Cache and Carry

Cache-Flow Quartet/Instant Coffee @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
Saturday, February 28, 2009

Instant Coffee
M.C. Schmidt: hi-hat, percussion, synthesizer, sampler, voice, video
Jason Willett: sidrassi organs, amplified rubber band, percussion
Lisle Ellis: bass, electronics

Cache-Flow Quartet
Michael Muniak: feedback, electronics
Paul Neidhardt: feedback, electronics
Twig Harper: feedback, electronics
Drew Daniel: feedback, electronics

The debut performance of Instant Coffee offered up a heady brew. A blend of creative forces that collaboratively build music from different angles. M.C. Schmidt's restless switching between instruments and sonic choices providing a prodding through an ear-driven creation that allowed for humor, substance and contrast. The presence of Jason Willett's amplified rubber band and similarly elastic electronic source materials provided a tension between control and non-control simmering just within the overall texture. Lisle Ellis moved between balancing and complimenting these parts with his widely varied - yet focused - bass playing combined with his own electronic impulses. His responsive strumming would anchor a drone texture before taking a turn toward expansively free pizzicato or bowed lyrical lines against a broadly fluctuating backdrop.

M.C. Schmidt has a striking sensibility for seizing sonic choices from any given moment. The squeaking as he rotates on his seat is effectively folded into the overall sound and repeated with deliberate durational intent. A collection of metal pipes detached from a wind chime tossed and scattered upon the floor and hi hat takes on a prolonged and intentional clumsiness to soak up the sonic racket offered up. The theatre of the performance never becoming unhinged from the collaborative sound of the group. These three different personalities and musical histories finding a common territory of evolving textures. Instant Coffee has a good sound that keeps the ears steeped in its unexpected turns.

The Cache-Flow Quartet is experimental music in its purest sense. The chain of inputs sent between players being deliberately obscured - and manipulated by the audience over the course of the performance - to place the performers in a collaborative feedback loop of managed unpredictability. The sonic equivalent of a laboratory with beakers of strange concoctions boiling over as four mad scientists strain against the Jekyll and Hyde within their own improvisative instincts. The unpredictable signal flow swallowing up input from each and swirling into an attractive din of noise.

Of Frictions and Sax-sonic Poetry

Joshua Jefferson/Samuel Burt/Paul Neidhardt @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
August 2, 2008

Joshua Jefferson: alto saxophone
solo, and in a trio with -
Samuel Burt: balloons, bass clarinet
Paul Neidhardt: frictions, percussion

Like shards of explosive sonic grains the opening salvo from Joshua Jefferson's solo alto saxophone set unleashed short bursts of loud, timbrally mutilated gestures that threatened to puncture the eardrums and settle deep within the skull.  With these seeds planted within the cranium of the attentive (and rudely awakened) listeners he then followed up with short improvisations exploring the opposite extreme of volume.  The brevity of his compact, self-contained solos was poetic to a fault - leaving one longing for a mix of longer expositions and developed ideas.  The shards of poetry, and creative use of mutes, gave a sense of ideas capable of taking root where these seeds had been planted.

The second half of the first set then transitioned into a study of frictions as Samuel Burt and Paul Neidhardt applied flesh to balloons and drum heads.  The expansive, sustained volumes of bowed sheets of metal and aggressively twisted rubber settling into a long-form meditation punctuated by the abrupt pop that ended the set.

The second set brought these three creative forces into a single fold as each contributed to an attentive and organic sonic form.  Duos formed and coalesced instinctively as each player left spaces within the collective sound and mined the timbral extremes of their instruments.

Stranger than Friction

Jack Wright/Katsura Kan & TROCKENEIS @ The Carriage House, Baltimore, MD
Friday, April 25, 2008

Audrey Chen: electronics, voice, frictions
Catherine Pancake: dry ice, percussion
Dan Breen: electronics, tools, rake
Andy Hayleck: percussion, frictions
Paul Neidhardt: laptop, percussion

Jack Wright: saxophones
Katsura Kan: Butoh dance

What does dry ice sound like? The on stage visual qualities have been well plumbed, but the sonic potential rests squarely in the hands of Catherine Pancake, possibly the closest thing to a dry ice virtuoso to come along in any generation. Making music with extremes in temperatures necessitates a good set of oven mitts as she takes heated cymbals from a portable heating element and applies hot metal to a slab of dry ice. At times the sounds unleashed are startling in their loudness, a dynamic range controlled by the amount of pressure applied between parts. Pancake also explores the more subtle frictions of spoons and forks along the ice and fills out her sound set with hand held gongs and bowed cymbals.

The other members of Trockeneis delve further into the frictional soundscapes as the collective drone of acoustic tectonic plates evolved into a pair of long-form improvisations. Each performer bringing a slightly different instinct to the elemental qualities of objects rubbing against each other. It is a sound filled with subtle detail and a deliberately blank foreground.

The duet of movement and saxophone that followed managed to heighten the other-worldliness of the evening. The pale form of Katsura Kan nearly blended into the wall in the dim light as the intensity of his movements and stark expressiveness was complimented by the air passing through saxophone as exhaled by Jack Wright. The austere, heavily restrained release of this duo shifted focus on details often overlooked in collaborative performance. The meditative quality of movement and music offering a gentle invitation to open one's thoughts and ears.