Music, Media & Performance at Big Orbit Gallery, 2000-01
by Craig Reynolds
From Big Orbit Gallery: Ten Years of Spin on WNY Art. Ed. Elizabeth Licata
In March 2000, Big Orbit Gallery officially launched its Music, Media & Performance Program, a multi-disciplinary forum for artists working in experimental music, sound art, literary performance and multi-media. Divided between traditional concert situations, performance events, informal salon appearances and curated shows featuring multiple artists, Big Orbit's Music, Media & Performance Program has, in under 2 years and with a total 2-year government funding level of only $5000, provided a venue for over 200 artists exploring the global vanguard of medium-challenging sound art, music and performance.
But unlike large art museums, which have attempted to accommodate sound art and multi-media by promoting singular masterworks in keeping with traditional presentation practices, Big Orbit’s programming aspires toward developing new musical, performance and exhibition methods consistent with modern modes of experience. The result is a curatorial agenda that serves the dual contexts of N.Y.S.C.A.-funded community service (which provides the necessary critical distance from explored cultural phenomena), and community-articulated, sometimes grass-roots methods for aesthetic exchange, with cultural bifurcation points like the internet, underground media, rock music, raves, sampling, DJ culture and more providing conceptual gateways.
From bookstore back rooms to gutted downtown buildings, from local clubs to hollowed out storefronts, Big Orbit’s Music, Media & Performance Program has attempted to accommodate audiences for whom "art" as it’s traditionally conceived may seem to be of no direct relevance, but who have nevertheless cultivated their own venues for cultural interaction (our intent being to re-invent the cultural experience in harmony with contemporary reference points, not to domesticate the energetic, the unruly and the new). It should also be noted that Big Orbit has never ruled out fun as a relevant cultural response, nor has it attempted to corral its audiences into a singular experience of an artist’s work. Laughing, dancing, drinking, eating, sleeping, playing, reading—even shouting and smashing things up––have characterized legitimate audience responses. As idealistic as it might sound, Big Orbit’s Non-Visual Arts series is meant to intersect with life, and to improve life––not merely to develop new structures to accommodate new art, but new strategies by which to experience a new world.
SOUND ENVIRONMENTS
Debuting a few months after Murder the Word 2, a multi-media circus sponsored by Basta! magazine (which I published independently and which precipitated my involvement with Big Orbit), the Soundlab series of the Music, Media & Performance Program began by attempting to answer conceptual issues raised by that year’s notoriously cacophonous installment. Featuring music, theater, film, video and installation art mingling in an in-common space, Murder the Word 2 intentionally reversed the traditional hierarchy of artist over audience (which was empowered to choose its own points of orientation), but left many performers drowning in the sea of multiplying juxtapositions.
With this situation in mind, the first Soundlab event, Subspace/Basta!, was conceived as a micro-MTW intended to explore audience/performer dynamics further but to do so in a fashion that welcomed individual artistic output without necessarily reverting to traditional audience/performer roles.
Musically, Subspace/Basta! began with Subspace: Fluid, a 2-CD set of ambient soundscapes composed by Jonathan Hughes, the clever conceit behind it being that the project consists of 10 individual "sound modules" which can be listened to individually or simultaneously with any other. By playing both CDs in unison (all tracks are 8 minutes long, contain minimal rhythmic elements and were composed in complementary keys), 33 possible combinations can be generated. By multiplying the number of CD players, setting their play-modes to random and jogging the CD start-times, an infinite number of hybrids become possible. For Subspace/Basta! 6 CD players and 3 mini-orchestras totaling 10 performers were used to create the live sound environment, which layered sampler clicks, found object noise, transistor radio scratches, middle-eastern percussion, guitar feedback and random electronics over the continuously fluctuating bed of ambient sound.
Eschewing any formal beginning or end, the performance empowered the audience to cut in and out of the music in time to its own pulse, while the fragmented, fluctuating base of intertwining sound modules licensed the performers to do likewise. At the same time, the use of pre-recorded sound as the defining structural element reversed the typical hierarchy of live performer over studio-generated samples, even as the pre-recorded material composed itself in real-time collaboration with the randomized CD players. In performance, no musician, line of melody, harmonic cluster or musical motif came to dominate, and the final form of the piece was defined by sonic relationships that nobody could have predicted beforehand.
The next Soundlab experiment, NoiseRiot, also concerned itself with developing strategies for accommodating individual performances in a multi-group environment. But rather than thread together disparate performances by way of a unifying drone, Noise Riot alternated between individual/ group sets and moments of collective cacophony (in which every band played at once), culminating in an all-over improvisation pursued in collaboration with the audience, who had been given various sound-making toys.
