatani emerges as an act of intense, creative ritual. His language of bowed gongs and scraped snare heads focuses on percussion as a source for drone textures that ripple with complex energy. The music erupts and subsides with an intense focus on the intersection of disciplined technique and raw sonic energy.

Nakatani has been looking for practical ways to expand his solo percussive world. To this end he has taken an interest in workshopping pieces for what he calls the Nakatani Gong Orchestra. The membership of the orchestra is made up of people local to wherever he happens to be performing, which he finds gives it a dramatically different character every night. His preference is to work with non-musicians for a brief period–just two to three hours–before staging a performance. This is just enough time to cover the basic techniques of striking and bowing his large gongs and to teach the performers a set of hand gestures that communicate his intentions as the conductor. Conceptualized as an extension of his own appendages, Nakatani uses the ensemble to realize the sound of a multi-limbed version of himself. Working with performers without previous musical training allows him to better shape a sound that utilizes his own exceptional restraint without having to also manage the personalities and impulses of trained musicians.

The opening set for his recent stop at Chicago’s Elastic Arts began with a Gong Orchestra performance. The wide dynamic range of six performers bowing and striking gongs of various sizes was startling, although much of this music was not particularly loud. The relatively small space at Elastic Arts could easily be consumed by the vibrations of so many large gongs. Tatsuya Nakatani’s aesthetic draws from a sense of restraint that allows the complexities of sustained gong tones to fill the space without resorting to volume. Nakatani conducted crescendos and decrescendos that washed in like ocean waves. At other times he would shape a sustained, quiet textures that served as a bed for his own playing at the front of the gong orchestra. The formal construction of his conducted improvisation was remarkably transparent as he sculpted an elaborate drone that allowed the wealth of anharmonic frequencies to dance in the air between gongs and eardrums. Much of the performance featured Nakatani leading through conduction before reaching for his own bows and mallets to contribute his layer of sound. The vibrations within the room were filled with nuances that shifted audibly with even the slightest movement of one’s head. It gave the air a feeling of density, like being submerged within a rich liquid of sound.

The second set of the evening featured a solo performance with Nakatani playing a drum kit, several gongs, and handheld percussion. Nakatani’s dedication to his sonic language is readily apparent in the meditative, near trance-like state that he goes into once the music begins. The sense of invocation that flowed from the way Nakatani regarded his handcrafted instruments gave rise to a spiritual quality that was reinforced by his sense of submission to the improvisational space. It was a drum solo realized as a continuous drone as Nakatani explored a range of percussive frictions and air pressure applied to the membranes of his drums through a technique of blowing through the hole of a cymbal held flat along the surface of the snare drum. These were combined with the sonic richness of his bowed gongs, which demonstrated his ability to react and truly control the contours of the sound through subtle changes in bow speed and angle.

***

Later that same week, Third Coast Percussion offered up a performance of new music as part of the Sunday Salon Series at the Chicago Cultural Center. The quartet of Owen Clayton Condon, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, and David Skidmore presented a polished set of composed music that explored different aspects of ensemble drumming.

A tight rendition of Mallet Quartet by Steve Reich opened the afternoon concert. It is a relatively recent work that builds upon the familiar harmonic progressions and fast-slow-fast form that are such an identifiable part of Reich’s sound. The use of two five-octave marimbas opened up a wider harmonic range of which Reich takes full advantage, particularly in the slow section. The use of amplification combined with the live acoustics of Preston Hall made for a loud excursion into the composer’s sonic language.

The next piece on the program was Credo in US composed in 1942 by John Cage. It is an early collage work that plays up Cage’s whimsical side, combining a mash-up of popular musical styles from that era along with the use of radio as an instrument, the live broadcasts adding various popular musical styles from this era into the mix as well. In addition to the radio, Credo in US is scored for piano, muted gongs, tom toms, tin cans, electric buzzer, plus a phonograph—though an iPhone served that role here as a 21st century technological substitution that was well within the spirit and sonic purpose of its 20th century counterpart. John Cage’s music soars when performed with a balance of reverence and enthusiasm, and the interpretation of this work by Third Coast Percussion—the tin cans and other physical materials tastefully selected for their timbral qualities—was an incredible success.

Third Coast Percussion performing Common Patterns in Uncommon Time (2011) by David Skidmore.The second half of the concert consisted of Common Patterns in Uncommon Time by Third Coast percussionist David Skidmore. Inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the piece begins with the mallet instruments entering seamlessly from specially designed pre-recorded intermission music. The pulsating sound suggests Reich, but with a decidedly different harmonic sensibility. The music then breaks abruptly from the mallet instruments and moves into more expanded percussive timbres. Each movement exploring subsets of metals, drum kits, woods, or membrane instruments over a span of time that systematically exhausted a stage filled with instruments. The abrupt timbral transitions between movements emerge as a signature quality of the piece. The use of electric fan-driven wind chimes over a soft texture of mallet instruments was particularly striking. It served as a fitting contrast to the loud beats pounded out on multiple drum kits just before that section. The piece concluded with two of the performers moving into the audience while playing clay pots as an effective nod toward the sense of space that marks Frank Lloyd Wright’s creations. It was music that built out nicely from the iconic 20th century composers featured during the first half of the program.

Devin Hurd

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