At Roulette, A Whole Glorious Generation in One Room
Experimental music luminaries who defined the downtown scene of the 1980s gathered to celebrate a new book of interviews.
I have nothing but pure joy to report.
Last night at Roulette saw the launch of Brooke Wentz’s book, Transfigured New York: Interviews with Experimental Artists and Musicians, 1980-1990. Just published by Columbia University Press, it’s a collection of forty interviews that Wentz conducted with everyone from John Cage and La Monte Young to Joan Tower and Anthony Davis when she hosted Transfigured Night on Columbia’s WKCR-FM in the 1980s.
To celebrate, David Weinstein, director of special projects at Roulette, invited, in his estimation, all eighty of the living musicians mentioned in Wentz’s book. Not all of them came, but the ones who did occupied a significant portion of the audience and made this feel like an important gathering of luminaries, akin to that Bruce Davidson photo of Milton Babbitt and Elliot Carter on the spiral staircase with those other modern composers. Only, last night was more jovial.
Like the title of that photo, yesterday was also A Great Day In New York. I saw many people hugging each other like they hadn’t seen each other in twenty years. Usually, book launches focus on the author. This was focused completely on the author’s subjects. It was beyond refreshing, and made for a valuable lesson for book publicity teams.
There was a Q&A hosted by Weinstein and Wentz, who spoke with three movers and shakers of the downtown scene in 1980s: writer, editor, and WFMU radio DJ Gaylord Fields; poet, producer, former director of The Kitchen Mary Griffin; and producer, curator, founder of PS1 and The Clocktower Gallery Alanna Heiss. I didn’t take down their names at first because I didn’t even expect to write about this, but Weinstein was kind enough to make a list for me, which Roulette Executive Director Jamie Burns sent to me.
Weinstein remarked how, back then, downtown composers knew about what uptown composers were doing, consumed it, and put their own spin on it, but uptown composers paid no mind to downtown music. Gaylord Fields spoke about discovering the downtown scene when, as a kid in the Bronx, he could use his free subway pass to go anywhere he wanted. They all spoke about the joys of radio, with Alanna Heiss ending her introduction by summing up the spirit of the age with the memorable line, “Come over to my house; come on the radio.” That just about captures the friendliness and verve that ruled the room.
Three jaw-dropping performances followed.
First, Don Byron walked inconspicuously onto the stage only to belt out the kind of volume that makes your ears rattle. He soared to the purest, most piercing high notes. He made comedy with honks and squeaks, prompting a few audience members to laugh. He also parodied “Frère Jacques” in a most grotesque and annoying way. Those are both compliments. After this free-ranging solo romp, he strolled, cool and uncaring, off stage to go back and sit in the shadows, like a mysterious orb that emits a puzzling gibberish and disappears forever.
Then, the English composer Fast Forward bent, scraped, shaped, flicked, and threw a sheet of metal in what felt more like a circus act than a musical performance. He rubbed the sheet and dropped it onto a drum before tossing it over his shoulder and equipping himself with two spatula, which he then used to push around a wok with holes in it. He looked and sounded like a child at play. He also brought out these huge metal spoons, which really made him look like a kid, in a surreal Lilliputian way. That is also a compliment.
And yet his attention was laser sharp. The nature of his performance seemed to be that of making random mistakes — dropping, hitting an object — and then more or less repeating that mistake a few times, before making a new mistake. It gave the music an immense present-ness that made me think about the nature of experimental music differently: as an exercise in acute attention and focus, and listening to oneself — meditative, in a way I hadn’t thought about before. David Tudor also makes me feel this way. The musician lives moment by moment, movement by movement, with no overall conception in mind, only that which is dictated by his or her present action.
After Fast Forward finished, Weinstein said, “Using these very same instruments, he could cook for you.” Indeed, I thought I was watching a chef making stir fry. But his focused frowning belied this comic image. The performance was seriously comic, executed with consummate spontaneity and utterly good humor. When an audience member laughed, he even stopped making sounds, broke the fourth wall, looked straight at the audience member for a few seconds, and then continued. That made the guy laugh again. Very English.
Then came Shelley Hirsch, who played the vocal cords (might as well not call it singing) while Weinstein blooped and buzzed on the synth. She was my personal favorite. They performed a piece she called, Bonbons, which she described as “improvised morsels.” Each little section was differentiated by the fabric of the synthesizer noise — how fuzzy and vibrating is was — and the different nonsense things that she uttered with the urgency of a machine gun. In one “morsel,” she transitioned from Dadaistic morphemes to an anecdote about a woman on a corner who was shaking. She says she asked to hold the woman’s hand, but she couldn’t because she was one hundred and three years old. This was an allusion to Fast Forward, who, during in his performance, wished Wentz’s 103 year old mom a happy birthday, in between spurts of metal bending.
Hirsch’s energy and physical dynamics were unmatched, and looking at photographs of her performance produce the same awe as looking at the silhouettes of Mahler conducting. Her vocals — her ooing, rrring, lip buzzing, and whooping — in combination with how she embodied Weinstein’s synth sound, made her almost mythical, like a siren. I couldn’t stop smiling and couldn’t close my mouth — my jaw literally dropped. I could have listened to her make up stupid stories and scream about them forever.
Last was Elliot Sharpe. Using an EBow, a flat piece of metal, another pronged metal scratcher, and his fingers, he “prepared” his fretless guitar (which, he said, he bought a long time ago for $13 at a yard sale) into an instrument capable of speaking more clearly and substantially than some people when they talk.
In fact, his playing, which sounded very much like the rhythms and contours of language, made me realize something. He wasn’t necessarily mimicking the rise and fall of specific words, or distinct ideas or emotions, but of speech patterns. At once, his sound mimicked the swoop of a question mark, at another time of droning on, at still another of yelling. It was all there. Just without words. I thought back to Hirsch’s performance and realized that she was doing a similar thing with her Dadaistic, nonsense morphemes. I’ve heard it elsewhere, too, but only with this generation of experimental musicians, not the younger generation. The generation who was at Roulette last night, it seems to me, knew how to manipulate sound in a way that approximated spoken language. They knew how because they wanted to do that. I do not think that similar musicians today — younger musicians — are concerned with the speech patterns of humans in their new music.
Romantic instrumental music (Beethoven, Brahms) evoked complex emotions with wordless music; these musicians at Roulette evoked the sound of words — as if you had earmuffs on — with music that has the contours of language; today’s experimental musicians are unconcerned with the rhythms of natural language, and have destroyed the concept utterly and completely. Younger experimentalists have lost touch with this old school mimetic tendency — the natural habit of trying to make art imitate life. These days, experimental music is imitating itself, folding in on its own new sounds, its own language. That’s not a value judgement, just an observation. It’s also, obviously, a broad generalization that may not be true.
The amount of history and talent in the room was staggering. An event like this is unusual for Roulette. But if there’s one place that had the standing and connections to pull this gathering off, it was them. It was such a fitting tribute, with just the right emphasis on the author and her subjects, for an age when Lou Reed, La Monte Young, Yoko Ono, and the Beastie Boys all cavorted and collaborated.
Each genre of today’s music is heavily cut off from the others. Last night showed the best of what can happen when you mix a bunch of stuff together and see what happens. In other words, the true nature of experimentation: “Fuck it, let’s see what happens.”
Try it. Maybe some day it will get you on stage.