On Oct. 4, two of New York City's finest avant-improv recording artists, Alan Licht and Aki Onda, brought their tape-manipulation-meets-live-electronics project to Ithaca. Themselves denizens of Brooklyn, Licht and Onda have long been active in the NYC creative communities centered around venues such as Tonic (now defunct) and The Kitchen. Onda first came to prominence in Japan in the early 90s through his work with Eye (of the Boredoms) and Nobukazu Takemura in Audio Sports, while Licht has spent the past 20 years touring and recording with countless downtown New York experimentalists.
In their free Cornell concert and Ithaca debut, the duo blent lo-fi musique concrete with degraded feedback circuits in an unpredictable brew of drone, analog sqawk, and haunted cassette collage. Onda's brocaded field recordings recalled people, places, and things now lost but still luminous in their ephemerality, while Licht's oscillating squeal and hum grounded the event in the electrical chaos of audible voltage-enabled systems.
The project's conceptual coherence and aesthetic goals - not to mention the criteria by which one adjudicates the success of this kind of thing - are interesting questions in and of themselves. And to judge by the illuminating public discussion given by the two at Cornell's Electroacoustic Center after the performance, Licht and Onda consciously set out in their hour-long piece to create a self-sustaining sonic work by means of improvisation alone. (One might even call it 'composition in performance.')
Onda's technique in particular merits comment: he uses handheld cassette players, an array of field recordings, and a system of self-sampling loops and signal routing in order to generate stunning sonic tapestries. In a sense, he actually performs pre-made field recordings of conversation, street noise, sampled guitar clang, drones, and other found sounds in tandem with, and in tangled response to, Licht's own extended guitar techniques and processed squall. It's a provocative synthesis of playback, electricity, and anonymous memory.
Further evidence of Ithaca's excellence in the classical domain will be on offer this Friday, Oct. 19, at a concert to be given in Barnes Hall by percussionist Tim Feeney and violist Wendy Richman. Though Feeney may be a new percussion instructor at Cornell, he's an old hand on the stage who has logged countless hours (and accumulated the resultant sage experience) in the worlds of both art music and avant-electronics. The keys to Feeney's work are not just talent and ability but the musical mind that he brings to bear on all that he touches. (His recent CD with Vic Rawlings on Sedimental Records, In Six Parts, is astounding.) Joining Feeney will be his partner, Wendy Richman, a world-class violist in her own right. Together the duo will perform a piece by local composer Kevin Ernste ("Birches") - thereby providing Ithacans with the rare opportunity to hear three exciting, and rising, new local voices in contemporary music. The program will also include Luciano Berio's "Naturale" for viola, tam-tam, and tape, Hillary Zipper's "Oculus," and Jacob Druckman's "Reflections on the Nature of Water," a six movement meditation on the physical and conceptual place of water in today's world.
Turning to more earthly concerns, there are signs that upstate New York has been experiencing a growth in artists associated with the term 'free folk.' Analogous to the manner in which traditional jazz eventually gave way to free jazz, folk music has been doing the same in decades past. (The emergence of the movement was immortalized in a 2003 Wire magazine cover story by David Keenan entitled "New Weird America.")
Last Friday, Rochester's Stone Baby exhibited its own take on the style in a concert at No Radio Records, where they were joined by Entente Cordiale, a project led by Rochester stalwart and Carbon Records owner Joe Tunis. In a brief but lively set, Stone Baby made use of modified tape machines, delay pedals, dulcimers, and guitars in a freely improvised avant-ambient mix.
Fans of this music will no doubt want to see Stone Baby again when they return to No Radio on Nov. 10 to play alongside Albany's Century Plants (an outstanding new twin-guitar duo who have released no less than five CD-Rs this year on labels spanning the globe) as well as a host of other regional drone-folk outfits. At a time when macro-level transformations in digital media and the record industry seem to dominate entertainment headlines, it is worth remembering that intriguing micro-level developments continue to unfold before our very eyes at home, in our local communities, too.
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