Beyond Baroque, Venice, California
29 June 2001
(15 in attendance)
Consolidated Lint
Guitar, Pro One and toy spun over the head of the person furthest right. Pitch shifts and the bowing starts. Chattering, like automotive idling, wells up and fills the room. Much bowing, and it’s as if the doors in a thousand old homes shutter and slide, hinging and whinging, open and shut. Now, the spinning metal implement pulls tones from the amplified boxing gloves (a thumb piano, quite literally). Much checking of levels and adjusting of dials.
It’s as if one is falling down a very long pipe and these are the sounds all around, above and below.
Vertonen
An echoed scraping and various high pitches, very high, quite near the speech of a mouse. Rods are inserted and bowed. It echoes and aches – pebble thrown down and ravine and down and down and down. Pools of sound eddy and ripple back up from the abyss. Flares flange overhead – in warning or celebration? The movement of the performer is slow and measured. Testing the nearness of items to others (much like a theremin) begets new sounds and it’s sentimental, in its quiet loud quiet way. The transmigrational flight of birds is captured in AM static. Rigid is the hand that holds the sound-changing cord… The methodic and incessant movement of the wand and stamper across the sound generator’s surface – finding one’s place in this world? Does the ringing of an alarm, any alarm = awakening?
Coeurl
The purity of the current. Clean high dry tones weave their mosquito magic as one’s head turns to experience the spectrum of sonic differences. The test is for hearing. One speaker, then the other. Whirling repetition vaults from the void, shivering into this reality alongside tumbling, spinning, falling movement dug deep from the laptop. The calm tornado erupts? The grumble of thunder and the swirl of flies, more of less. Paths cross in anger as the hornets meet a jackhammer with a siren placed squarely atop it. An odd grouping, inside the sonic menagerie, and now all the animals sing at once, decelerating into the throbbing hum of a cage…
-David Cotner-
