This year's Ecstatic Music Festival in New York is now in mid-stride, and will continue through March 21st. Originating waaay back in 2011 at the hands of the Kaufman Music Center, the festival has in its nascency already played host to probably at least half of the artists you would expect to show up at a festival that proclaims itself to be "at the nexus of New York City's vibrant 'indie classical' scene." Nico Muhly, Owen Pallett, Nick Zammuto, Sufjan Stevens, Merrill Garbus, Dan Deacon, Oneida, and the Mountain Goats, are just a few of the participants from the past two years. This year's line-up is equally both exceptional and of-the-moment. For one of the more telling examples, take the pieces written and performed collaboratively by
Laurel Halo,
Julia Holter, and
Daniel Wohl, with
Transit, last Saturday night at the
Merkin Concert Hall.
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| This picture was not supposed to have been taken. Please don't tell the folks at the Merkin. |
The fusing of the old and the new in music doesn't always go smoothly. Think of all the
bad-to-
worse pop acts in the late 90's that were attributed with combining rap and rock 'n' roll by paying a dude to stand off to the side scratching a record on a turntable just for the sake of making the record-scratch sound. The 1970's and 1980's were especially fruitful decades for traditional guitar/bass/drums ensembles to explore and introduce some new space-age synth or other device that they bought on sight while tore-up on some drug-fueled spree after finally cracking the the Top 10 singles charts, or whatnot. There have certainly been a number of successful examples of technology being expertly woven into songs based in more "organic" instrumentation -- the Beach Boys' use of the theremin in "
Good Vibrations" immediately comes to mind. From Kraftwerk to Autechre, though, oftentimes the finest examples of a kind of 'way forward' for music have often long been to go full-robot...
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| This picture was okay to take, if not near as interesting. |
...which is part of why the more recent successes of 'cyborg'-style compositions have been so encouraging, and Saturday's electro-chamber-music concert should be held up as just such a success. Halo, Holter, and Wohl provided the various keyboards, wire-sprouting electronics, and occasional vocals. Halo's and Holter's voices, sometimes alone and sometimes intertwining, were paired well, though there still seems to be something slightly odd about watching a person sing into a mic while sitting down behind a desk and computer (surely just a generational issue). Transit, meanwhile, provided the cello, violin, clarinets (bass and regular), pianos (grand and toy), and an array of percussion. One can reasonably guess which side carried more of the atmosphere and which brought more of the melody, but one of the more impressive accomplishments of the pieces they performed was how evenly those duties were actually split over the course of the two pieces that comprised the first half of the performance, and the longer final piece that balanced it out.
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| The Merkin Concert Hall is made of loads of very nice wood. |
One of the most compelling passages of the night came about halfway through that final piece, when pianist David Friend was isolated to wrench out a part seemingly structured (in an appropriate turnabout) to mimic that kind of fractured or chopped-up effect that has been increasingly prevalent in strains of electronic music since as far back as the early days of the aforementioned Autechre, and even before that. Watching Friend's intensity was a reminder that it's one thing to program a part like that, it is another thing to play it on an instrument in real time, which requires the focus to work against any inherent inclination, of the mind and/or the body, toward finding a rhythm. Friend didn't hit a bum note. One would have been hard-pressed to have found a bum note anywhere in the room that evening.
The pieces were commissioned for the festival, and the whole of the event brought to mind the comparative short-term and long-term cultural values of live performances versus recordings. Fortunately,
they recorded the whole thing. Whatever 'indie classical' means now, or will come to mean later, more like this will always be welcome.
