Fort Worth/Denton 12.14.2024

The capper to an uncommonly good year for live music I dig wound up being a marathon day, starting with Sounds Modern at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and continuing with the third annual Molten Plains Fest at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. A cavalcade of impressions I'm hoping to set down here, on too little sleep, before they blur and fade. 

We haven't had a chance to take in the Modern's Diaries of Home exhibition yet, but the seven pieces by women and non-binary composers featured in Sounds of Home: music to celebrate Diaries of Home all dealt with the meaning and emotions evoked by the idea of "home." Jessica Meyer's Getting Home, inspired by an anxious homeward bound airplane flight, consisted of successive layers of melodic fragments, played by violinist Mia Detwiler and sampled and looped by Sounds Modern assistant director Andrew May, that coalesced to form a complex and emotive structure. (A recurring theme of this day was the ways in which contemporary classical musicians are finding ways to incorporate technology into their work.)

Linda Kernohan's When In Dreams I'm Thwarted, performed by a trio that included cellist Kourtney Newton, pianist Willem Van Schalkwyk, and flutist/Sounds Modern director Elizabeth McNutt, built an air of unease with melodic lines that stopped and started nervously, creating a complexity that my wife compared to a Jacques Tati film. Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina's and he returned to his house found Detwiler and Newton blending their instruments in a dance of overtones. A wide-vibrato'ed phrase Newton played near the end had an almost Chinese sound. Then, on Asha Srinivsan's Dviraag, Newton and McNutt dived headlong into a web of Carnatic scales from southern India. 

After a pause to reset the stage, the program resumed with Bitches Set Traps (a feminist improvising trio of McNutt, Newton, and Sarah Ruth Alexander) performing a holiday version of Bitchin' in the Kitchen, a work they first performed virtually during the pandemic (viewable on YouTube), prefaced by a seasonal take on Fluxus composer Alison Knowles' Piece for Any Number of Vocalists. Attired for the occasion in antique aprons and festooned with festive lights, the three improvisers performed on small instruments (including kitchen implements), read from texts that included Martha Stewart and a '50s "guide to pleasing your husband," played snatches of seasonal song, and moved through the audience (Alexander distributed "stocking stuffers" to a couple of lucky audients). During the performance, an older lady sitting with her husband near us was heard to remark, "When they started the movement, they should have burned aprons instead of bras. That would have made sense."

Marti Epstein's Oil & Sugar was inspired by a video made by the artist Kader Attia in which crude oil is poured over sugar cubes, causing them to crumble -- a metaphor for conflict or entropy, but as performed by a quartet of Van Schalkwyk, Detwiler, McNutt, and clarinetist Kimberly Cole Luevano, it had a pastoral feel more evocative of an organic process. 

After that, we had to dash so I could catch my ride to Denton, but I viewed the YouTube video of the event this morning, so I could hear Pamela Z's Twenty Answers. In this piece of Cage-ian indeterminacy, eight musicians (with Alexander on voice and electronics, violist Kathleen Crabtree, and bassoonist Victoria Donaldson joining the ensemble) are each given 20 events, the order and content of which are determined by consulting a fortune telling toy. The net effect, while not as frantic as, say, a Zorn game piece, is episodic, with intervals of silence and space in between the melodic fragments and vocal interjections and the visual of performers shaking their Magic 8 Balls before receiving their next instruction. But don't take my word for it: The entire concert is archived and viewable on YouTube.

The third annual Molten Plains Fest was reduced to a single day by diminished resources (the end of federal pandemic recovery funds having reduced the city of Denton's support), but it was still a stacked bill -- "eight sets, featuring 20 artists from ten different cities," as Molten Plains co-curator Ernesto Monteil said. 

The previous night, I watched a bit of the live stream from NYC's Roulette Intermedium of a William Parker world premiere performance and was surprised to see violinist gabby fluke-mogul, whom I knew was performing at Molten Plains fest. I was mightily impressed by their recorded collaboration with drummer Lily Finnegan, so I was stoked to see that fluke-mogul was playing the opening set, in a trio with bassist Aaron Gonzalez (now fully recovered from back surgery and playing at the top of his game) and Houston-based guitarist Tom Carter (Charalambides). fluke-mogul is an aggressively dynamic performer, running their violin through guitar pedals and bowing with a slashing attack, strumming pizzicato chords, beating on the instrument's body, and sliding spit-moistened fingers against its back. Gonzalez and Carter joined the conversation, which unfolded episodically with a sublimely balanced flow.

Second set teamed Chicago-based bass clarinet specialist Emily Rach Beisel with Austin improv mainstay Lisa Cameron, on this occasion playing lap steel (purchased in Denton in 1977!) as well as percussion and electronics. Beisel plays a low C instrument, which allows access to the lowest as well as the highest notes in the clarinet range, and runs it through an array of guitar pedals to provide an extreme close up view of every breath and key press. Besides operating an array of electronics, Cameron used a Nakatani bow on cymbals and strings and employed percussion sleight of hand, damping a held cymbal on her leg so it sounded like a tape edit. After awhile it became difficult to distinguish who was playing what, although at one point, Cameron somehow managed to play the same tone that Beisel was playing on piccolo. When I encounter something I don't understand, but I know it's real, I call it magic. They'll be at Chess Club in Austin tonight and Lawndale Arts Center in Houston Monday. 