An event that functioned like a composition, a composition that felt like an event, NoiseRiot was an orchestrated inquiry into the individual’s role in an all-over artistic experience. Soaring and textured, the music was strikingly beautiful, something of a surprise considering the event’s embrace of uncompromised sonic abstraction. Lit from behind and arranged around the periphery of the courtyard, the performers looked like demons howling from the pit of hell, but as the chorus of disembodied sound fragments swelled into the cool night air, the event took on storm-like intensity, exploding forth and receding in alternating waves of tension and calm. The full-scale release of energy that met the final all-over improvisation, which saw audience members blowing wildly on whistles, smashing Christmas tree ornaments and toys and banging on the courtyard walls with forks and knives and pots and pans, provided a brief but powerful collective catharsis.
Perhaps the most difficult sound environment was manifested, in fits and fragments, by Therefore, who performed a continuous 8-hour set of fractured anti-music in a University Heights storefront. Although the performance combined aspects of Subspace/Basta! and Noise Riot, at 8 hours the show wasn’t about music except as a life activity. Today, I think of the concert, which consisted of no songs but rather a series of unfolding musical activities, more as a conceptual action, or as performance art––but an ironic form of performance art in so far as the group replaced "performance" with "process." Rather than appear on stage with preconceived musical answers which they then imparted to the throng (by situating a Therefore show in the continuum of 8 or more hours, the group embeds its music in lived time rather than performed time, manifesting a sound workshop as opposed to an entertainment per se), Therefore created both the questions and the answers on the spot, and did so at a pace consistent with regular human activity as opposed to that of musicians "performing" on stage for a brief period of unusually increased intensity.
For the audience, Therefore’s set required an enlarged understanding of how to experience performed music. While the group shifted between improvising abrasive sound clusters, noisily dismantling the instruments it brought along and building new ones on the spot using duct tape, wood, nails and found junk, the audience quickly abandoned trying to function as an audience and started playing Chinese checkers, drinking beer, joking around, whatever. It was as if the performance was just something going on in the room, but a subtly-charged ambience that ironically empowered the audience by refusing to dominate it. I pushed Chinese checkers, Therefore banged nails into wood, a listener read a romance novel, a member of Therefore duct-taped a guitar to each leg and began to walk around, quite literally capturing the sound of simply being. What Therefore did was difficult to enjoy as music (stringing wire, for example, between 2 metal poles, attaching a pickup and running a violin bow across the newly–invented "instrument" does not necessarily yield a concerto) but in breaking down traditional performance dynamics, it helped manifest an ideal, creativized community where music and life interfaced.
MULTI-MEDIA SYMPHONIES
Just as Subspace/Basta! exploited the fragmentation inherent in its multi-CD conceptual apparatus to initiate new performance strategies, the pointillism inherent in video and live-feed digital transmissions inspired some exciting multi-media experiments. Among the most memorable was the gallery’s idiosyncratic screening of Modulations, a documentary film by Iara Lee which traces the development of electronic music from early avant-garde innovation to current manifestations of digital culture. Intending to break down the clear linear experience of a regular theatrical screening, Modulations was shown on 6 surfaces (scrims and walls) and 20 monitors arranged at obtuse angles around the room, allowing the audience to flow through the film as it experienced it—that is, to become a part of the electronic music scene that the film explored and celebrated.
Afterwards, a Soundlab concept twisted the environment in new directions. Updating an idea we debuted at Murder the Word 3, the Atari/DJ Symphony for Turntables and Video Games saw DJ trio the Knowmatic Tribe spinning on 6 turntables simultaneously while mixing digital bleeps and bit-mapped blops "performed" by audience members playing classic video games like Frogger and Space Invaders, which became indeterminate scores for the emerging sound mass. Although clearly half the fun was in revisiting the playthings of our youth (which, in retrospect, marked the first stirrings of a digital revolution that eventually erupted in techno music, raves and the internet), the event explored audience interaction on a structural level, and played with semiotic information dynamics through the manipulation of found data.
The final "sound mash," as Knowmatic Tribe member DJ Marcos referred to it, was a hypertextual constellation of sound. There were 6 turntables, on which the DJs negotiated continuously fluctuating informational interrelationships (with rhythms, sounds and musical textures providing links to other pieces of vinyl-encoded and sampled networks), while the video games provided further chance material for the mix. Over the course of the evening, the sound collage emerged like a jaunt through the internet, as the DJs negotiated a non-narrative stream of decontextualized cultural data.
Koji Tambata’s Music Works, featuring Minimalist droneworks by Tony Conrad, free improv by Hylozoa and the Protozoan Improviser’s Collective, an interactive ensemble of musicians and artists filling the space with visual and musical information, also utilized dozens of monitors and multiple projections. But whereas the visuals associated with the Atari/DJ Symphony proved incidental except in providing scores by which the audience realized its own musical contributions, Music Works was a full-scale multi-media symphony in which abstract video imagery transcended mere accompaniment and the musical elements emerged amidst an avalanche of visual data.
Amorphous, richly textured and packed with information, Tambata’s imagery is both pleasantly organic and relentlessly self-referential. Combining intertwined real-time video feeds, edited material from earlier incarnations, and video feedback multiplied backward and forward through time, Music Works is its own sound and image-producing machine, spawning infinitely into the multi-media void. The resulting symphony, which collapses space and time by treating live and previously-recorded material equally, both interrogates the contemporary media landscape and exploits its tools to generate a unique artistic experience that encompasses the past, the present and the future while marrying documentation and abstraction; fact and fiction; real and unreal.
