MIUC ONLINE CONCERTS 27/10/2020 – 17/11/2020: Review Notes Found in Abandoned Folder V
MIUC ONLINE CONCERT #32 27/10/2020
Alex Spence / MP Hopkins
Nick Ashwood
Elico Suzuki [JP]
Charles Macinnes
Sean Baxter, percussionist and Make It Up Club MC, argued once in an ABC television interview that Beethoven should be listened to as noise, just as noise should be listened to as classical art. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (an important thinker for Sean) put forward a concept of game that can aid understanding of the plasticity of listening Baxter proselytized. In The Logic of Sense, his post-structuralist critique of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Deleuze proposed a game “without rules (but in which each move invents its own rules), with neither winner nor loser, without responsibility … that can only be thought as nonsense … the reality of thought itself and the unconscious of pure thought.” The music in these sets is not without rules altogether; there are parameters in place regarding choice of instrument(s), time frame, etc. But Alexandra Spence and MP Hopkins’ opening set for the 27 October concert proceeds with the gradual, hypnotic accumulation of discrete sonic events rather than the frenetic disruptions and redirections of, say, John Zorn’s genre-informed game pieces (Cobra has been performed at MIUC in various arrangements).
The tabletop preparations of Spence and Hopkins are steeped in Keith Rowe’s improvisatory approach, but their backlit hand-held video suggests game culture as performance art. The artists’ visual representation is reduced to a pair of floating hands: the visible extensions of an invisible economy of signs/sounds, tracing arcane maneuvers in the dark. A ball bearing set rolling at the beginning could be the roll of a dice whose instructions are measured more in trajectory than addition. With the combination of found percussion and sampling, the sonic world is reduced to sea shells and the recombinant looped echoes of their interiors. Over a rising tide of sine tone drones, the natural loops make way for blurts of electrical interference. The music, experienced both visually and aurally in this anti-surveillant way, is both restful and deeply engaging; creepily peaceful.
Nick Ashwood’s performance is a tribute to the Dutch/Australian musician Cor Fuhler who, like Baxter, died earlier this year. Fuhler’s main tool of choice is used: a piano whose strings are both prepared and agitated with E-bows. To return to Lewis Carroll’s metaphorical realm, this could be the soundtrack for Jan Švankmajer’s interpretation of Alice's encounter with The Clock That Refused to Tell Time as It Should. Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano stretched and slowly descending into a ventilated space resonating with the ectoplasmic embers of gagaku ceremonies. A fine elegy for a respected musician whose loss, like Sean’s, is still being processed in this year of hardship and turmoil for the Australian experimental music community.
Elico Suzuki’s performance was recorded in April. She plays an upright, semi-prepared piano, combining the arpeggiated technique of Charlemagne Palestine and the hard-minimalistic approach of Anthony Pateras (mixed in with a bit of the irritating tension of Ligeti’s Musica Ricercata) with an upper register, periodic pulse signaled with a red light. Does the industrial noise that intrudes throughout disrupt our expectations of piano melody/harmony, or does the piano’s sonority disrupt our appreciation of the noise?
Charles Macinnes’ trombone piece is the most playful and absurd, perhaps the most Carrollinian performance of the concert. In an address to camera from his home studio, he tells us it’s a reimagining of an incident involving Brian Wilson and his horn section. What follows is a looped panoply of parps and pumps: Vinko Globokar channelling the compound zaniness of Spike Jones.
MIUC ONLINE CONCERT #33 3/11/2020
Ion Pearce /Melanie Eden
David Shea/Monica Lim
Marlene Claudine Radice/Cicatrix
LungA Ensemble/AMINOR
Ion Pearce and Melanie Eden’s performance takes place in a woodland
clearing. The combination of Eden’s Kurt Schwitters meets Maggie Nicols phonetic
play and Pearce’s percussion accompaniment suggests a Noh theatre of sylvan incantations.
David Shea’s playing on piano and synthesizer combines the angular spring of Boulezian formants with Keith Jarrett’s melodic drift. At one point, he stops to carry the camera, making the viewer feel like an anaesthetized patient or a node in a working, as he repositions on the floor to play ceramic prayer bowls while Lim lays down subtle lower-register clusters.
