Live Eye: Text of Light @ SOUNDplay Festival, Latvian Hall, Oct 27
October 29th, 2007
Dave Morris
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How do you know that a performance has had at least subconscious effect on you? When you find yourself randomly humming the tunes afterwards? Not likely, at least when the show in question consisted of three players improvising freely with no drums or recognizable pulse to speak of. So when the noisiest melodies this writer knows sprang to mind — half-forgotten Metallica riffs — days later, take it as a sublimated sign that
Text of Light’s gig on Day 2 of
New Adventures in Sound Art’s SOUNDplay festival left some small mark on the psyche.
The first half of the evening consisted of
numerous short films scored in multi-channel mixes delivered via eight top-quality speakers throughout the room. Some, like filmmaker Ines Wickmann and sound artist Francis Dhomont’s “Moirures,” suffered for their reliance on digital audio processing techniques that sound sterile and dated to these (admittedly neophyte) ears, but
Stephanie Loveless’
“Lines” with its trance-inducing pianos and washed-out images of railroad tracks seemed more in keeping with the second half of the program, where Text of Light improvised hazy soundtracks to two short films by
Stan Brakhage.
It was a bit of a surprise to discover after some subsequent research that Text of Light — here comprised of
Lee Ranaldo and
Alan Licht on guitars/effects and
Ulrich Krieger on sax — are a regularly-working group. The three veteran improvisers are clearly comfortable playing together, particularly in quiet passages where they carefully laid down spare, ringing guitars and breathy sax drones forming layers of sound as wispy and transient as spiders’ webs. Yet very little of what they were doing seemed to reflect
Brakhage’s films — the first of which was “City Streaming,” a Toronto-made 1990 film whose off-kilter shots of power lines as glimpsed from subway cars and apartment interiors seen through shaky cameras suggested far more activity than Text of Light seemed interested in reflecting. Where you might have imagined that the pairing of film and music might change the experience of both, it ultimately seemed futile not to focus on one other the other.
The three players kept going through the break between films — another indication that they were disconnected from the on-screen action — but although they remained subdued, with Krieger’s fingers skittering over his saxophone’s keys and the two guitarists leaving each other space to play a little, you could sense the growing intensity, particularly as the frequency of Ranaldo’s jagged exclamations increased. The second film “I…” started up, a 1995 short full of abstract, hand-painted splotches that quivered nervously from frame to hand-drawn frame, moving ten times faster than they changed colour. Licht was the first to react to the change; after a few minutes, he began to tease us with hints of noise that quickly threatened to overwhelm the surround-sound speakers, whose green indicator lights started to flicker red from the sudden jump in volume. There wasn’t nearly as much change in the film, but they were off anyways; eventually Ranaldo started treating his guitar by sticking pieces of wood in the strings and swinging it wildly, apparently having fused the techniques of
Jimi Hendrix and
Fred Frith.
Then three things happened roughly at once: the film ended; Licht pumped up the volume even further and started laying down some serious squalling damage with his effects boxes; and Ranaldo started throwing unidentified objects, as well as picking up his guitar and then dropping it. I’d be the last person to suggest that improv is only interesting
when it gets loud, but all three players seemed more comfortable expressing themselves once the decibels hit a certain level. (This just in: Ex-
No Wave guitar dudes and a horn player who
transcribed Metal Machine Music like noise. Film at eleven.) After a stretch of top-notch why-did-I-leave-my- earplugs-at-home screeching, they finished with very little denouement, having improved so much that had they done one set with films and one without, nobody would have had anything to complain about.
You’ve got to applaud Text of Light for their ambition, and they certainly aren’t lacking for skill either., But you also have to wonder whether Brakhage’s
vehement desire not to have his films soundtracked was less an indication of his prickliness and more a desire — arguably a wise one — to let films be films, and music be music.