concert review: Garden of Memory
Jun. 22nd, 2006 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacThis was a weird gig. Nearly thirty avant-garde/experimental musicians playing in various rooms (nooks, crannies) of the Chapel of the Chimes, Julia Morgan's enormous crypt in north Oakland. And it is labyrinthine. Even with a map showing all the rooms and where the performers were, I saw many people wandering around lost. Tiny winding cloister passages and short flights of stairs (the building's on a hillside) connect the various rooms, many of which are greenhouse columbaries, with glassed-in niches containing urns that looked a lot like old-fashioned bound books.
I'd thought all the performers would be playing for the whole four hours. Perhaps a few did, but most of them took breaks, or shared venues where two or three performers each played two or three sets each lasting thirty or forty minutes. This felt a bit wussy. A work by LaMonte Young or Morton Feldman can last five or six hours without a break, so next to that four hours seems a doddle. A few performers didn't appear at all, but sent recordings. That was cheating. The one whose "music" consisted of a recording of a man reading self-condemnatory remarks on the Iraq war by Cheney, Rumseld, etc., was particularly unpopular, not because of his political views but because his playback equipment blocked a useful hallway.
I wandered around for an hour and heard bits of a few weird things. I heard two separate minimalist clarinetists. I heard two separate performers on glass harmonica. I heard a group of men playing Steve Reich-style additive percussion music on wooden blocks. Don't ask me who all these people were; I wasn't there when they identified themselves and several of them were not quite where they were supposed to be. I heard a Jewish spiritual world music group called Ya Elah who were much more popular than their bathroom-sized performance space would accommodate. A bit nasal in sound, they were nevertheless accomplished singers, with a truly excellent accompanist playing softly on bodhran and other hand percussion. They were sharing space with the Cornelius Cardew Choir - yes, 25 years after he was mysteriously run over by a hit-and-run driver, Cardew is still remembered - who provided the most painfully Ligetian sound of the concert. I heard Terry Riley, the godfather of all the sorts of music we heard today - now over 70, straggly white beard, cap worn backwards - playing jazz piano. Riley has been reinventing himself regularly for four or five decades, and I guess this is the latest him.
After about an hour of this, I settled down in one of the site's large chapels, and spent the rest of the evening listening to three performers trade off half-hour sets. Perhaps what got them in the same room was that all three use electronic looping. I was familiar with only one of them, but the other two proved equally good, so I decided I had no reason to move. The one I knew was Paul Dresher, an electronic ambient minimalist whose piece "Glimpse from Afar", performed with Joel Davel and a lot of programmed equipment, was just as enjoyable the second time through. Alternating slow halting sections with fast ones that seemed to come out of nowhere, it sounded a bit like the Windham Hill group Shadowfax.
Also on the schedule here were Todd Reynolds, a violinist from New York whose duets (trios, quartets) with himself were about as close to lush lounge music as the concert was likely to get; and Amy X Neuburg, who was my golden discovery of the evening (sorry, Ya Elah, you come in second). Not a classical performer by any definition, Neuburg is a singer-songwriter who describes her lyric- and rhythm-driven work as "avant-cabaret." Skilfully manipulating her electronic stage setup, Neuburg will record a rhythmic pattern (on one occasion by rhythmically brushing her teeth), set it running as a loop on her processor, create another one and layer it on top, and so on. But the technology is all in the service of the art, not vice versa, and the wit and style with which she did all this was delightful. On the giant map of musical sensibilities, she'd slot in somewhere between David Byrne and The Bobs. When she began one set by layering out an entire purely vocal performance of Chopsticks, I was hooked. I'd been standing in the back, but sat down again very quickly.
At the end of the evening, back at the event registration table, I snagged the last copy of Neuburg's CD Residue. Only three of its songs were on the concert, and somehow - maybe it's the lack of sight of her doing all this - the CD lacks quite the appeal of the live performance. But it does have the toothbrush song, "Every Little Stain", and the piece I could most easily imagine The Bobs doing as a cover, "Life Stepped In", an entirely surreal telephone conversation with herself. I bet even some of you who don't think you'd like this stuff, would like it.
Rather anxious and uptight when I arrived - sure enough, I soon ran into a guy I know slightly and managed to give him the quite false impression that I didn't remember him - I felt entirely relaxed and at ease by the time I left. Minimalism is the type of music that best does that for me.
