Performance #1
Watching someone play their computer is really distracting from the content, what does it mean to be a performer in this context, or to be entertained? To be blindfolded or led along some kind of projected or virtual reality pathway seems like it would be really helpful to the partial experience I'm having. How is this series of sounds, this ambient textural landscape any different then listening to the night time street outside, with fragments of conversation and an occasional vehicle like a deep thundering undertone, except all of those observations offer clues and a mood that arises from our observation of it, the sound helps organize our sense of it. I'm not sure where to look, but I know seeing is distracting from what he is offering us, so I close my eyes and try to allow the sounds he is sculpting on his glowing laptop call something out of me.
How much are words lost, when dropped into the expanding universe, without visuals to hold their meaning in our mind's eye? A computer voice recites rich imagery, maybe even story filled poetry, but so disjointed and monotone, I can't follow it, and as soon as I hear the next word, the one before it is lost, unrelated in time or space or my perception. Listening to this deluge of computer generated noises, I wonder what it is we are supposed to connect with here. Algorithms can't replace the sounds we make to communicate with each other, or the desire to hear a response, to feel the resonance of human effort fill the room, to fill us.
What can he offer us? Story fragments? Flooded senses? As the landscape shifts to Raptor noises it seems like an imitation, like offering a robotic animal to an affection starved child - but I imagine that like our advanced skills of finding faces everywhere, we have the potential to connect with this too, electronic animal noises that may somehow speak to some primal part of ourselves.
As the music shifts into nightmare noises, I wonder what he wants us to take away from this performance other then a vague memory of something like the soundtrack to a horror film.
Performance #2
I stood outside for this one, and it sounded like the vocalist screamed from the same place in his body the entire time, an angsty, rage filled, raspy monotone that was a mix of vocal chords and belly. I wonder if his capacity to let himself speak from that place I had no interest in listening to was supported by the energetic quality of the other band members. Were they all in some way reaching to say the same thing? Did they all believe that monotone cry? What is the purpose of lyrics we can't hear - who do they guide in the process of manifesting a song? Maybe they provide something for the music to wrap around, maybe they inspire the emotional quality of the vocals, maybe there is no real difference between voice and guitar in some elemental way - maybe we created instruments to mimic the human voice, and like all tools found a symbiosis around pattern and tonality.
Performance #3
The sound hit me before I got to the place I wanted to stand and the wall of soundwaves felt like trying to walk into an ocean wave, I had to slow down to even function. I wonder why my response to the speed was to become really deliberate in my movements, like I was struggling to remember how to put one foot in front of the other. There is a quality of held breath, like playing with such focused intensity leaves little muscular room for the action of breathing, but maybe that was just me forgetting how to inhale. Stretches of fierce repetition so clearly mirror in my mind the chanting or fervent prayer of devout believers in whatever style of religion you could look into, and it amazes me to watch the drummer at the edge of disorientation from such impassioned repeated muscular actions but never quite losing himself in the process. The vocalist has a higher pitched quality to the sound he makes then I am used to expecting from a metal band, and it reminds me of what I imagine a Grecian siren to sound like singing men to their death, or that of a Banshee, who in Irish mythology heralds the death of a family member, usually by wailing, shrieking, or keening. Sound overwhelms my ears, but I am becoming aware of the deep vibrations spilling out of the bassist and pouring through the worn floorboards up through my body as well. There is an obsessive quality to some of the song parts, like singing the sign of Virgo into being, but also uplifting somehow, in a way that seems totally unrelated to what I know of the Metal genre. I am being held on all sides, like floating in the ocean, or stepping into a medieval church to feel your spirit guided upwards towards the light by the lofty architecture, even as you are wading through the heaviness of our earthly selves in a conversation with hundreds of years of traditions and history and bloody wars and pseudo-spiritual family trees.
Just the guitars and the bass lead into a song that reminds me so strongly of a church service that I am landed in my childhood for a moment, where I grew up in the bible belt, and the Baptist services my mother was filming for something too vague for me to remember - grown ups falling in muttering ecstasy to the ground, the women covered with frilly pink satin blankets on their lower half to keep their skirts down. I can't believe that's where their sound took me.
The guitarist's hand is a blur, and draws a sharp contrast to the profound stillness of the rest of his body for the moments of most intense playing, the stillness possibly as a support for the deftness and concentration required to bend time and space in that particular way. I am suddenly thinking about the computer generated noises I heard earlier, as well as the folktale of John Henry, who's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a machine - I am compelled by the vision of a man made sound that has a heartbeat a computer can't yet produce, but is in no way overshadowed by technology at the same time. Is it math? Feeling? Does he have to hold his breath to be available for these specific movements? Does the movement originate in his wrist? Shoulder? Center of his chest?
The vibrations coming up through his feet from the floorboards? Where does his generator live and what is it connected to?
More so than any band I have ever watched, the intensity of engagement required by each member to produce the power of their individual sounds, it seems incredible to me that they might possibly have the space left over in their awareness to entertain listening to each other at the same time. Like performing Kriya, like in the practice of Kundalini, I feel like a humming vessel waiting for something to arise out of this throbbing listening state. There is a temple quality in the shape their sound makes, we are all baptized in it, by it, in a way other bands may aspire to fill a space with enough noise to feel like this - and I wonder how each band member visualizes the architecture being created by their addition to the structure of the textural landscape. I forgot to breath again, and it feels like some of my unconscious functions are arrested by the sound my body is inundated with, while things like my heartbeat are suddenly dictated by their fast paced tempo.
What do they hope will fill the void of their absence when the music is over?
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