Unsound New York: Daily review Day 10

All the while, Lillevan’s screen tests are playing on a massive screen behind the DJs. Some are played at the original speed they are filmed, but most are slowed down, as Warhol did, emphasising every blink and facial tick. Some are so slowed that they look more like a series of still shots played in succession. Occasionally, Lillevan’s assistant comes out from the curtain behind the screen a takes people back behind the divider, where they are filmed and projected in real time, dimly lit in the red glow that resembles the safety light of a darkroom. The live screen tests are cross faded with pre-recorded ones baring no similarity to the current sitter. It’s hard not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

From time to time we drift into the back room of Public Assembly, which, after 1am, is wall to wall people. It is also, save for the shelf lighting behind the bar and a flickering wall projection, completely dark. Some people are dancing, but most are standing still, either chatting or staring at the wall projection. It’s very comfortable to be in on your own in this room; the darkness makes you feel inconspicuous. However, because it is so dark you can only go a few minutes at a time before someone bashes into you, regardless of how much space there is to walk. The protocol for apologising after smashing into a person seems to be as such: a woman will put her hand on your shoulder and linger for a little too long; a man who has bumped into a woman will put both hands on her arms in the space between the elbow and the shoulder; a man who bumped another man will garble an apology that is lost under the volume of the music and move on swiftly. We don’t spend too much time in the back room.

It is 3am when Anthony “Shake” Shakir gets behind the decks in the main room. Hailing from Detroit, Shake is something of a legend in the house scene, and he energises the room the minute he starts spinning. His set is dynamic from the outset, layering heavy beats and grabs choruses across decades. His treble does not float above the beat but is instead its own beat, interlaced into a mind boggling complexity. The room is heaving with dancers and random shouts of approval. But along the bar people stand still, staring at the screen and the giant faces looking back, the only people not moving in time to the music.

Day Seven

There were a few occasions today where we wondered if we were just missing the point. We started our evening once again at the Wyoming Building, merely to gather for a walking tour to the Dream House in Tribeca. A twenty-odd minute walk through the icy streets of SoHo a up three flights of stairs found a group of thirty people greeted at the door of the art and sound installation. Opened in the early 90s, the Dream House was originally conceived by composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela. The two rooms of the Dream House, joined by a narrow hallway, are lit with low, pink lights. Bass clef like curlicues hang from the ceilings. The music playing is a contrast of very high frequencies and a very low, mechanical, chugging sound, apparently meant to mimic certain Indian instruments. The space was completely carpeted in a plush white, which explains why we needed to take our slush-covered shoes off at the door, and smells very strongly of patchouli. We are told that it is meant to be a meditative space, and they ask that no one speaks while in the Dream House, and that no recordings of any kind are made.

The group seems to embrace this. Most of the 30 people lie on their backs on the soft carpeting, shut their eyes, and relax. Everyone looks quite peaceful. But for us it is complete sensory overload, and we’re freaking out. The smell is too strong, the frequency of the music is maddening. We last only a few minutes before we’re scrambling for the door, leaving our blissful traveling companions behind. We’re very willing to accept that we’ve missed the point.

It’s something to contemplate on the 15-minute walk to (le) Poisson Rouge, along with the guessing game of how the venue will be configured tonight. Upon arriving, we find tables set up on the floor space people ordering food. It feels as though we’ve intruded on a dinner party. We make our way across the room to the bar where others have situated themselves, drinks in hand, at the best angle to view the stage.

The string quartet ACME open the evening with a piece by the Polish composer Gorecki. The piece begins in dark, sombre tones and proceeds to cover the full emotional spectrum. By the second movement, the violins are bright and cheerful while the viola and cello remain aggressive. This energy is pulled back into something morose and plaintive. It is a passionate performance with the quartet often rocking in their seats as they play. The audience is quiet without having been shushed. There isn’t even a clinking of forks on plates.

Three quarters of the quartet return to accompany Polish electronic artist Jacaszek on his performance of his 2008 album Treny (yes, the trend of playing complete albums has carried over to the electronic world). Jacaszek describes the album as ‘ten electronic laments,’ which seems apt from the first note. The music is woeful, lovelorn, and inherently tragic. And incredibly beautiful. While he does sample the live strings, unlike Meissner’s SST tribute, Jacaszek doesn’t loop or distort the musicians beyond recognition. Instead he seems more focuses on his own programming, the subtle beats and piano-like tinkling at his fingertips. He stops between individual songs and thanks the audience, making him the most interactive performer we’ve seen yet at Unsound.

We arrive at Littlefield for the Brooklyn showcase in time to catch most of Blondes set. They are at a table stacked high with equipment and overflowing with wires. They also have a synth set up next to them, combining weird ethereal strains with heavy beats. It’s very much of the Ulrich Schnauss school of electronica, borrowing from shoegaze but without the guitars. Also, it’s not necessarily important, but neither of the boys are blond.