I'd thought all the performers would be playing for the whole four hours. Perhaps a few did, but most of them took breaks, or shared venues where two or three performers each played two or three sets each lasting thirty or forty minutes. This felt a bit wussy. A work by LaMonte Young or Morton Feldman can last five or six hours without a break, so next to that four hours seems a doddle. A few performers didn't appear at all, but sent recordings. That was cheating. The one whose "music" consisted of a recording of a man reading self-condemnatory remarks on the Iraq war by Cheney, Rumseld, etc., was particularly unpopular, not because of his political views but because his playback equipment blocked a useful hallway.
I wandered around for an hour and heard bits of a few weird things. I heard two separate minimalist clarinetists. I heard two separate performers on glass harmonica. I heard a group of men playing Steve Reich-style additive percussion music on wooden blocks. Don't ask me who all these people were; I wasn't there when they identified themselves and several of them were not quite where they were supposed to be. I heard a Jewish spiritual world music group called Ya Elah who were much more popular than their bathroom-sized performance space would accommodate. A bit nasal in sound, they were nevertheless accomplished singers, with a truly excellent accompanist playing softly on bodhran and other hand percussion. They were sharing space with the Cornelius Cardew Choir - yes, 25 years after he was mysteriously run over by a hit-and-run driver, Cardew is still remembered - who provided the most painfully Ligetian sound of the concert. I heard Terry Riley, the godfather of all the sorts of music we heard today - now over 70, straggly white beard, cap worn backwards - playing jazz piano. Riley has been reinventing himself regularly for four or five decades, and I guess this is the latest him.
After about an hour of this, I settled down in one of the site's large chapels, and spent the rest of the evening listening to three performers trade off half-hour sets. Perhaps what got them in the same room was that all three use electronic looping. I was familiar with only one of them, but the other two proved equally good, so I decided I had no reason to move. The one I knew was Paul Dresher, an electronic ambient minimalist whose piece "Glimpse from Afar", performed with Joel Davel and a lot of programmed equipment, was just as enjoyable the second time through. Alternating slow halting sections with fast ones that seemed to come out of nowhere, it sounded a bit like the Windham Hill group Shadowfax.
Also on the schedule here were Todd Reynolds, a violinist from New York whose duets (trios, quartets) with himself were about as close to lush lounge music as the concert was likely to get; and Amy X Neuburg, who was my golden discovery of the evening (sorry, Ya Elah, you come in second). Not a classical performer by any definition, Neuburg is a singer-songwriter who describes her lyric- and rhythm-driven work as "avant-cabaret." Skilfully manipulating her electronic stage setup, Neuburg will record a rhythmic pattern (on one occasion by rhythmically brushing her teeth), set it running as a loop on her processor, create another one and layer it on top, and so on. But the technology is all in the service of the art, not vice versa, and the wit and style with which she did all this was delightful. On the giant map of musical sensibilities, she'd slot in somewhere between David Byrne and The Bobs. When she began one set by layering out an entire purely vocal performance of Chopsticks, I was hooked. I'd been standing in the back, but sat down again very quickly.
At the end of the evening, back at the event registration table, I snagged the last copy of Neuburg's CD Residue. Only three of its songs were on the concert, and somehow - maybe it's the lack of sight of her doing all this - the CD lacks quite the appeal of the live performance. But it does have the toothbrush song, "Every Little Stain", and the piece I could most easily imagine The Bobs doing as a cover, "Life Stepped In", an entirely surreal telephone conversation with herself. I bet even some of you who don't think you'd like this stuff, would like it.
Rather anxious and uptight when I arrived - sure enough, I soon ran into a guy I know slightly and managed to give him the quite false impression that I didn't remember him - I felt entirely relaxed and at ease by the time I left. Minimalism is the type of music that best does that for me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 06:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-23 05:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-26 03:02 am (UTC)I got a couple of blocks from the house (I live a short bike ride from the venue), remembered something I'd forgotten at home, and didn't get back out of the house, mostly due to sloth. I'd been out the previous evening and had something lined up for the following, so....
I hope I notice when Neuberg is performing again around here.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-26 03:21 am (UTC)And that _Residue_ is on Other Minds records, so maybe I'll hear about her that way. That's how I heard about the Garden of Memory performance.