Marlene Claudine Radice/Cicatrix combine gentle oboe tones with electronic growls and susurrations that are eventually set swirling with hypnagogic phasing.
LungA Ensemble from Iceland is a rambling, Circle-like psych improv collective
that combines embryonic shades of shoegaze-style guitar melody, New Weird
American (i.e. Sunburned Hand of the Man] folktronica and dubby Moebius & Plank
clinks and clanks. Choice.
MIUC ONLINE CONCERT #34 10/11/20
Charmaine Lee (AU/US)
Mariachi (Nina Garcia)/Myriam Raccah (FR)
Id M Theft Able (US)
Antoine Chessex (CH)
Vocal artist Charmaine Lee creates her own sonic menagerie and colors
its surrounds into the bargain. Her set and Id M Theft Able’s outsider art engage in a similar vocal soundscape practice centered in disjunctive intensities.
Mariachi (Nina Garcia)/Myriam Raccah (FR) – A split-screen two-angle capture of Garcia’s electric guitar performance combines Caspar Brotzmann-like raw psych with the Thurston Moore school of extended skronkery. There’s some Hendrixian tremolo bar dive bombing and Chris Karrer’s sputtering crowholler at the end of ‘Hallucination Guillotine’ on Amon Duul II’s Yeti thrown in as well. Finishes with spare, ragged flamenco picking in a relatively clear tone setting.
Saxophonist Antoine Chessex’s tribute to Baxter would have made its dedicatee proud. A one-man combination of Borbetomagus and Sunn O))), Chessex summons all of the percussionist’s love for sonic brutality – Peter Brotzmann’s sax, grindcore drill intensity, noise sculpture - into one great power drone salute.
MIUC ONLINE CONCERT #35 17/11/20
Spasmoslop
The Convoy
Sisters Akousmatica
Robi Rusdiana [Id]
Spasmoslop
Another table loaded with toys (FX pedals this time); another sonic
realm evoked. Spasmoslop opens proceedings with a dissonant synth sequence that
brings to mind Richard H. Kirk’s more unsettling patterns, giving way to power
electronics blizzard and blackened voice manipulation. Some lovely post-apocalyptic
Aumgn-style oscillator siren age beckons on the other side of this
charred terrain.
The Convoy
The faintest flickering electronic torch sputters in the distance. Vocal intonations, bell tone pool splatter like ‘Goldstaub’ from Stockhausen’s Aus den sieben Tagen. More flickering electronic torches; the diffusion of their light allows a mixed sex duo to become discernable. La Monte Young/Cale drone distortion. High whines like the imagined screams of antediluvian bonsai falling into a reversed tape chasm. A (de)snare(d) roll and an old crone come rising out of the swamp, vocal loops and tribal drumming recalling Psychedelic Underground-era Amon Duul.
Sisters Akousmatica
Sisters Akousmatica is a Tasmania (lutruwita) based duo comprised of Phillipa Stafford and Julia Drouhin. Their video ‘Super Occult Cosmophon Ammophila’ has been made on Mumirimina land. It’s an intriguing blend of mysterious spatial compositions in outdoor locations enhanced by psychotropic edits/cross-cuts. As the name implies, the duo’s methodology is heavily informed by acousmatic music, particularly such luminaries as Maryanne Amacher, Beatriz Ferreyra, Sally Ann Mcintyre, Celeste Oram, Dinah Bird, and Annika Moses.
Robi Rusdiana [Id]
Indonesian keyboardist Robi Rusdiana performs near a goat stall, apparently as much for its inhabitants as the camera. The founder member of extreme metal vocals group Ensemble Tikoro combines Tuvan throat ululations/beast growls and sprechgesang for a shadow puppet opera over expressionistic portable keyboard motifs. We’re back in Wonderland. Animals are addressed as humans, with joy, warmth, and a little consternation at the finale.
Stevie Richards’ intermission music throughout these video concerts is again exemplary, occasionally recalling Milton Babbitt’s concertos for synthesizer. MIUC continues to confound and stimulate.
(C) Copyright 2020 by Jon Kromka
Below is a link to the MIUC YouTube video for the 17/11/20 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=0LekLHyzvCM&t=2992s
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