The Seventeenth Annual Festival with no fancy name, Part 2 (or B) got underway on Monday night (March 12) at Experimental Intermedia, composer Phill Niblock's homey loft and performance space in Lower Manhattan, with a performance by Jason Kahn (pictured) and Jon Mueller.
I previewed the concert for this week's issue of Time Out New York. You can read that piece here, but I'll summarize for readers in a hurry. Both Kahn and Muller started out as drummers: Kahn played with California punk-jazz outfits Universal Congress Of and Cruel Frederick before relocating to Zürich, while Mueller has been active with Milwaukee postrock bands Pelé and Collections of Colonies of Bees.
In their more recent work, both players have turned to a percussion-oriented version of electroacoustic improvisation, much of which has been documented on their own labels (Kahn's Cut and Mueller's Crouton). In each case, the conventional notion of timekeeping is entirely abandoned in favor of textural exploration, usually augmented by unorthodox amplification and electronics, which led me to coin a new term in my TONY preview: postpercussionist. (Other members of the genus include the phenomenal Swiss musician Günter Müller, as well as New Yorkers Tim Barnes and Sean Meehan).
Kahn and Mueller have recorded together twice. Papercuts, issued on Crouton in 2004, consisted entirely of electronically manipulated sounds made by ruffling, ripping and crumpling paper. The duo's new CD, Supershells (on San Francisco-based label Formed), features recognizable percussion sounds -- gently tapped cymbals, whining gongs, fingertips pattering on drum heads -- augmented by Kahn's analog synthesizer and Mueller's stacked cassette players.
In their hour-long set tonight, Kahn and Mueller stuck close to the techniques and sounds they'd employed on Supershells. Kahn's right hand fluttered on a small cymbal and deep snare drum, while his left alternated between plugging and unplugging patches on his boxy old synthesizer and adjusting knobs on a mixing board. Mueller played soft rolls on a gong suspended close to the floor, and created a din with a piccolo snare drum set on the face of a loudspeaker. Now and then, the performance rose to a roar of feedback and wiry buzz; otherwise, the duo maintained a quietly conversational level. Energy dipped to a near-stasis point midway through, but for the most part the players sustained interest throughout their set.
The Festival with no fancy name continues at Experimental Intermedia through March 29. As is often the case with Niblock's festivals, many of the artists are new to me; among those I know are Larry Austin, who presents six new electroacoustic and electronic compositions this Thursday (March 15), and Robin Hayward, an exceptional British tuba player who presents a solo concert on March 26.
Tonight's gathering also provided an opportunity to catch up with two old friends: Brian Olewnick, who writes about this area of music more precisely and artfully than anyone I know, and Jon Abbey, who singlehandedly operates one of the seminal record labels documenting this music, Erstwhile.
I complained to Jon that concerts by the leading practitioners of electroacoustic improvisation have become exceedingly rare in New York City. The last major event here was the ErstQuake festival he mounted with Tim Barnes and Chris Wolf last fall. In response, Jon rightly noted that much of the audience for the big events he has presented here flew in from elsewhere, and that there was a general lack of appropriate venues.
While I hope that doesn't mean Jon's given up on New York altogether, it was good news to learn that he's currently concocting a major series to be presented September 13-16 in Philadelphia, under the auspices of the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival & Philly Fringe. Artists scheduled to appear include Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto, Burkhard Beins, Toshimaru Nakamura, Axel Dörner, Andrea Neumann, Giuseppe Ielasi, Thomas Ankersmit, Tim Barnes, Sean Meehan and Howie Stelzer. That's a heavyweight roster if ever I've seen one; keep an eye on the Erstwhile site for further details.
Playlist:
Napalm Death - Utopia Banished (Earache)
Carcass - Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious (Earache)
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Le nozze di Figaro - Anna Netrebko, Dorothea Röschmann, Christine Schäfer, Ildebrando D'Arcangelo, Bo Skovhus, Vienna State Opera Chorus, Vienna Philharmonic/Nikolaus Harnoncourt (Deutsche Grammophon DVD)
Machine Head - Through the Ashes of Empires and The Blackening (Roadrunner)
Electric Kompany - Electric Kompany (CD-R demo)
Marillion - This Strange Engine (Eagle Rock)
Keith Rowe and Mark Wastell - Live from the I-and-E Festival 31 March 2006 (Confront)
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