It’s not the biggest space but there’s not a lot of people. Those that haven’t grabbed a seat head to the floor or continue to stand. There are three musicians performing, two from NY state, one from here. It’s not what I tend to choose to listen to: lots of reverb, slow, meditative, music that makes me resigned and impatient in the concert hall.
But I wasn’t bored this evening. I didn’t know anyone outside the shop owner; but I was surrounded by books, which is always a comfort to me, and people that were kind and open and ready for an experience.
The first set was a guitarist with amplification, loop pedal, and maybe other technologies that I have yet to learn about. At times his sound coated my left ear drum, an embrace I missed when the layering and texture of the music changed. The work lasted about 10-15 minutes, and I realized that what I was hearing was not so much producing sound as playing it: working within the vibrations and resonances, the repetition and perception of stasis.
The second set was a guitarist and singer-songwriter with the guitarist from set #1. She’s one whose speaking and singing voices are two different things; a musician who looks to create something otherworldly and emotionally clear. Her voice blended and enhanced the resonance of the microphone, magnified by her husband’s drones and her sparser, sharp repetitive figures. With her music, the linear expectation of words was replaced with the immediacy of feeling, from a song from an album describing one of the four stages of a migraine to another where the melody and words drifted through our minds long after the set was completed.
The final set required a new setup. The musician had a synth, modulator, and other devices with which he built his soundscape for 12-15 minutes. I learned later this was a piece that required practice and openness to variation, be it a note in the texture that’s too vibrant or the pitches sitting a little lower or higher than they did in a previous performance.
This set was a mix of the visual and experiential; I immediately saw large, brutalist structures and futuristic visions until I wondered why this music was typically tied to the uncanny unknown of the future and not the present in which it was being made and performed. The imagery and story changed to something familiar and frustrating; of stark urban need; distraction and individualist restriction; and communal responsibility.
I sat in these sounds. I thought how often I’d heard and was convinced that people didn’t want to hear music like this. And yet here we were, on a wet Saturday evening, gathered in the bookstore by the Marathon to hear music that was about the moment rather than the journey; vibration over manipulation; the subtle instead of the overt.
Speaking with the musicians after, they’re aware of the disconnect between perception and reality. The sonic avant-garde of the concert hall isn’t lounging in the ivory tower. It’s on the road, in the bars, and the bookstores. It is part of a community of practitioners and listeners whose comfort doesn’t rest on self importance but an eagerness and dedication. Not only to the art, but the connections it engenders.
Location: Conveyor Belt Books.
Musicians in order of appearance: Wiles, Kira McSpice, Jack Betkowski.