It would be quite easy to dismiss the experimental music played at The BridgePAI Saturday night. In fact, the term “experimental music” itself might already have your eyes rolling. But don’t sell yourself short, Charlottesville. Just because screaming was the preferred vocal gesture and the most virtuosic player was sticking metal objects into a block of dry ice doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant.
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The HzCollective is an experimental music group that aims to connect the creative arts communities in Charlottesville and Richmond by presenting shows like this one, which featured the established Chicago avant-garde trio the Friction Brothers performing on cello, percussion and—you guessed it—dry ice. |
The young and refreshingly unpretentious Benjamin O’Brien started the night off with two works performed on a setup of his Fender Telecaster, a few effects pedals and a computer running the music composition program Max/MSP. Both pieces explored a script he had written for Max/MSP which would identify the frequency O’Brien played on his guitar and trigger a preloaded action based on the determined note. The subdued influence of O’Brien’s former teacher Fred Frith, the British guitarist and improvisation pioneer, was pleasurably apparent in much of the melodic phrasing during the performance. While O’Brien lacked a confidence that may only come with age, his work was promising.
The following duo, KAMAMA, showed a similar insecurity which may simply be endemic to younger artists. Cellist Audrey Chen’s screaming and drummer Luca Marini’s extended technique suggested an element of primal disregard for convention, but the two, along with O’Brien, didn’t seem to overcome the liability of self-awareness. It’s one thing to be inspired in the moment to lodge a pencil between the cello strings, or to play the snare with a rubber ball. But the audience should be convinced it’s a moment of invention rather than a gesture predetermined to be appropriately weird.
Members of the Friction Brothers, the final act, are well established in the avant-garde world and have nothing to prove. (Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm studied with New York School composer Morton Feldman, and both he and percussionist Michael Zerang collaborate with Jim O’Rourke, the producer, experimentalist and former Sonic Youth member.) This allowed them to fully occupy their sound in a way the previous two acts could not. Lonberg-Holm and Zerang provided a rich, grinding sound to accompany Michael Colligan’s dry ice playing. Colligan has developed a technique of embedding spoons, coins, pots or thin sheet metal into dry ice which, as the ice melts, emits a haunting timbre similar to an exorcism. Zerang and Lonberg-Holm’s low register playing and Colligan’s metal polyphony was a gorgeous death rattle of the industrial age and the perfect soundtrack for our time.