By the time Neurotic Drum Band take the stage, the crowd are thoroughly warmed up. People are ready to dance, as much as they ever dance in Brooklyn (there are people moving energetically and people stood stock still; the latter is usually more common). Most of NDB’s set revolves around a woodblock, clip-clopping beat at varying levels of prominence depending on what manner of sound is played over it. Both NDB and headliner Morgan Geist are of the DJ mash-up variety of electronic artists. Geist is a bit more lively; there is a great deal of variety in his set, snatches of recognisable tunes that fade out as quickly as they come in. It is easier to engage in, whereas NDB’s set feels repetitive. But clearly both artists are doing something right; the room is filled and people are dancing. If there’s a transition the audience doesn’t quite feel, they stop dancing for a second, and then adjust into some new contortion. It’s not for us, but it’s well received. But the style does seem out of step with the rest of Unsound, where other artists are working mostly off of their own creations rather than their record collections.

Day Six

It’s snowing in New York. The word the weather reports are using is ‘blizzard.’ There is close to a foot of snow on the ground and the wind is whipping fiercely. If the organisers of Unsound are fazed, they aren’t letting it show. Today’s events - from Lillevan’s ongoing screen tests to Tim Hecker’s appearance at (le) Poisson Rouge - are going ahead as scheduled. Not that we can get to any of it; our faith in the Subway isn’t strong enough to be certain we would be able to get home in the small hours. But the Poles are undaunted by the weather. We wonder if many other people have made it out.

We haven’t seen much of what goes on behind the scenes of Unsound, apart from the ‘Art of the Party’ panel over the weekend. But we’ve gathered that after seven years the Unsound team have things pretty well sorted. Events are not cancelled, whether because of weather or international musicians’ visas not coming through at the last minute, but rather just adapt to a new situation. Is it possible that because the music itself is improvisational, everyone involved just learns to think on their toes?

Unsound is relatively small. It’s taking place over ten days, but there are only a few events a day and the venues usually only hold a few hundred people. There is very little conflict between events; there is time to get from a film in the East Village to a concert in Downtown Brooklyn (for those of you not familiar with the geography of New York, those aren’t close to each other).

More remarkable still, you’re likely to see the same people there. It’s a very community-minded event, whether or not it intends to be. Not only do you see the organisers at all of the events, but the musicians come out in support of other performers as well. Even the audience is pretty uniform from day to day. There are awkward moments of trying to determine if we really do know the person standing next to us and should say hello, or if we’ve just seen him or her at shows this week. Unsound has unassumingly usurped the title of ‘the scene that celebrates itself,’ and people talk to each other. More strangers have spoken to us in the past week than have in seven years of going to gigs in New York. Everyone is very approachable, performer and fan alike. It’s incredibly bizarre to us, but really rather nice.

Day Five

The Wyoming Building doesn’t have the comforts of the Walter Reade Theater, but it has become comfortably familiar in the last few days. This where tonight’s film screenings are being held. The two short films showcase electronic music at a time before anyone thought to call it that. The Delian Mode is a short 25-minutes on the work of Delia Derbyshire, the BBC composer credited with creating theme music for Dr. Who. It covers the labourious process of of recording sounds to analogue tape, slicing the reels, taping them back together, and then playing different tapes simultaneously on different records and hoping they synched up. Apparently Derbyshire was also unique amongst her colleagues in that she worked out her compositions mathematically, having studied maths at Cambridge. As well as a pioneer in electronic music, she was one of the original math rockers.

The Future Is Not What It Used To Be is bit broader in that its subject, Erkki Kurenniemi, is something a Renaissance man. Disenchanted with his studies in theoretical physics, Kurenniemi chose to pursue music and film making and building gadgets ranging from scales to synthesizers. While some of his films from the 60s and 70s now seems a bit kitsch, and some of the soundtracks resemble early Nintendo sound effects, the story is presented to make the audience understand just how revolutionary Kurenniemi’s ideas were. And even though an instrument that requires four people to play by holding on to different orbs and then touching their hands together to create different sounds is effectively useless, you’re still left a bit awed by the mind that came up with such a thing.

A half an hour and a subway ride later we are in Gowanus, an industrial section of downtown Brooklyn. Like many of the industrial sections of Brooklyn, warehouses have been abandoned only to be reclaimed for completely different purposes. Littlefield is in one of these former warehouses, on a street that is otherwise abandoned at this time of night. It is here that New York recored label Anticipate is holding a showcase.

