A lifetime of tinnitus
I have a confession to make. I didn’t go see Grubenklang, although with Frank Gratkowski they had a true Plush artist in their midst. How can you ever forgive me. Instead I went to the Concerts in the Dark series because I wanted to hear John Wall. Definitely worth it.
He began with waveforms crashing on a digital shore. (This is pure computer music, where Wall improvises with prepared chunks of sound.) And I really mean crashing, this was rather loud for the tiny room. Unbelievable detail in the smears and tears of pixels, sounds gnawing their hearts out from within. After a while (and maybe helped by the fact that we were surrounded by 6 speakers so everything constantly changed position) I couldn’t help projecting a narrative into the noise. TVs were thrown out of windows. Lions ripped their prey apart. Galopping horses changed to machine gun fire in mid-gallop (that was sort of the refrain, it came up now and again). Hitchcock’s birds returned as mutant zombies. More and more, intolerably high notes crept up, like a lifetime of tinnitus rolled into this short cozy afternoon session. After 15 minutes, somewhere in mid-development, Wall just yanked the sound and mumbled something like “that will be enough.”
Pretty annoying, pretty cool. That’s him you can see at the laptop if you really strain yor eyes.
The second set was by Manu Holterbach. He began with field recordings from a forest in the Netherlands (you know, I have that kind of ear). To my right a brook was murmuring. Birds everywhere, it sounded like an invasion of song. A dog yelping. I am no fan of dogs. I don’t know, it was too active for me. There were two or three forests layered on top of each other. In the background, a smallish drone like from a harmonica. Then the only nice moment, when the whole environment slowly got eaten by computer glitches and static, but it was not brought to a logical conclusion, and we were back again with in your face pastoralism. The second track sampled birds from the Guadeloupe rainforest (I told you, I have that kind of ear) in a stammering loop, accompanied by the same three chords on a keyboard over and over. Holterbach did nothing but press play. Pretty boring.
The last set was from Jonathan Coleclough. In an unfortunate move, he began with another brook. I felt my heart sink into its shallow waters. As if to mock me, there were resonances from another harmonica. Do they all use the same patch? Luckily, things began to change, became more pointillistic. Little gongs, pings and tuned clicks and crackles. The harmonica changed to sitar-like drones, which now and then vanished into computer feedback. The brook slowly faded, thank god. When it was gone, the music was quite nice, digital temple music. The structure followed the Beethoven mode, ten minutes of exposition, ten minutes of fake endings … then for the real ending he held a nice, complex chord. Conciliatory finish to a mixed concert.
