My first time in Exposition Park since the time I saw King Crimson with Jeff Liles and Dennis Gonzalez back in 2017 brought back memories of shows at Bar of Soap back in the 20th century. We were headed for New Media Contemporary, James Talambas's new artist-run gallery space, for their first collaboration with Denton experimental music mainstays Molten Plains.
The gallery is currently the home of Bay Area-based composer Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, an apparatus made up of a hundred 90-foot strings with a resonating chamber on one end, tuned in Just Intonation -- a system based on whole-number ratios, rather than the divisions of the string used in the more familiar Equal Temperament -- using C-clamps. The player walks between the two courses of strings, using friction from rosined hands to play long tones on them.
Composer Kory Reeder opened the evening with an abbreviated Deep Listening workshop (a real one would last four hours, he said). Holder of a PhD from the University of North Texas, Reeder's had works performed by symphonies in Toledo, Fort Worth, and New Jersey. Since committing to living in Denton after completing his studies, he's been concerned with finding spaces for creative music performance not under the auspices of academia or nonprofits (although he has done both). Last month, he performed a 24-hour piece at a space in Dallas -- which required finding a site that would be available for 48 hours, to allow for setup and teardown, plus coordinating the teams of musicians who would perform with him (in sections that ranged in length from an hour to seven hours). "The easiest part was writing the notes on paper," he said.
Deep Listening is based on the work and ideas of composer Pauline Oliveros. It's a practice and technique by which performers can learn to listen and respond to sounds in their environment. I find its meditative aspects and the idea of "walking as aesthetic practice" that Reeder spoke of (citing Francisco Careri's Walkscapes: Walking As An Aesthetic Practice as a resource) resonant with my experience of meditative practice. Reeder led us through a couple of Deep Listening exercises, and provided copies of one from Oliveros. Now I'm going to have to revisit her book Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. (They say that the most successful teacher is one who motivates their student to want to learn more.)
When Monte Espina sound checked, it was immediately evident that New Media Contemporary is a good sounding room -- much more so than one would expect from a space with concrete floors and walls. But the space proved to be very well suited to nuanced musical performance. I don't think I've ever heard the duo of Ernesto Montiel on tabletop guitar and Miguel Espinel on percussion, violin, objects, and electronic treatments more clearly, or been able to see what they're doing as well. (The most exciting part of their set was watching to see if Montiel's wife would be able to stop their baby daughter from rushing the stage to her father's arms.) As always, they provided a complex, ever-shifting soundscape.
Sarah Ruth Alexander's set was basically a presentation of her excellent 2023 album Fellowship of the Arid Plane, released on Reeder's Sawyer Spaces label and consisting of field recordings she made on the Panhandle farm where both she and her father grew up (in Lakeview, Texas, population 60, "and there's no lake!"). After a brief spoken introduction, Alexander's partner Stephen Lucas screened a video collage he helped her make using her photos and video from the site, with a soundtrack from the album that included the singing of religious songs with a friend from her high school days, sounds of wind, farm equipment, cattle, bees living in the wall of her childhood bedroom, and a climactic thunderstorm. ("Mother Nature is a fuckin' badass noise artist!") Fellowship is my favorite recording of Alexander's to date, and the combination of visuals and theater-quality sound is the best way to experience it.
The final set featured Reeder and Talambas playing solo pieces -- Reeder on arco bass with electronic treatment, Talambas on the Long String Instrument -- before improvising together. The pulsing overtones from Reeder's bass were hypnotic, and I think the audience benefitted from having done the Deep Listening exercises as a precursor to the evening's performances. The ritualistic movement involved in playing the Long String Instrument added to the mood of contemplation that the music's long tones created. All in all, it was an extraordinary evening of highly absorbing performances, and hopefully a harbinger of things to come.
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