Exotic Hypnotic 2008: After Now

After Now: Nothing You've Heard Before @ University of Baltimore Student Center Performing Arts Theater, Baltimore, MD
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Part of the Exotic Hypnotic series - in conjunction with Artscape.

Five by Andrew Cole

Jamie Schneider: oboe
Matthew Taylor: saxophone
Cameron Raecke: viola
Nathan Bontrager: cello

Seven Sketches of Beginning by Mark A. Lackey

Jennifer Holbrook: soprano
Mark Edwards: guitar

Manifestation by Samuel Burt

Ariana Lamon-Anderson: clarinet
Justin Nurin: trumpet
Neil Feather: guitaint
Paul Neidhardt: percussion, friction
Domenica Romagni: cello

With the three pieces on this program the After Now collective offered its clearest vision of what "nothing you've heard before" sounds like as composers assemble the disparate components and local resources in the realization of a creative voice.  This was most effectively realized by Samuel Burt in Manifestation as he made use of an "audio score" to unify a mixed ensemble of players from different traditions.  Players wore headphones and responded to what they heard as the sounds of Neil Feather's invented instrument, Paul Neidhardt's friction-centric percussion blended with the more "classically-inclined" wind and string players.  Even as the quality of this performance hinged heavily upon the ear-hand coordination of the performers the overall form and sound bore many of the characteristic ideas and humor of Samuel Burt.

With Five Andrew Cole realized the mileage and sonic horizons that open up within an aesthetic of reduced materials.  A handful of notes and a sense of stasis allowed the texture to blossom organically.  A direction that almost anticipates his move to the remote wilds of Wisconsin later this year.

With Seven Sketches of Beginning Mark A. Lackey turned inward toward his faith to realize the challenge of setting a wordless setting about the creation for voice and guitar.  (Two of the most challenging instruments to write for, in my opinion).  Holbrook and Edwards clearly had a feel for both the subject and the musicality of this writing.  

Three Times After Now

After Now: Nothing you've heard before @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
Saturday, March 8, 2008

Medium - Mark A. Lackey
Mark A. Lackey: voice

embodied - Mark A. Lackey
Duo Mare + boom box
Jee Young Rachel Choe: flute
Akiko Sumi: guitar

Sacred Words In Dead Languages - Mark A. Lackey
Catherine Wong: clarinet
Devin Adams: alto saxophone
Daniel Miller: trumpet
David DeDionisio: guitar
Iain Roush: guitar
Mark A. Lackey: electric guitar
Doug Perry: vibraphone

Accretion - Samuel Burt
Jamie Schneider: oboe
Sally Sarles: viola
Cameron Raecke: viola
Nathan Bontrager: cello

[im] possibilities - C. R. Kasprzyk
Shodekeh: human beatboxer
Jeremiah Baker: soprano saxophone
C.R. Kasprzyk: laptop

Staring At The Sun - Andrew Cole
pre-rendered 4-channel fixed media

Nearo - Andrew Cole
Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart: flute
Jamie Schneider: oboe
Marc Edwards: guitar
Sally Sarles: viola
Domenica Romagni: cello

Housed within Normal's Books and Records, the pre-concert atmosphere outside the Red Room was colored by live chamber ensembles working in some last-minute rehearsal in the odd spaces between book shelves and magazine racks. I was just thinking that the Normal's sound system was sounding much better than I'd remembered it before rounding the corner of the fiction stacks to find my pathway blocked by violists and guitarists. The heady, languid harmonies being a perfect compliment in a jungle of ideas one could easily imagine a Henry Brant spatial composition filling every corner of a bookstore with such music.

The third presentation of the After Now collective turned toward a more introspective set of works in sharp contrast to the more dramatic-oriented experience of their second outing. This was particularly true of the quiet spaces plumbed by Mark Lackey's Sacred Words In Dead Languages and Samuel Burt's Accretion. Lackey's use of muting of the guitars, the plunger mute on the trumpet and the manual operation of the revolving discs within the vibraphone's resonant tubes provided an acute unity to Sacred Words while Burt explored a consistent set of intervals and dynamic timbral shifts with sustained tones for Accretion.

In Medium, Mark Lackey delivered a text on the use of lab mice to test the possible link between cell phone frequencies and cancer as he performed against a delay of his own voice channeled through a low-fidelity chain of cell phones. The appropriation of carrier networks as performance instrument managed to avoid a sense of gimmick through a combination of brevity and well-rehearsed, almost casual delivery.

Mark Lackey's embodied and C.R. Kasprzyk's [im]possibilities each explored the insertion point of crafted beats of contemporary commercial musics within classical traditions with mixed results. In embodied the bursts of groove and accompaniment emanating from the boom box managed to graft an unusual thread into the compositional logic of the piece. With [im]possibilities the beat boxer, soprano saxophone and laptop coexisted within a temporal space with few nods toward cohesive design or perceptible interplay between parts.

If there is a singular aesthetic quality to the wide-ranging After Now collective of composers it is a creative drive to shuffle the deck of tradition to place technology, chamber music and present-day vernacular musics in the age of portable, downloadable genre-mashing sensibilities into a sonic space that has yet to be discovered. I look forward to hearing what hand is dealt in their fourth concert.