The performers are all joined by visual artist Joshue Ott, who used a rather advanced tablet to draw and manipulate images in time to the music played. Simple swirls and flicks of the wrist become animated, and Ott will keep things in constant motion throughout the sets.

The first performer of the evening is Japanese-American artist Sawako. She is the first female solo artist we see at the festival, as well as the first person we see perform live vocals. We can’t understand what exactly she is saying, and we aren’t sure we’re supposed to. But her airy soprano blends delicately with the waves of noise. It is gentle, relaxing music. People slowly drift in to the live room and, finding nowhere to sit, seat themselves on the concrete floor.

A rather novel factor of electronic music is that when the musician is only using a laptop, the time between sets is incredibly brief. Only two or three minutes elapse between Sawako’s set and Alexander Kaline’s. In sharp contrast to Sawako, Kaline favours dissonant sounds and comes across as more aggressive. He favours tinny sounds from whistles to suction noises. Beats do stand out during the set but are often buried beneath an approximation of feedback. It is the kind of loud, overwhelming music that gets art rock fans excited.

The end of the evening creeps up very quickly and Ezekiel Honig has taken the stage, like the others, without ceremony. His set opens with field recordings of a bustling thoroughfare and sounds akin to an electric piano. Honig features many crackling noises that sound like tearing amidst ripples of calmer music, a midway point between the serenity of Sawako and the aggression of Kaline. The crackling gives way to driving, metallic beats, slowly overtaken by the field recording that opened the set, before finally building to its own dissonant wash. Honig’s music is not overwhelming in the way Kaline’s is, but builds on greater subtleties and found sounds. We’re thinking now of what he said at the previous day’s panel, ‘Who Controls Who?’: ‘All sounds begin outside of the box.’

Day Four

Sunday’s events are all about education in their own way. We are spending the day at the Wyoming Building again, bunkered down in a seat along the wall for an afternoon of panel discussions.

The first discussion is on music journalism, not so much the state of it now as how things have changed over the years. The panel featured Simon Reynolds, who has written several books including ‘Generation Ecstasy’ and ‘Rip It Up and Start Again’; Michelangelo Matos, who writes about dance music and authored Prince’s ‘Sign o’ the Times’ for the 33 1/3 series; Mike Powell, who writes for Pitchfork and others; Anwyn Crawford, who has contributed to ‘Loops’ and ‘Mess + Noise’; Andy Battaglia, the only non-freelancer of the lot, of the Onion’s A.V. Club. Many people around us have notebooks open, either taking notes or pretending to.

Perhaps the most interesting point made is that with the loss of the traditional magazine, and the desire to run things cheaply, there has also been the loss of the office. Editorial staff no longer confer the way they once did, bouncing ideas off of each other and, as Reynolds reminisces, making words up, but interacting on message boards, which lack immediacy to say the least. Crawford comments that it could be intimidating to be the only woman in one of these offices. We will not dispute this, but we cannot help but notice that women have a slight majority presence in the audience.

The second panel focuses on the logistics of putting together Unsound, which, given the international nature of the festival, are nightmarish. Perhaps most in tune with this are Bryan Kasenic of the Bunker parties and Ronen Givony of the Wordless Music series. Kasenic has had to deal with the increasing difficulty of securing performer’s visas--and convincing them that the expense of travelling to America is worth their while. Givony has faced the challenge of booking artists in venues that would suit their needs at ticket prices that will attract crowds, not always so simple for bands that might not meet many markets outside of New York. Jessica Schmitz, a classical performer, is able to offer some perspective of what is like being on the artist’s side of booking and promoting, and in contrast to the others on the panel is a staunch promoter of online promotional tools. Shawn Schwartz, who owns the dance record shop Halcyon in Brooklyn, offers his viewpoint on how the reception of dance music in New York has changed in the ten years and how that has related to booking bands. It is very insightful, especially considering that the cool reception towards dance music ten years ago would not have allowed Unsound to happen in New York.

The final panel of the day, Who Programs Who?, seems like it should sum up the theme of Unsound better than any other. Artists Ezekiel Honig, Sebastian Meissner (who performed the SST tribute opening night), and Sasu Ripatti (you may have heard us mention his name) all weigh in on whether they thought the machines had control over them or their music. The short answer is no. It is interesting to consider the changing technology electronic artists have at their disposal, and to consider how much of it they have to ignore. Meissner comments that, “If you spend too much time learning technology, you don’t spend time making music.”

The artists on the panel also remind us that their writing processes don’t begin with pushing buttons on a machine, but with a melody or a sound they are trying to replicate. “All sounds begin outside of the box,” says Honig. It should be a fairly obvious statement, and yet somehow it is new information that mechanical sounds originate in human minds.

