I recently considered Keith Rowe's A Quartet for Guitars for this outlet as a conversation between guitars independent of people playing them. Contour, recorded later in 2013 than the Quartet has a similarly disembodied feel but this one, at least for the first half, seems rather free of musicality altogether.
The first half, a duo by Rowe with his tabletop guitar setup and Alfredo Costa Monteiro on accordion, I imagine as a soundtrack for a stop-motion animation, a night scene in an office or kitchen with staplers or spatulas marching about. This isn't anything new in the peripheries of audio art — sounds have been being divorced from musicality for nearly a century with the pioneering conceptual work of John Cage, not to mention Rowe's own five decades of generating noise. But there's something about this duo that seems extreme — or intreme, to coin a more appropriate antonym. There are some rather pleasant sounds, some sounds with a fleeting (perhaps accidental) tonality, and some quite literal sounds that focus the mind — scrapes and motors with clearer origins that bring the frame back into its rather miniscule focus.
The difference between accidental sound (the sounds of traffic Cage so loved) and sound art, one would have to presume, is intention. As with any art, we can enjoy it without entirely understanding it, but if we feel the artist doesn't understand we're likely to conclude that we've been hoodwinked. And here is where I'd like to draw the distinction between clattering silverware and waltzing office supplies. I don't feel the intention in the duet. While I don't doubt it's there, I don't feel that sense of purpose. This is such an abstract headspace that I don't expect anyone to agree with me or even care what I say, but within the layers of minimalist abstract improvisation and the nuances of individual receptibility, I fail to find the sense that something is compelling the players. We want, at least (I think) to feel as if artists are doing something. I find myself wondering in this instance if they are merely running through "Stella by Starlight" for the 60th time this month.
Rowe and Costa Monteiro are joined on the second track by Ilia Belorukov (alto saxophone, iPod, mini-subwoofer and mini-speaker) and Kurt Liedwart (electronics). Rowe's bandmates are also all credited with playing "objects" and indeed it's the objects that seem to steal much of the show. I can still imagine the stop-motion animation but the score is more musical now. There's more dynamic and more tonality, which makes it (and I hesitate to see this) seem all the more musical. In fact, the 35-minute quartet seems to retroactively justify the 24-minute duo. It still doesn't make it sing but if these objects are indeed in conversation, the dialect becomes easier to catch when the full quartet is speaking it.
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