FTW, 4.15.2023

The weather is nice and Covid threat low, so we toddled over to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to hear Sounds Modern's Echo or Agent?: The Mirror of Disembodied Sound, presented in conjunction with the museum's current exhibition, I'll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen. Drawing its title from a song Lou Reed wrote for the Velvet Underground, this was an interesting show to see at a time when I'm reducing my online interaction. After five years in the smartphone universe (we are perpetual late adopters), I was finding that the state of constant distracted attention they foster was messing with my psychic equilibrium. But as one whose interaction with the world was largely filtered through screens even before the pandemic, I found much that resonated here.

I'll Be Your Mirror, curated by Alison Hurst, gives one a lot to think about (including the memory of local representational painter James Lassen's series of miniature paintings of people using cellphones from 15-odd years ago). Some of the pieces reminded me of Warhol and Liechtenstein's burlesques of consumer culture, but much more information-dense (emblematic of a world where Everything Everywhere All at Once is more than just a movie title). Particularly striking was Hassan Elahi's wall of thousands of images of every meal he ate, bed he slept in, and toilet he used, in response to his targeting by post-9/11 surveillance. We'll have to go back before the show closes April 30, because Gretchen Bender's Total Recall is only operating between 10 and 11am, and 2 and 3pm. And Nam Jun Paik's TV Buddha and Lynn Hershman Leeson's Lorna (the latter an interactive depiction of an agoraphobe's living room) felt like old friends whom it would be nice to revisit.

For me, the most evocative piece was Molly Soda's Me Singing "Stay" by Rihanna, the sound of which drew me into the room from another gallery. It has a look that must be familiar to everyone since the pandemic began -- that of a Zoom meeting -- and the multiplicity of voices formed a virtual choir, the "latency" inherent in the app creating the same effect as the idiosyncratic pitch and tone of church singers. (I was also reminded of videos I'd seen recently of the two expelled state legislators from Tennessee, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, singing "We Shall Overcome." When Pearson sings in the car with his wife, they're initially in different keys, then he adjusts so he's in tune with her. When Jones sings with Joan Baez in an airport, she harmonizes with him; at the point in the video where she laughs, I originally thought she was overcome emotionally, but later thought perhaps she couldn't hit the notes.)

Since 2007, Sounds Modern, the brainchild of virtuoso flutist Elizabeth McNutt, has been presenting concerts of contemporary music that is thematically linked with the Modern Art Museum's exhibitions. (I recall a performance of Morton Feldman's Why Patterns? from that first year.) In Echo or Agent?, the ensemble took a number of different approaches to integrating disembodied sound with live instruments and voices to create a singular experience. 

Rachel Yoder's Self-Seed was a duet between clarinetist Alex Ravitz and a pixilated, black and white, previously recorded version of himself. The composer views the piece as a dialogue between a dissonant "worst self" and a harmonious "best self;" I found myself just enjoying the contrast, and the balance between the live and pre-recorded elements. Eric Wong's Multiple Portables #8: Accumulated Minimum provided an opportunity for audience interaction, as listeners were invited to use their cellphones to scan a QR code which led to three audio tracks that they could play, and move around the room. It was interesting to observe the way participants quickly settled into a single direction of movement around the space (counterclockwise); only later did it occur to me that I could have been switching between tracks (it's been a long time since I played nonidiomatic improv in HIO).

Seth Shafer's Silbertone was a reworking of a Franz Schubert song for four electronic devices, violin, and euphonium. Again, the balance between electronic and acoustic elements was key to the piece, which one young listener identified as "video game music." I found myself looking forward to the fuzzy bass tones every time Stephen Lucas' fingers hit his phone's screen. After a brief intermission, the program resumed with Retake, an interaction between McNutt (improvising live), a pre-recorded flute solo improvisation she could reshape using a pedal, and several virtual "performers" (operated by Sounds Modern assistant director Andrew May) that "listened" and responded using flute samples, percussion sounds, and synth tones. 

Mark Vaughan's |: This Piece :| was a high point, consisting of multiple readers (some seated in the audience) asynchronously reading text (the program notes, and one provided by the composer) into their phones, which added electronic treatment -- like the Velvet Underground's "The Murder Mystery," only with even more layers of complexity. Elizabeth A. Baker's surfaceNetwork had ten improvisers -- two violins, two brass, two clarinets, two flutes, piano, and voice -- interpreting photos of surfaces which they texted each other; kind of reminiscent of a John Zorn game piece (Sounds Modern has performed Cobra). Oh Lou, we are all your mirrors now, inspired by the Molly Soda piece in the exhibition, combined 20 versions the exhibition's title song, synchronized and processed by Lucas into a virtual choir with which Sarah Ruth Alexander (battling a migraine) vocalized live. It was an uplifting close to a concert of thought-provoking sounds.