As heard later in an MP3, the performance is cut short. Not by the arrival of the fire marshall, or an electrical outage, or an assault from a member of the audience. The performance went on, but it’s cut short for those of us who didn’t make the April 21, 2012, event at the YU Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon, when Daniel Menche played two-plus hours of deep glisten, of intense sheen, of high-decibel sheer. There’s an MP3 document of the event, a rousing, swelling mass of what it would sound like if tinsel caused feedback (MP3). Apparently it’s shorter than the original performance due to a recording failure. What we miss must be even more resplendent noise, because the hour and a quarter in the sizable (110+ KB) MP3 is nothing but resplendent noise, occasionally dipping into everyday-level but often in a sonic stratosphere of hazy clanging, the ringing in Zeus’ ear. Apparently the performance was itself cut short (“The amplifiers also blew out at the end,” we’re told) but the MP3 doesn’t get that far. The MP3′s failure is an unintended simulacrum of the one that ended the show.
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Nils Quak is playing a show in Hamburg, Germany, on June 1. In advance of the event, he is prepping his live rig. We know this because he has posted an extended test run of his rig. It’s an attenuated sliver of ethereal momentum, aptly titled “Live Test.” The music is quite lovely. It’s also an interesting application of the term “live.” The rig could easily have been given a test run and been judged in the moment. Or been given a test run, which was recorded, and then listened to by Quak for confirmation. But instead he’s gone the step further, which is to share the performance. As with Dave Seidel’s live performance post back in October, there’s something going on here that feels like a peek ahead, something about how acknowledgement of a dispersed Internet-based audience is part of the conceptualization of a local event.
The first half of the hour is Achim Mohné on a trio of turntables (Omnitronics), and the second is Philip Jeck on a pair (Dansettes, we’re informed) and in place of a third, Jeck employs a sampler. Both musicians take a device intended to project, to reproduce, sound and then they explore the device’s unintended sonic mechanisms and consequences. In Mohné capable hands, this means a revelatory series of details born of the tight circling patterns of a record needle caught in a groove, of the turntable’s aged gears moving in place; it’s a fantasia that erupts from the sleep induced by the cycling’s monotony. Jeck, with his sampler, layers his source material for a rousing, seesawing haze (MP3).
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The set was recorded by Philip Marshall (“from desk to hard drive”). Track originally posted at touchradio.org.uk. More on Mohné at achimmohne.de, and on Jeck at philipjeck.com. Photo above by credited to Mike Harding and Philip Marshall.
On Thursday, April 19, 2012, seven members of the Disquiet Junto and three of their guest accompanists played a concert of music for expanded glass harp at Enemy in Chicago. The concert was also available for live streaming at numbers.fm. It was the first group concert to develop out of the Junto project series. And what follows is audio (MP3) of the full evening. As the founder of the Disquiet, I am heard framing the evening at the opening, intermission (between Soliday and Monteverde), and end. I was visiting Chicago from San Francisco, where I live.
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The performers were in order: Aroon Karuna, Erik Schoster (with Jason Nanna on glass harmonica and Wesley Charles Tank on vocals), Jason Shanley (aka Cinchel), Jason Soliday (with Michael Esposito on glass harmonica), Jon Monteverde (aka XYZR_KX), Joshua Davison (aka Stringbot), Jeff Kolar (with Kg Price on glass harmonica), and Ryan T Dunn.
Dunn’s brief performance was an unplanned, and welcome, closing to the evening. Throughout the concert, he watched over the broadcast. The instructions to the other performers were to do two pieces: one of “expanded glass harmonica” and the other a work-in-progress they wanted to share with their fellow musicians and the audience. There are some extended silences and glitches/artifacts in the audio.
Dunn’s playing wasn’t the only surprise. Esposito had driven in from Indiana, and the crew that was the largest, Schoster’s, drove the furthest: from Milwaukee. Thankfully expanding the range of the performances, Tank read a poem through Schoster’s work. It closed with this memorable stanza:
it’s cold everywhere here…
i’m inventing a month called ‘revember’
where there’s reverb on every life sound
and you get to relive warm wet
memories
The evening was just tremendous. The Enemy venue, in a large third-floor space in Wicker Park, has great sound, and the audience was attentive — barely anyone spoke at all during the performances. Despite the fact that everyone performing was from Chicago (or driving distance), no one who performed knew everyone who was performing. For example Soliday, who manages the Enemy space, only knew one of the performers in advance of the evening. The glass harp was selected as the subject of the evening because, as I note in my spoken introduction, it was an important piece of the Disquiet Junto series. The glass harp project was the third Junto project, and its intent was to make clear to participants that the Junto wasn’t just a sample-of-the-week endeavor; instead, it required that participants perform live. Thus, what better subject for the first large-scale Junto concert (I use the phrase “large scale” to distinguish the Chicago show from the times when members of the Junto have performed some of their project material live in other settings).
Someone seated on a couch at Enemy, Sei Jin Lee (twitter.com/sadlypanda), captured these five videos and posted them at youtube.com:
Any additional, post-concert material will be posted here:
• Shanley/Cinchel wrote about his concert experience at his cinchel.com site. He really gets into the spirit of the Junto, which involves talking about musical process as an interative process:
I also have really worked hard these past few months on live sets that a simple and focused. I’ve also now spent well over a year working in the same tuning (DGdgbe low-high) and the past month with the partial capo. its a tuning that seems to lend it self to drone really well. aslo i have spent a lot of time thinking about layers of frequency and focusing on that to really expand the guitar. pitch shifting with the whammy or in abelton to reach registers that the guitar normally doesnt hit. i see/hear a lot of guitar based drone/ambient and i really want to try and carve out a new sound or a fuller sound like mike shiflet or david daniell.
I was emboldened to create sounds by tapping various parts of the glass and the contact mic itself. The latter method produced low thumps that sounded very much like a kick drum, and the piece overall became much more percussive.
The photo at the top of this post is from Shanley/Cinchel’s set and was taken by by Cole Piece (instagr.am). That large box just behind the laptop is a tape delay. And the glass is, indeed, from Brooklyn Brewery. The image counts as a mid-concert update, in that Pierce tweeted it during Cinchel’s set.
Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (MP3), with pixel percussion, these fissures that seem more like absences, sudden rhythmic moments of digital clarity that lend momentum to a cloud of synthesized dust. The collection comes from three different live performances: from broadcasts on the websites stillstream.com and electo-music.com, and from “City Skies 2011 sets in Atlanta, Georgia.”
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Mindshed by Mahoney & Peck on the Ethereal Live netlabel may be live but it is more than ethereal. There is blippy 8bit maneuvering (“The Divine Dark”) that yields broken beats, and Muslimgauze-style modal exploration (“Ghost Transmission”), as well as gaseous meandering (“Interstellar Murmur”). One highlight is a track, “The Pale Blue Dot” (