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19 Apr 2008, 20:07
There are stories about the audience rioting at the debut of "The Rite of Spring"—people brawling in the aisles, the Parisian police arriving at intermission, and Stravinsky leaving the theatre in tears. And, according to himself, Alejandro Jodorowsky had to flee for his life from the rioting attendees upon whom he unleashed Fando y Lis at the 1968 Acapulco Film Festival. Allegedly they became downright murderous, chasing him from the theater and throwing rocks as he dived into his getaway limousine. And one of the first myths in cinema is that when the Lumière brothers showed their "L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat", the audience (many of whom probably took a train to the show, and were quite familiar with trains and reality) spooked and fled for the back of the theater, lest the train on screen break on through and do them harm.
And I've always thought those were bullshit, hero-building hype stories fabricated after the fact in attempt to rouse interest in suckers and students of a later generation probably wondering why these less-startling older works, compared to the work of their age, are so revered by the authorities. It's just art, after all, just an idea, and you can take it or leave it as you will. It's nothing worth getting so upset about that the only way to reclaim your stability is to sucker-punch the lady next to you and rush the stage. If you're going to the ballet, or willing to risk a film festival, then we can probably assume that you're fairly well educated. That you're tolerably civilized. That you know what happens to fads and work reliant on shock value. Really, there's no need to maul the maker.
And then last night happened.
The Wordless Music Series, according to its chief organizer, is an attempt to evangelize and reconcile two opposing camps. Each concert pairs a delegate from the indie rock and electronic sphere with a delegate from the chamber/classical sphere and tries to get the one, if not to fall in love with, then at least to accept the validity of the other, and to expose the other side's talking points to the partisans in attendance. How effective the diplomacy has been, I don't know, but they've kept at it for three years now. And they've taken the show on the road. If you're in New York, Minneapolis, or Portland, Oregon, check your local listing.
I saw a poster for the series while getting coffee at the Acorn Cafe in Portland's Pearl District. The night before, Stars of the Lid, Christopher Willits, and Classical Revolution PDX performed at the Holocene. Among the pieces performed were Arvo Part's Spiegel Im Spiegel, which has been a favorite of mine since I first heard it one rainy night in Dallas, Texas, watching Gus van Sant's Gerry totally entranced on sleeping pills.
That was the show I should have seen.
Friday afternoons, at the office, all productive activity generally stops some time not long after lunch. And then we start killing zombies. I set the first high score at 145. Current mark to beat is 176. But my game wasn't quite on—I couldn't top 131—so I went home, opened a bottle, and started looking into the night's composers: Tomas Svoboda and David Schiff are alive and well and living in Portland; Zoltan Kodaly traveled the Hungarian hills, collecting folk songs; and Chen Yi, PhD, has a rather appalling AOL page.
Half a bottle later, it was 10 minutes to showtime. I grabbed my coat and ran out the door. Only to be told 20 minutes later that they were going to start at 8:30, rather than the published time of 8:00, and that they were sorry for any "confusion". There was no "confusion"—we were lied to. Sitting quietly for half an hour in a church pew—they selected The Old Church as the venue, a rather inconsiderate choice due to the lack of available drink—isn't something one should have to endure on a soggy Friday night outside of the cloisters.
So the night got off to an agitating start. And then Eluvium took the stage.
First, the coincidence that we were both wearing the same style of shoes, corduroy pants, green t-shirts and black scarves, was perturbing enough. (I like to think of myself as a fashion maverick.) (Not really.) But then he had to play the most grating droney bullshit I've ever been victim to. His pieces were long and built from slowly-accumulating loops of bass, guitar, and synth that degraded into powerful loud feedback—a la Godspeed You Black Emperor, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, etc, etc, and etc, who can do the same thing tactfully and to good effect—that literally had people covering their ears. He played four of these "selections". Each time, as the volume approached crisis level, the sound guy ran to the board. Each time, I wanted to clock the old dame next to me, who had dropped her knitting to hold her aching head and cry, and charge the stage. Brandishing a machete. To punish the impotent conjurer and slay the beast he called and couldn't control.
To his credit, Eluviuim has the sense to intersperse little Yann Tiersen-derivative piano pieces between the Eno-cum-Merzbow unpleasantries, aka drones for dramatic arc. If he had stuck to those, it would have been an ok show. But he didn't. And it wasn't.
I still can't understand people rioting over a movie. Images on screen can't physically harm you. But loud sound can. This clumsy kid noodling behind his guitar and laptop and perilously large speakers can whirl up a torrent of noise enough to wreck your ears, stutter your heart and stall your lungs. Sonic weaponry is a real deal. Property owners can drive away troublesome teenagers by emitting insect sounds to which the ears of the elderly are no longer sensitive. The military can blast crowds with noise to prevent flag-burnings and other sacrilegious demonstrations. And artless shits can seriously annoy innocent and unassuming concert-goers. It should be a crime. If noise can be a weapon, then performances like these could surely be spun as aggravated assault.
Stravinsky's rioters were definitely overreacting. But if I had struck out last night, it would have been in justifiable self-defense.
But I didn't want to write all this just to give my opinion on one bad performance. Oh no. I want to say that if you're going to make experimental art, in whatever form but especially in music, it's much better to err on the side of pop and prettiness than on the side of punk and pretension. Because at least then you'd have made something that, if it's not any good, at least it's not damaging. And, hell, if it's poppy enough, maybe it'll get written up by an influential indie scenester blog or something, rather than berated on this one.
The rest of the night was was great, by the way.
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