Denton, 10.29.2025

Just beginning to feel recovered from the cavalcade of emotions that was No Kings 2 (where 8000 people gathered in Fort Worth's Burk Burnett Park and marched through downtown under gentle rain to exercise their First Amendment rights and say a rousing "Hell no!" to the unitary executive), I headed up to Denton for this month's installment of Joan of Bark Presents at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios.

The statistical probability of finding a parking spot near the square in Denton is now approximately equal to that of hitting the Power Ball. This is apparently due to the Texas Legislature, amid all their abortion banning and racial gerrymandering hijinks, having designated li'l d "The Halloween Capital of Texas," which makes as much sense as the Visit Fort Worth folks naming Cowtown "The Unexpected City." But I was able at length to trek up to Recycled Books to restock their Indivisible zines and pick up a couple of Keith Jarrett "standards trio" CDs my buddy Cade had put aside for me, so I could continue my electronic wake for Jack Dejohnette as I type this.

There was a rock show in the main room at Gloves, and Joan of Bark was consigned to the Rubber Room, and at first I felt some trepidation, which was allayed when I rolled up to find the new Rubber Room configuration, which has enclosed the old patio area, effectively doubling the size of the room, adding a good size stage and some acoustic treatments to the ceiling, which significantly reduced (if not altogether eliminating) the bleed through from the other show. Sound tech extraordinaire Aubrey Seaton has done a great job optimizing the room sound, and even the electrical amplification she employed on the opening set by Sounds Modern managed to preserve the tonal and timbral qualities of the acoustic instruments.

Mia Detwiler, Elizabeth McNutt, Stephen Lucas, and Kourtney Newton.

On this occasion, our favorite new music ensemble performed a piece I'd seen them play at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth back in May: Matthew Shlomowitz's Popular Contexts, Volume 10: Beethoven's Fourth Symphony in context, in which snippets of Beethoven bump up against found sounds and electronic textures. The sounds of children at the beach were particularly evocative, and the use of a synthesized duck call as a rhythmic element was novel and brought a smile. The closing quote from Beethoven's Fifth Symphony brought a shout of recognition from Larry the video guy. Good news: Sounds Modern will be back at the Modern in Fort Worth on Saturday, December 6, at 2pm. As always, admission is free. All I ever need is something to look forward to.

Second set teamed the peripatetic composer Kory Reeder with Austin percussion eminence Lisa Cameron, playing the last date of her "Belly of the Beast Tour" of the midwest (she recalled a duo set in Chicago with bass clarinetist Emily Rach Beisel, a favorite from 2023's Molten Plains Fest). Together, they put on an amazing exhibition of drone, pulse, and a multi-layered feedback loop. The juddering dissonance and overtones from Kory's bowed bass moved around objects on Lisa's contact-mic'ed floor tom, which changed the tonal characteristics of the feedback (which Lisa also manipulated by pressing on the drum head). When Lisa picked up a snare drum and moved it around, the resonant frequencies changed again, leading me to wonder if there was a contact mic on the snare as well (there wasn't, she said later). A real time demonstration of the physics of sound in motion.

The Marfa-based duo Air Field -- that's guitarists Phil Boyd (Modey Lemon, Hidden Twin) and Nick Terry -- create ambient soundscapes redolent of Marfa's wide open spaces. No wonder their music resonates with Joan of Bark curator Sarah Ruth Alexander, whose own music is highly referential to her own upbringing in the Panhandle's arid desolation. Playing matching black Strats through a Vox AC-30 and Fender Deluxe respectively, the twin axe-slingers use clean but effects-laden tones to weave interlocking melodies, like Philip Glass at play in Syd Barrett's subconscious. A soothing and meditative encounter.

The closing set belonged to Taylor Collins, a unique and visionary keyboard artist whose experience of synesthesia informs his autodidactic approach to spontaneous composition. Like a lysergically enhanced Keith Jarrett, he extemporizes lyrical melodies which take on orchestral and cinematic proportions through the addition of synthesizer treatments and found sounds. During his set, I noted the austerity of the blank white background, which was made more evident by the fact that after Sounds Modern requested that room light be left on so they could have visual contact with each other, the other performers opted to keep it as well. The plain wall could be a canvas for Aubrey's lighting effects, but some audience members and performers I spoke to said they liked the absence of visual noise in the presentation. We'll see how it evolves.

Next Joan of Bark, on November 19, will feature some spoken word performers in between the musical sets. Don't you dare miss it. And support your local food banks. Folks are going to need 'em.

Denton, 10.6.2025

It's not often one gets to hear a concert of modern music here in North Texas. The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has their Sounds Modern series, but that's only a couple of times a year. Some of the performers occasionally appear in improvising contexts on the Denton experimental music scene, but opportunities to hear them performing works by 20th century and contemporary composers on the concert stage are few and far between. Now less so. 

