LongBeachCulture.org CenterStage Blog

By Greggory Moore

In 2006, in addition to the walking tour of sound installations throughout the East Village Arts District, SoundWalk has been expanded to include three nights of performances. The first, on October 6, took place in the Dome Room of the Lafayette (528 E. Broadway).

Noah Thomas used a laptop and a mixing board to take us on an acoustic journey with an aural, narrativeless plot. A long opening portion instantly brought to mind the submarine, pings and sequences of sound slowly and gently echoing off into the deep, behind which Thomas kept up steady, rhythmic low ends, making it easy to drift along with him. Eventually one human voice dropped in, then another, operatic vocals sounding as if they came from a concrete stairwell far below (the kind of thing you hear on a This Mortal Coil album). Soon there were different voices, speaking, lecturing or reading essays. The content seemed to touch upon certain artistic concepts, but the function was more suggestive than didactic. The voices were slowed, treated electronically—prompts that helped take you away from the meanings of the words and left you to your own inner travels (to which all of this was a soundtrack). Courtly music made its way in, faded, made way for carnival music, which eventually slowed and got pared down to isolated tones. It was a delightful trip, even if I’m not sure where I went. Thomas was in complete command of his audio, and he made exceptional use of the Dome Room’s specific acoustics. The only Website I have for him is www.csulb.edu/~gbach/socalsonicthomas.html, which is just a short bio.

Metal Rouge is a duo playing what I believe to be dulcimers with metal strings. Contact mics are placed on them, and digital delay and other effects are used to treat the pair’s hammer strikes, bowings, and the like. They seemed to confine themselves to a limited scale, focusing on manipulating an industrial tone that bespoke of the musical notes inherent in all sound (if only we pay attention). Too loud and this sort of thing can register as a distorted mess, but they regulated things well enough. See helgafassonaki.net for more info.

The bulk of Alessandro Bosetti’s music was pre-recorded. In fact, as far as I can tell, the only live element was a vocal he put on top of the vocal and music emanating from a laptop, manipulating that live vocal with a small mixing/effects board. Of course, if what’s of interest is the sound, it’s not all that important how it’s produced, just what you hear. Bosetti performed five pieces, which gave a nice variety to his set. His sound is mostly sort of a jazzy, meandering scat line of words on top of stripped-down jazz orchestration. At times the result is exceedingly charming. For example, his third piece was a short narrative about a visit to a cousin who “is a comedian in Ivory Coast” and Bosetti’s (or the narrator’s) being inspired upon his return home to become a singer—something that he thinks is “a very hard job.” This same little story is repeated maybe a half-dozen time in varying keys, but always with exactly the same grammatical solecisms (Bosetti is German), and it took me a while to grasp the playfulness of the piece, its self-referential humor. Bosetti explained that his last song, “Idiot”, is recordings of the oscillations of human voice you hear on short-wave radios when they’re in between frequencies. He transcribed a phonetic version of what he heard and sang that transcription over the recording, occasionally finding certain “real” words (e.g., “idiot”). The last section was radio-wave whistles over top of piano and stand-up bass, during which Bosetti walked amongst the audience. At first it was hard to know what to make of his peregrinations; soon, though it became clear: he was whistling. This was the vocal he layered on top of the recording. There is something very creative in this simplicity, and the result goes beyond its elements. Generally speaking, his final products makes use of randomness but end up pretty far from random. Check him out at www.melgun.net.

There was a fourth act, Arcanum—a duo on bass sax, effects, and laptop—but I could not stay for them. For info, visit www.myspace.com/arcanumartensemble.

If this kind of thing sounds interesting to you and you’re sorry you missed it, don’t fret!, there are two post-SoundWalk performances at {open}, 144 Linden: Monday (Oct. 9) and Wednesday (Oct. 11) at 8:30 p.m. Go to accessopen.com for further info or call (562) 499-OPEN.