Denton, 5.4.2025

Hot on the heels of Wednesday's Joan of Bark Presents, and yesterday's embarrassment of riches at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Full City Rooster in Dallas, tonight's concert brought four more inspiring and inspired performers to the Rubber Room at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios -- a couple of them familiar, a couple of them new to your humble chronicler o' events.

Co-curator Sarah Ruth Alexander has had a busy month, performing a three-hour segment of Kory Reeder's 24-hour piece Vespers at New Media Contemporary in Dallas' Fair Park, then traveling up to Boston to perform with Austin based dance maker Rosemary Candelario at the Boston Butoh/Performance Art Festival. It was clear that the performance art she'd witnessed (and the unplanned solo set she performed, sans instruments) were very much on Alexander's mind as she began her set, summoning the audience with loud bird calls and musing about how perhaps she needed to be braver in her solo performances. 

She left the Rubber Room to start a song in the restroom, returning to sing snippets from Willie Nelson's "Crazy" ("Sometimes I dream I'm auditioning for a country band") and Billy Strayhorn's "Lush Life" (the lengthy intro before the melodic hook I recognize) while moving through the audience and making physical contact with listeners. Then she went into an electronically-augmented acapella improvisation that used the full dynamic range of her voice, from whispers to ear-piercing shrieks, building waves upon waves of sound that engulfed us, then subsided to a final denouement. A new expressive peak for a veteran performer. 

Alexander's collaborators from Sounds Modern and Bitches Set Traps, Elizabeth McNutt and Kourtney Newton, were in the house, and I was pleased to hear that there will be another Sounds Modern performance at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in September. They'll also be performing some of the repertoire from this week's museum concert at Grayson College in Denison, and another venue closer to home. Catch 'em if you can; you owe it to yourself.

The next two sets focused on electric guitars as input sources for sonic architecture. Austin based Roaring Mass used what was essentially a rock rig to sculpt monolithic slabs of sound that had a curiously soothing, meditative effect. Another Austinite, Tazer Void had an intriguing setup: a household step stool used as an electronics rack, creating multiple tiers of noise over which they improvised on what photog/musician Taylor Collins identified as an Ibanez "lawsuit" Les Paul copy. During the set, some piece of equipment began to oscillate wildly, and it appeared as though the musician (who later introduced himself as Travis) struggled to get the machine under control. Part of what makes improvised performance compelling to watch is the possibility of failure, and seeing how people recover in those situations -- a lot like live theater, where the tension of that possibility is always present. This requires courage as well as preparation. A good metaphor for our times, perhaps.

The closing set was by Ruptured Implant, the rubric for Denton improv stalwarts Kristina Smith and Rachel Weaver. They wove a web of dark sonic mystery, the duration of samples giving the music a deep underlying pulse, with Smith declaiming stridently, her words blurred by electronic effects, occasionally striking the strings of a bass guitar to add a harmonic underpinning. An elegant improvisation that brought the evening to a satisfying conclusion. 

In the bar area, Alexander was selling homemade artifacts and potted plants to support the upcoming December Joan of Bark festival, an announcement of which will be made soon.