EVENTS, SERIES & SINGULAR SHOWS
In addition to these highly conceptual "Soundlab" environments, Big Orbit cleared space for more direct work at large festival-parties like Murder the Word and Bam!, both of which encompassed dozens of media pieces, installations and performances, and more intimate sets through its Parenthesis: Monthly Art, Music, Film and Performance Forum.
Aspiring to provide "an informal laboratory for creative discussion," Parenthesis became, during its 2001 tenure, a primary venue for emerging artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers eager to discuss their art, including: Carissa Centani, who buried herself in dirt and egg shells to explore issues of violence and femininity; architect students Mike Zebrowski, Chris Siano and David Taglione, whose discussion of public aesthetics erupted into a heated argument about exploitation and hegemony as it relates to community spaces; Tracy McGuirl, whose video documenting internet sexual experiences explored human desire through the contemporary prism of virtual hook-ups; Ravi Padmanhaba, whose solo percussion piece found him performing a music box motor buzzing on an overturned pan while scraping a full symphony of sound out of a bowed cymbal; and Jeffrey Starr, who presented his sound opera, which began conceptually with the observation that most modern listeners can’t understand the language of traditional opera, licensing a new aural language in which narrative, character and scenery could be expressed purely as sound.
Similarly, Murder the Word, in the 2 years that it aligned itself with Big Orbit, has also seen an avalanche of exciting, often groundbreaking work. Some quick memory snapshots include: David Kane’s one-off, art-rock inflected Infants of Prog; Joy Patterson-Wurthmann’s fashion-art performance tableau, which copped faux-passivity and feminine adoration in a room almost entirely filled with male noise musicians; Bernd Gottinger’s String Quartet for Couch, in which cushion sensors triggered classical music fragments; Colin Hargraves’ hilarious Robot Fight, a Godzilla-like performance atop the sky-scrapers of Buffalo; the Disappointments deconstructed pop set, where the audience, responding to cue-card prompts by Abraham Lincoln, picked titles linked to 2 bar fragments from the band’s catalogue, which were then strung together into an absurd pop symphony; Christopher Coleman & George Cicci’s manipulation of the event itself by way of aural effects and projections triggered by the audience; the Global Village Idiots’ mock opera Henry, a rock-theater piece inspired by one of the drummer’s original comics; Chris Borkowski’s 3 screen hypersound video installation, which rocked the basement of DNPRO; Aaron Miller’s glitch-music tunnel, in which participants curled up in an envelope of digitized color and blipping sound; Jan Nagel’s furious egg toss, the yoke from which transformed a wall painting from simplistic bird image to airplane, a haunting echo of 9/11; and Tribe F’s industrial percussion apocalypse, which rushed one member to the hospital in a shower of raining blood.
Last but not least are Big Orbit’s singular music concerts, which yielded gems by the Freight Elevator Quartet, which packed the 658 Lounge for a set that mixed modern drum-n-bass beats and soaring, mournful cello and digeridoo; Noggin, who played a cascading set of guitar and amplified violin feedback inside the Big Orbits installation built by Mehrdad Hadighi and Frank Fantauzzi; Mice Parade, Gutbucket, the Living Sound Ensemble, Mount St. TV Eaters, Astronaut Lost and more, who consumed the Essex St. Complex as audiences danced in courtyard kiddy pools; Lake Affect’s groundbreaking reconstruction of poetic texts as jewels of shivering sound; Treelinedhighway’s live original soundtrack to Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night at Squeaky Wheel; Bill Horist, whose solo prepared-guitar concert was a virtual anti-method workshop; the Bufffluxus ensemble, which wrapped the gallery in string, played hand-cream and scotch tape music, made everybody buy a beer in the service of cultural funding and performed on-stage sleeping works; and turntable artist Marina Rosenfeld, whose Fragment Opera explored a new aesthetic pallet deliberately antagonistic to the smooth flow of typical dancefloor DJ sets.
MULTI-MEDIA NOMADS
In 2002, Big Orbit’s Music, Media & Performance greets its third year by departing the Essex St. Complex––where it shared quarters with the gallery’s visual arts programming––in search of its own dedicated home. While the future likely involves a string of temporary residences, we look forward to the challenge of constant re-invention, embracing the demand for relentless creativity imposed by cultural homelessness.
Most importantly, it should be noted that Big Orbit’s performance programming will not cease. Multi-media nomads pursuing "a new era of local engagement with the global avant-garde," we believe an arts organization where reinvention is internalized just might be the healthiest kind artistically, insuring that it never leaves the contemporary course that alternative art spaces have a renewed mandate to inhabit. In the coming years, expect Big Orbit’s Music, Media & Performance programming to diversify and expand while continuing fearlessly into the new.