Saturday, November 08, 2008

Seen and Heard Last Night

I attended a really nice show at Enemy last night made up of three sets by interesting configurations of avant-garde musicians -- each group of which contained local performers that I find to be extremely compelling:

set 1:
Joseph Clayton Mills, electronics
Jason Stein, bass clarinet

set 2:
Asimina Chremos, movement
Carol Genetti, voice
Aaron Zarzutzki, acoustic turntable

set 3:
Olivia Block, electronics, prepared materials
Adam Sonderberg, drum, tone generator
Christian Weber, contrabass


Joseph's delicate use of oscillations and controlled feedback worked extremely well with the wind - not really notes - passing through the clarinet. I could listen to hours of just the electronics...

Carol's vocals are always interesting to me. Last night, she performed un-amplified, against Aaron's minimalist turntable/CD player set up. Her delivery was pretty disturbing, actually, and out of the context of this event and this space, she could easily be viewed as a mentally ill person off her meds. Excellent stuff! The dance/movement element seemed to work pretty well but it was Carol's simple performance that held my attention.

Olivia and Adam created a really nice fabric of electronic and acoustic sounds (Snap and Pops!) that did play well with the strings, even if I could easily do away with the contrabass. Weber's scraping on the ground with the instrument's floor peg at the end was actually a pretty cool touch.