The Dramatic Turn of Nothing You've Heard Before

The Autumn Concert of After Now: Nothing You've Heard Before
November 17, 2007, The Carriage House, Baltimore, MD

Concord by Sally Sarles
Monika Vasey: harp
Lee Hinkle: voice, percussion
Leonid Iogansen: violin

Tosherish by C.R. Kasprzyk
Prerecorded electronics

Cog by Samuel Burt
Unwound by Samuel Burt
Michael Formanek: contrabass
Ann Teresa Kang: piano
Rose Hammer: baritone saxophone

L!st3N by C.R. Kasprzyk
Lee Hinkle: voice
Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart: flute
Zachary Herchen: baritone saxophone
Rachel Gawell: cello
Adam Hopkins: contrabass
Catherine Pancake: metals, dry ice
C.R. Kasprzyk: laptop

The second concert from After Now moved into the funky confines of the Carriage House - giving this off kilter group of composers and performers access to a grand piano and a stage - as the music took a turn toward composed dramatic, theatrical gestures.

Samuel Burt's Unwound confronts the composer's anxieties regarding repetition by embracing fixed sequential states. This was particularly clear in the piano part: play keyboard, retrieve a balloon from the interior of the instrument (the piano had been prepared by filling it with inflated balloons), rub balloon, play keyboard, pop balloon and repeat. The percussive element of the pop was often accompanied by the repeated element of catching the sheet music recently displaced by the sudden release of air. Cog maintained its focus on repetition by locking the ensemble into a pulse and was a significantly less dramatic and musically more satisfying work.

Tosherish takes the recent Howard Stern bashing of The Zs as its source material and subjects it to a Steve Reich Come Out or It's Gonna Rain style of loop phasing. This piece was incredibly problematic for several reasons. The phasing quickly took on all the sonic characteristics and rhythmic qualities of Come Out and resembled it in every detail except for source loop and some added electronic manipulations interspersed within the phasing process. This literal Reich homage didn't add anything new other than a sophomoric sense of humor. The looped material references John Cage negatively. Which makes the Reich treatment puzzling given the wide aesthetic distance between Cage and Reich. Then there was the "too clever" quality of the selection of source material itself. When Howard Stern mocks avant garde music, John Cage or The Zs he does it with the same self-satisfied ignorance and proud philistinism that openly celebrates lesbian pornography. It's a shtick that thrives on attention and I question the choice of feeding it by composing a work that essentially draws even more attention to it. I give Kasprzyk credit for attempting to confront public reactions toward modern music head on. The mutual agreement between mass audiences and avant garde composers to ignore one another is rarely punctured.

Sally Sarles' Concord takes the Charles Ives Concord Sonata as its point of reference and takes the transcendentalist underpinnings behind that work in a different direction in a manner that treads lightly away from the Ives mold. The Concord Sonata is practically a sacred text at HurdAudio and I went into this piece with some trepidation. But these short movements are a completely different work and a pleasant one at that.

The final work of the evening, L!st3N, was jam packed with dramatic elements and surprising turns. Structured on a transcription of a recording of a walk through Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood this piece attempted to capture the odd juxtapositions and transitions of an urban sojourn. The conglomeration of unusual techniques; a mouth filled with Pop Rocks candy, dry ice and heated metals as an instrument, electronics, bowing the cello and bass with a pencil, etc. never completely gelled for these ears. The sonic joys of an urban walk were buried under too many elements and aural clutter. There's a good idea lurking within L!st3N waiting to be coaxed out with a little more focus.

Overall, the move to the Carriage House is a positive development for the fledgling After Now series and it is refreshing to hear chamber music that is fearlessly extreme.

After Now Takes Flight at the Red Room

After Now: Nothing you've heard before. Inaugural concert. July 21 @ the Red Room, Baltimore, MD

An evening of composed music at a venue normally associated with improvisation made for a perfect end to a day spent viewing improvised music in a venue normally associated with college lectures.

Columns in the Air by Mark A. Lackey

Kristin Bacchiocchi-Stewart, flute
Gina Kim, flute
Mindy Heinsohn, flute
JeeYoung Rachel Choe, alto flute
Mark lackey, electronics

The flute quartet sounded great as the repeating patterns in the different flute parts made for a beautiful aural image. I found the intrusions of the electronic sounds puzzling as the abstract sheen of the flutes would become polluted with the concrete qualities of overlaid sound effects. As the electronic timbres eventually gravitated away from voices and recognizable real-world sounds and began to reflect more of the abstract beauty of the flute music it began to make more sense.

Homeward by Andrew Cole

Brian Sacawa, soprano saxophone
Cory Kasprzyk, alto saxophone
Chris Blossom, tenor saxophone
Rose Hammer, baritone saxophone

The opening movement of this work was particularly good. The final movement featured some soft multiphonic harmonies from the baritone and tenor parts as the soprano wove a melodic line over the top. I would like to hear this one again.

spastic i droNe by Mark A. Lackey

Courtney Orlando, violin

While I enjoyed the wealth of extended technique and ideas contained within this excellent work for solo violin I sometimes wished that some of the textures had been elongated a bit more to spend more time taking them in. The restless quality of this music didn't allow one to focus on any particular sound or idea for long.

Degredations IV-b by C.R. Kasprzyk

Jamie Schneider, oboe
Sally Sarles, viola
Mindy Heinsohn, flute
Bonnie Obel, cello

This was by far the most timbrally striking work of the evening. Accompanied by an electronic track, this piece dripped a steady string of sonic beads of polyphonic textures featuring the sounds of the players breathing and whispering as part of the overall sounding image.

Even Horizon by Samuel Burt

Brian Sacawa, alto saxophone

It's odd that this day was filled with so much solo alto saxophone music. After Jackie Blake's solo set just a few hours earlier this was a completely different approach and sound for this instrument and Sacawa continues to impress me with his interpretive energy.