MIUC ONLINE CONCERT #31 20/10/2020
Trí (Gearoid Brinn and
Georgina Butterfield)
No Man's Land (Pippa Dean
Bainbridge and Swiss Kalken)
Guro Moe [NO]
Mike Cooper [ITL]
Melbourne improv institution Make
It Up Club’s move online for the duration of pandemic lockdown is a boon of our
liminal era. It allows long-time attendees access to a gamut of methodologies,
outside of Bar Open’s cosy, attic room space. What can’t be replicated online
is the communal interaction and spurred performativity conducive to actual presence. Nevertheless, these videos give the artists access to an expanded audience of experimental music fans and
practitioners who will be inspired to experience the venue in situ.
In contradistinction to the other
artists contributing to this concert, Tri, a duo comprising Gearoid Brinn and
Georgina Butterfield, have prepared a video that doesn’t feature themselves as
performers. It’s a static and digitally processed overhead shot of a person’s
hands cleaning dishes in a kitchen sink. How the audience perceives this may
depend on attitudes towards Rotoscope-type imagery (let alone filmmaker Richard
Linklater’s take on SF author Philip K. Dick in A Scanner Darkly – but
let’s not go there). Close your eyes and
relax (preferably with a decent surround sound system) and it’s a fascinating
exercise in lowercase/reductionist improvisation. Butterfield accompanies
Brinn’s extended guitar manipulations with squelchy electronic techno-Babel,
bells and occasional voice. Like fellow Melbourne improv guitarist David Brown,
Brinn carries the Derek Bailey torch of guitar reinvention even further into
microscopic radiance. It’s an insistent and frenetic scurrying, nay, a scrying
into sonic event, and its myriad quantal effects. The deep listening required for
this sort of music can be a frightening experience, compelling imaginative
positioning with different types and scales of terrestrial life. It’s a scary
trip, but one you wouldn't mind not coming back from.
No Man’s Land is Pippa Bainbridge (vocals, guitar, loop pedal, effects) and Swiss Kalken (bass guitar, found percussion, effects). They perform in a prepared interior space on the traditional land of the Wada Wurrung people. The duo creates Doom Ambient/Isolationist-flavoured improv: bowed electric bass and lead guitars conjure preserved organic shapes in sedimentary delay against looped video footage from a car driven in a rural location. The visuals provide spatiotemporal movement to balance the music’s sombre feeling of evolutionary decline. Both performers are wearing bunny outfits which suggest Animal Collective whimsy, but with their dour Cardiacs expressions alarmingly recall Jack Reynor in his bear ‘costume’ in Midsommar. Underneath the surface absurdism, there’s an important message about precarious fauna shaped by the experience of Victoria’s January bushfire disaster. The hellish orange glow of the driving footage suggests it may have been shot during a trip into a junction zone.
The inter-harmonic vibrations of
their combined drones recall the deep space reverie of Techno Animal’s ‘Cape Canaveral’.
Other metallic resonances resemble The Beam, Mickey Hart’s Pythagorean
mono-chord invention used by The Rhythm Devils on the Apocalypse Now
soundtrack. Bainbridge's obscured figure amongst smoke machine
leakage recalls Sunn O)))’s ritualistic concerts. Theirs is the most satisfying
video in this collection in the sense it combines live human performance with
apposite visual and aural semiology.
An intermission recreates the
feel of MIUC in its natural home and gives the venue’s longstanding sound man
and committee member Stevie Richards a chance to showcase his free sax work. A
dizzying flurry of scalar sheets and euphonic bleats, his playing grounds this
video concert in the venue’s free jazz tradition.
Norwegian bass player and
vocablist Guro Moe performs in her backyard. The use of an old gardening
glove as a wind sock for the mic is a pleasing domestic touch, as is the sight
of a distant headland in the background. The framing of the shoot grounds her
performance in a specific place and evokes its temporal extension. Her noise rock group MoE hints at primeval
modes of expression, but this is the real deal. Unleashing a spectrum of infant
coos and avian trilling, Moe plays an upright bass with singular ferocity (the visible
disintegration of her bow into horsehair straggles is testimony to the
intensity of her approach). The tactility of her playing suggests sound being
wrenched and ground out of unfamiliar materials by early humans whose
collective consciousness has just been supercharged by exposure to
Kubrick/Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith.
Avant-guitar legend Mike Cooper
also performs outside from a location in Rome, seated at a table in midday
sunshine, open-shirted like a latter-day Jimmy Buffett about to deliver a
community bulletin from Margaritaville. He plays various Garageband apps on
smartphone and tablet, breaking Hawaiian guitar and plinky-plonk piano into
glittering byte dis(re)membrance against electronic drone spectra moving along
delayed and filtered passageways. His set is the shortest of the day, somewhat
in the manner of his recent release Thirteen Covid Miniatures. The
looped melodic delirium of his 2004 Arthur Lyman tribute and neo-exotica
classic Rayon Hula has given way to a more austere, but eminently freer
performance style.
(C) Copyright 2020 Jon Kromka
Below is a link to the MIUC YouTube video for this concert. The organizers ask that you contribute $5/$10 through the Paypal link shown as per the venue’s usual door charge, so please be COVID normal and assist the artists if you can.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ_rjqrZWGU
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