Sounds, syllables dance at Other Minds Festival
Words and music often go hand in hand, but their relationship status can be, as they say on Facebook, complicated. Sounds, sense and syntax are capable of more surprising and intricate dances than we generally ask them to execute.
The opening concert of the Other Minds Festival, which took place on Monday, April 9, at the ODC Theater, offered just a sampling of the forms such sonic choreography can take. In a range of performances by “sound poets” from around the world — by turns captivating, inventive, fizzy and predictable — phonemes became sculptural elements, and words took flight from the bonds of meaning.
Some of these strains will be explored in greater depth and with a historical perspective as the weeklong festival unfolds. There will be programs devoted to early landmarks of the tradition by Kurt Schwitters and Ernst Toch, and more recent work by Mark Applebaum, Amy X Neuburg and Charles Amirkhanian, the festival’s founder and artistic director.
But to begin with, there was a sort of tasting menu to stake out the range of these offerings. At one end were witty, bite-size selections by Enzo Minarelli and Jaap Blonk (both of whom will return for more extensive outings) that turned vocal sounds into buzzing Rube Goldberg contraptions.
Minarelli’s two bagatelles, backed by a few delicate electronic sounds, each put a single individual sonority through its paces. “Ptyx” was an explosive collage of labials; in the second piece, accompanied by a gentle, jaunty drone, Minarelli explored the range of the sound “Ohhh!” including surprise, fear, wonder and abdominal distress.
Blonk took a more outlandish approach, packing a slew of vivacious nonsense syllables and extended vocal techniques into a piece by the founding Dadaist Hugo Ball and an even jazzier work of his own that he described as “Dutch bebop.” This was virtuoso stuff, and Blonk undertook it with all the verve of a born showman.
At the other end of the spectrum were offerings that veered only a little from the world of the traditional poetry reading. Michael McClure read selections from his “Ghost Tantras.” Anne Waldman (accompanied by some atmospheric gong sounds from percussionist Karen Stackpole) delivered long, florid tributes to Cecil Taylor and John Cage that she didn’t quite recite and didn’t quite sing, but something in between. Aram Saroyan repeated the word “Crickets” a few times until the audience chimed in.
But the evening’s most ambitious and in many ways most rewarding segment came at the end, with the premiere of “Just About Out of Nowhere.” This was a 35-minute joint improvisation between poet Clark Coolidge and composer Alvin Curran, junior high school buddies from 1949 whose long friendship was reflected in the easy directness with which they played off each other’s unpredictable swerves of direction.
Coolidge’s poetry turned out to be a tangled but streamlined torrent of words, cut loose from sense but never entirely losing sight of it. Like the urgent musings of an aphasic, these phrases — “Better rinse than his playing of the sandwich,” or “Meticulous sunrise and he floored it with a mental shrug of war” — mimic the posture of language but rely on assonance, association and internal rhyme to land and lodge in the listener’s mind.
In truth, they land but don’t always lodge. I found it hard to write down many of Coolidge’s most beautiful aphorisms — again and again, one would strike my fancy, only to vanish immediately like a snowflake in the sun.
Curran, meanwhile, weighed in with delicate piano chords, boisterous noises from an electronic sampler, and an occasional ruminative chord from a harmonica. At the end, he pulled out a shofar (the ram’s horn typically used in Jewish religious services and in Curran’s music) and blew some valedictory blasts. It was a moving and apt conclusion to an improbably engrossing performance.