Day Three

The live soundtracking of Andy Warhol’s films Kiss and Blow Job was one of the more hotly tipped events of Unsound. However, things met an immediate snag when Tobias Freund, one half of nsi., didn’t get his passport back from the US Embassy in time to get on a plane. Sitting in his place was Sasu Rapatti, who, under his moniker of Vladislav Delay, opened Unsound the night before. Rapatti partnered with the other half of nsi., Max Loderbaur, whom he works with as part of the Moritz von Oswald Trio (Rapatti, who played later that night under his Uusitalo guise, gets around, as you can imagine). The collaboration was still in step, if not what it was originally intended.

The duo opened the evening with their soundtrack for Kiss, a 45-minute film of different couples osculating. Loderbauer played different arrangements on a Kurzweil while Ripatti looped the piano strains and tweaked them. Though occasionally looking over their shoulders at the film behind them, they still managed to compliment the onscreen pair: for example, the hesitation in the loop for the couple that tease each other, and the short-circuit fizzle for the bored couple who looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. There surely must be a comfort for the musicians that the audience snickered not at them, but at the image of a woman latching on to her partner’s chin like a leech. And based on the presentation it can be reasonably concluded that people look weird when they kiss with their eyes open.

It is worth mentioning at this juncture that the cinema hosting the event, the Walter Reade Theatre, is quite a bit swanker than the average cinema. The seats are wider than on an aeroplane (and recline further), and everyone is allotted at least one full armrest. This is noteworthy because while Blow Job isn’t as uncomfortable to view as the title suggests, you still wouldn’t want to accidentally brush up against someone while shifting in your seat while it’s playing. No danger at Walter Reade.

Detroit’s Carl Craig is something of a legend in the techno world, and his name has drawn much of the crowd. Much credit must be given to Craig for the impressive subtlety he has lent to his soundtrack. Relying on steady, pulsating beats that immediately recall breathing patterns, small nuances crept in throughout the 30-minute film. As actor DeVeren Bookwalter’s eyes filled with something akin to panic, a mimicking, shrill whistle filled the room. While steadily building up through out the film, the most frenzied arrangement was not in the climactic moment but just before, so that when the boy was twisting in pain the music had already started its long fade out. The only laugher from the audience came when Bookwalter lit a cigarette at the end.

Day One

The David Rubenstein Atrium is a relatively new space at New York Lincoln Center, having only opening in November. It is here that the Unsound Festival is kicking off the proceedings for the next ten days. The space was designed to hold maybe 300 people; despite arriving an hour early, we stand around looking awkward for a bit until a table near a wall miraculously opens up.

The opening of Unsound is arranged as one of a series of free events that takes place every Thursday, which is to say there are people who show up every Thursday, regardless of what’s happening. So it is that there are art students mingled in with grey-haired Upper West Siders, the latter of which one could be so bold as to assume don’t normally listen to electronic music.

It is with very few words of introduction from Unsound founder Mat Schulz amongst others that the festival is officially declared to have begun. And with few words - none to be exact - openers Vladislav Delay and Lillevan take the stage.

The collaboration saw Finnish electronica artist Delay (née Sasu Ripatti) and German video artist Lillevan each doing live mixes in his own medium. The idea behind much of Unsound is that a man with a laptop in himself can only be so engaging; thus while Delay’s singing bowl echos wafted under the clatter of industrial clunks, on a massive screen behind him and Lillevan monochromatic clouds swished by, rain drops fell and bubbles effervesced. When Delay shook a piece of equipment that created the sound sparks shattering on metal, Lillevan countered with lightening bolts across the screen.

But there is a limit to how engaging a man with a laptop can be. Delay is the only person in the room moving; there is no consistent beat to follow, but he is completely in time with what he is creating. Everyone else is transfixed on the enormous projections behind him. During the set there is a single, appreciative yelp, only shortly before a long bass wub rattles in the collective lung of the audience. The screen fills with static snow, and things fall silent.

It is after Delay and Lillevan’s performance that the atrium begins to empty and previously scarce seating frees up quite quickly. And it’s a shame, because those that got their fill in the laptop toting duo missed something far more tangible in the Solid State Transmitters. The collaboration between German producer Sebastian Meissner and Polish avant-garde quartet Kwartludium involved reinterpreting songs released by SST Records, the influential American punk label.

It would have been better presented as an experiment in live mixing, which very successful. The quartet, consisting of piano, percussion, clarinet and violin, provide a very passionate, very human element to the event. When they are sampled by Meissner to the point that your senses can’t really understand certain sounds coming from those instruments, everything becomes very surreal. It is simultaneously horrifying and beautiful in the way Scott Walker’s music has a sinister allure. That the barely audible lyrics of Black Flag’s “Hollywood Diary” are layered over it all doesn’t really add anything. It would still be as captivating without the gimmick.