Richard Shuster.

Minerva Contemporary Ensemble is the brainchild of a couple of members of the music faculty at Texas Women's University. Richard Shuster is professor of music and director of piano studies, while Ermir Bejo is manager and director for TWU's Margo Jones Performance Hall. Together, they've assembled an adventurous group of performing artists who filled the hall last night with a program of challenging and intriguing compositions. 

Jordan Fuchs and Whitney Geldon.

Joseph Klein's Chain of Circumstances is a piano solo that can also be performed with four hands, a solo dancer, and/or interactive computer music. On this occasion, the piece was played by Shuster and danced by choreographer Jordan Fuchs (whom we recently saw make his Improv Lotto debut at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios) and a second dancer, Whitney Geldon, whom  your humble chronicler o' events had the pleasure of accompanying back when she was a member of Big Rig Dance Collective and I was in HIO. The music begins simply, minimally, gradually evolving through episodes of sweeping lyricism and percussive tension, with Shuster spending a fair amount of time picking and strumming the piano's strings. The shifting sonic environment was mirrored in the movements of the dancers, who at times approached and interacted with the piano. A continually surprising and visually arresting curtain-raiser.

Mia Detwiler and Kourtney Newton.

Iannis Xenakis' Dhipli Zyia is a duet in the architect-engineer-composer's mature style, drawing on Greek folk dance forms and techniques like glisses, sharp picking, and abrasive bowing to create a harsh, bracing texture. The instrumentalists involved -- violinist Mia Detwiler and cellist Kourtney Newton -- have performed together often as members of Amorsima Trio and Sounds Modern, and that familiarity was reflected in the tightness of their interplay. I'd heard Newton use may of the techniques heard here in improvised performances, but it was thrilling to hear them in the context of a scored piece. 

Ted Powell.

Bejo's composition Opus 12 was played by pianist Ted Powell, an audible favorite of the mostly-student audience. The piece was ethereal and contemplative, returning periodically to the opening material, and well appreciated by the listeners. A crying baby who added their sounds to the performance evoked inevitable visions of children in Ukraine, Gaza, and now Chicago. Then Detwiler joined Powell for Kaija Saariaho's Tocar, a piece formed by the composer's vision of the tactile experience of playing the instruments and their commonalities of range, resulting in melodic lines that dance around each other, briefly join in unison, then go their separate ways.

Ted Powell and Mia Detwiler.

George Crumb was a forward-looking 20th century composer whose work, influenced by the sounds of nature, pioneered in the use of extended instrumental techniques, graphic scores, and theatrical elements. Thus, the three musicians -- Shuster, Newton, and flutist Britt Balk -- who performed Crumb's Vox Balaenae "The Voice of the Whale" did so wearing half-masks. For the opening cadenza, which requires the flutist to sing and play their instrument simultaneously, Balk employed a more "legit" tone than I've heard in other performances, where the artist chose to emphasize the vocal rather than the instrumental element. The cadenza ends in Crumb's piss-take on Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathusra opening (aka "the 2001: A Space Odyssey music): a recurring element.

Richard Shuster, Britt Balk, and Kourtney Newton.

Newton excelled on the "Sea Theme," played in harmonics, and the evocations of animal sounds in the succeeding variations (named for geological eras) reminded me of an improv I once saw her play in an outdoor duet with Elizabeth McNutt where they interacted with birdsongs in real time. She even lent the performance an air of theatricality with sweeping arm movements as she plucked chords. The stately "Sea Nocturne" included the sound of tiny cymbals (played by Newton, then Balk) and a closing theme that slowly diminishes in volume as it repeats -- the last played in pantomime, as if to foreshadow extinction. Bejo's lighting included a shimmering, "underwater" effect that greatly enhanced the piece's impact. A transcendent evening's music in a week that begged for transcendence. Hoping this ensemble performs again sooner than later.

Denton, 10.1.2025

It's been an ass-kick of a week, in which Repubs shut down the government because they were unwilling to negotiate with Dems to continue funding healthcare under the ACA at the same time they were continuing tax breaks for billionaires, and former Fox News shill turned "War Secretary" Hegseth summoned the entire senior leadership of the US military -- which we would have called "shitty OPSEC" back when I was Guarding Freedom's Frontier -- from around the globe to hear him espouse a John Milius wet dream as "warrior ethos" before his daddy got up to ramble for an hour or so, as is his wont, and announce he would use their forces against "the enemy within" (meaning, for now, blue cities in the North, especially those with Black mayors, and eventually, I suppose, your humble chronicler o' events). So my buddy Mike and I headed up to li'l d, where Ernesto Montiel was presenting the third installment of his new Porous Sonorous series at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. 