Next up was the trio of Andrew Weathers on lap steel, Ryan Seward on electronics, and Kory Reeder on cello -- who released Two Ballads from the High Plains on Editions Glomar back in May but somehow never got around to performing together in Denton until this night. Owing to the way I listen to music at home now (at a volume similar to when I lived with my parents), Two Ballads can seem almost ambient, but live, this combination is a lot more immersive and enveloping. The electronic drones combine with bowed bass and lap steel scrapings to form a total sonic environment, especially when Reeder plays with acoustic feedback from his amplified cello, producing juddering oscillation which took me back to the time Graves at Sea opened the last-ever Yeti show, 20 years ago. (My innards are still vibrating.)

I was familiar with Brooklyn-based Caroline Davis from her Astral Spirits release Accept When, a collaboration with Wendy Eisenberg that was released back in April. As a solo performer, she features her electronics more prominently, sampling, treating, and looping alto sax lines which she then extemporizes over. At one point, she sang lyrics I remembered hearing on the record. It was a satisfying performance, after which I rushed out to the food truck to grab some sustenance, having not eaten in nine hours. 

After timely pause, the room was reset with chairs in a circle, within which two dancers -- Molten Plains veteran/Texas Women's University professor Sarah Gamblin and Dallasite Carla Weaver -- improvised a ten minute set. I used to accompany modern dancers and was always amazed to observe the myriad ways in which the human body can move through space. Without accompaniment (except from an occasional squeaky chair), Gamblin and Weaver inhabited the circle, orbiting, reaching, striving, intertwining their bodies with infinite tenderness and trust. It was a good head cleaner and preparation for the two most intense sets of the evening.

Laura Ortman, a White Mountain Apache from Arizona, currently based in Brooklyn, played what can only be called a rock and roll set. If gabby fluke-mogul plays aggressively, Ortman does that and tops it off with layers of volume and whirlwind energy. The first sound she made onstage was like a thunderclap, and during her solo performance, you could feel tectonic plates shifting under your feet. Her entire set was a dance of fierce joy as she moved between her pedals, pausing with a grin to show off her silver boots when Ernesto Monteil's daughter approached the stage, playing up the proverbial storm, pausing briefly to sing lyrics that reverberated in your head as she played on ferociously. Then fluke-mogul joined her -- Ernesto said both musicians had insisted on it -- and the audience was confronted with the spectacle of two silver-booted violinists going at it like gunslinging guitarists. A cathartic soul rinsing we surely needed.

I was looking forward to hearing Oakland-based Lubbock native Zachary James Watkins (Black Spirituals) in a trio with two thirds of Trio Glossia -- that'd be Stefan Gonzalez and Joshua Canate -- merely for the chance to hear his two bandmates playing drums at the same time. When Watkins picked up his Univox guitar (made in Westbury, Long Island!) without a strap and started to play while Gonzalez joined in on vibraphone and Canate kicked the traps, I thought his volume was a little low, but I was in for Something Entirely Other. Rather than jamming along with the percussionists, Watkins was sampling and treating the signal, to be brought back later at volume. 

When Gonzalez moved to the second drum kit, the net effect was like the cataclysm at the end of Hendrix's Monterey "Wild Thing" alongside Rashied and Elvin's twin erupting volcanoes on Trane's Meditations, and they were just getting started. I kidded Joshua that on this night, he actually accomplished what he'd been trying for at the last Improv Lotto, when he was teamed with Sarah Jay and Paul Slavens -- driving the bus. For the first time in the 22 years I've known him, it seemed to me like Stefan Gonzalez was laying back a little. A second cathartic soul rinsing. How on Earth, I thought, would the closing set ever follow that?

I should have known better. The last set, a collaboration between Molten Plains mainstays -- co-curator Sarah Ruth Alexander and the duos Monte Espina (Ernesto Monteil, Miguel Espinel) and Python Potions (Randall Minick, Rachel Weaver) -- brought the intensity down with a chill dreamscape of a set. You could hear all the individual components -- Alexander's haunting treated vocals and skateboard guitar, Monte Espina's dawn-of-time electro-acoustics, Python Potions' crackling electronics -- in perfect proportions, with no one trying to hog the air. When Minick started taking it to the dance club, I was reminded that in an improv situation, whenever someone introduces a pulse, everyone instinctively follows it, the same way musicians tend to follow a singer. It's something that's ingrained in us from before birth, from our mothers' heartbeat and voice. 

This has been a rotten year for lots of things, but music's not one of 'em, and where I live Molten Plains is a big reason why. Thanks and kudos to all of those responsible, and for that reason alone, I can't wait till next year. So there.