On Tuesday, June 5th we visited another NYEAF performance evening at 3LD Art Center. This time it was called “Crackle, Noise and Light”, common terms of which crackle and noise almost seem to designate a specific genre of electronic music these days. The evening was being described as “Electronic sound and video with sonic environmentalist Anne Wellmer in collaboration with live video artist and musician Adam Kendal; interactive sound-art and live cinema by NoiseFold (David Stout and Cory Metcalf); Bay Area electronic performer Elise Baldwin; and video artist Leslie Thornton. Supported by the Gaudeamus Foundation.” The evening was again presented by Carol Parkinson, executive director of Harvestworks, and she was remarkably more relaxed and enthusiastic compared to the Sunday before. Maybe because she already knew that the evening was going to be so much better, in fact, the evening was going to host at least two very interesting and remarkably good performances. Here we go,…
First up were Anne Wellmer and Adam Kendall. They presented a collaborative audiovisual performance examining the interaction of sound, light and video. Anne performed with digital granular synthesis and some analog equipment controlling TVs as audio-reactive “lightboxes”. Adam played with software-based live video playing on and expanding the theme of white light. The video work was quite nice and showed dark black and white images of cities and especially bridges, with occasionally some colored accents. The style was quite edgy and it looked a bit like those old projectors that have a concentration of light in the middle and become a bit frayed on the edges. This was a good start to set the mood for the rest of the evening. The sounds and music from Wellmer reminded me in a way of the heartbeat and nervous system opposition. There was always a certain rhythmic pattern going on in the lower frequencies and a more continuous singing slower moving cloud in the higher frequencies. What I liked very much about the piece was the way the video and the audio interacted. For the rest I didn’t get too crazy about the sounds and composition. I kept wondering throughout the piece what Wellmer was trying to express or what kind of experience she was trying to create. The composition didn’t manage to appeal to any emotion and ended up to sound just very sterile. Also she kept breaking the flow by constantly introducing new elements and sounds into the piece. If you’d view certain aspects of the performance in isolation there were some magical moments though, sonically as well as visually.
Next there was a short movie by Leslie Thornton.
After this enjoyable warming-up began the really good stuff. Elise Baldwin used early ’20s circus video footage and new processing techniques together with a fantastic musical composition. One of the great things about this performance was the way she managed to revive these old sounds and images with modern technology. There was a certain dark, sweet, loving melancholy in her performance that started out with sounds that reminded me of an old music box. Slowly the composition developed into a more layered and complex whole that towards the end climaxed in series of sounds that easily managed to equal the emotional richness of the human voice. All throughout the piece she managed to dose the sounds and images so that you were taken away into this other world of days past, completely forgetting about the audience and city around you. The early ’20s video footage was edited in such away that it created these visual loops that took you in and slowly passed you over into the next loop. I don’t know what more to say, it was just beautiful.
After the break we were treated with another brilliant performance. Up were David Stout and Cory Metcalf who together make NoiseFold. Noisefold is “NoiseFold is an interactive visual-music-noise performance that draws equally from mathematics, science and the visual and sonic arts. This networked performance duet explores the use of infrared and electromagnetic sensors to manipulate and fold virtual 3-D objects that emit their own sounds. The work integrates multiple techniques including; real-time 3-D animation, mathematic visualization, recombinant non-linear data-base, A-life simulation, image to sound transcoding, complex data feedback structures and a variety of algorithmic processes used to generate both sonic and visual skins. The result is a theater of emergence and alchemical transformation existing within an intricate cybernetic system. The endlessly folding objects, synthetic life forms, vortices and oblique spirals defy easy anthropomorphic projection – images of crumpled paper, nerve ganglia, dendrites, organic architectures, impossible animals, seed-pods and fungi may come to mind.”