First set, by composer/cellist Kory Reeder (who says his main axe is contrabass, but adopted the smaller instrument as a touring expedient) and Denton-based Portuguese soprano/harpist Julia Coelho was an abridged version of Reeder's two-and-a-half-hour piece Codex Praxis. The juxtaposition of Reeder's minimalist drones and pulses and Coelho's medieval-sounding song put me in mind of a release on Reeder's Sawyer Editions label, Feldman and Hume: Intermissions, in which works by minimalist icon Morton Feldman and 17th century composer Tobias Hume are presented side by side. In Codex Praxis, the overlaying of the two elements was surprisingly harmonious, even when a passing train (the "house band" at Rubber Gloves) added its tonality to the mix.

Second set was an ad hoc pairing of Trio du Sang bandmates Gregg Prickett (guitar) and Andrew May (violin), necessitated by the absence due to illness of Austin-based Turkish vocalist Esin Gunduz, who was present virtually via tracks she recorded, which May played on computer. I was accustomed to hearing Prickett and May perform together in Trio du Sang's acoustic format, but hearing them applying their electrified instruments (with Prickett adding echo and delay along with skillful use of a volume pedal) as they responded to Gunduz's voice and effects was a study in musical empathy, marked by deep listening and in-the-moment creation. High spots included May using a pick on their fiddle to respond to Prickett's percussive fingerpicking on muted strings, and skirling gypsy scales played against snaky slide guitar chords. Trio du Sang is about to hit the boards again, and Prickett says he plans to record his other band, Monks of Saturnalia, soon -- a welcome development. 

The wildcard of the evening was the Franco-Belgian "brutal jazz" trio Darrifourcq Hermia Ceccaldi, performing material from their third album, Unicorn and flexibility. Two minutes into their set, I told my friend Karla, "This is obviously the drummer's band," something Sylvain Darrifourcq denied, but their music is characterized by what they call "temporal elasticity," which in practice means frequent, jarringly on-a-dime shifts in dynamics, from quiet passages to free jazz intensity to harsh noise and back, often within a couple of bars. Darrifourcq uses extended techniques in the manner of a Han Bennink or a Tatsuya Nakatani, but he does so within the context of a cohesive, powerful unit playing tightly scripted compositions. 

Early in their set, a melodic sound I couldn't identify mystified me, seeing that saxophonist Manuel Hermia's reed was nowhere near his mouth. Then I realized it was Darrifourcq, rubbing what I thought were tuned bells (he later revealed they were teacups!) against the head of a floor tom (or was it a metal surface placed on that?). At other times he would scrape a cymbal against he same head, or careen across his kit like "arena jazz" era Tony Williams, pausing to damp cymbals as the music went through a series of astonishing stops and starts. 

Cellist Valentin Ceccaldi put me in mind of Kory Reeder's earlier comment about the cello as bassist's touring expedient, as Ceccaldi played grinding arco double stops reminiscent of the big rock PA behind the screen at Texas Theatre a few weeks ago, which made amplified arco basses sound like jet engines (Ceccaldi's double stops were more musical), or delicate pizzicato lines to which Darrifourcq responded with explosive percussion interjections. Hermia's tenor could rhapsodize, wail, or shriek, depending on the needs of the moment. This band definitely needs to be seen to be believed; if you get the chance, you owe it to yourself. Their record is also eminently worthy of your attention.

That would have been a tough act for anyone to follow, but fortunately, Firelife Trio was up to the task. Houston-based saxophone master Danny Kamins (El Mantis), whom I last saw dueting with Polish bassist Marcin Bozek last year, was back from kicking cancer's ass and playing up a storm on sopranino and alto, his circular-breathing fluency and limitless melodic imagination undiminished by months of chemotherapy. Alongside him, siblings Stefan Gonzalez (Trio Glossia, Young Mothers) on drums and Aaron Gonzalez (Kolga) on bass played with imagination and fire, the relentless intensity of their work with Yells At Eels -- thrash metal aesthetics with free jazz chops -- tempered with a new sense of dynamics and use of space, with both musicians vocalizing wordlessly at times. A cathartic soul rinsing to put the capper on a superlative night of music. 

Next Porous Sonorous event will be October 23 at The Wild Detectives in Oak Cliff, featuring spoken word artist Fred Moten in a duo with bassist Brandon Lopez, Aaron Gonzalez in a duo with saxophonist/drummer Joshua Canate (Trio Glossia), and poet Sherrie Zantea. It's presented in conjunction with No Idea Festival, under whose auspices Moten and Lopez will perform in different ensembles at Alienated Majesty in Austin the following night.