It's very possible that I'm uncultured and don't understand art. Or sound.
That would explain the negative reactions I had to seeing Tony Conrad and Genesis P-Orridge perform at Issue Project Room this weekend [Updated: Saturday night] in Gowanus. This is a big problem for me, because Conrad is a well-known video and sound artist, and P-Orrige is a seasoned musician and professional eccentric. They've never worked together before and all of these artsy hipster-types outside the venue were talking about how excited they were for it.
The narrow room where IPR has its world-renowned, state of the art speaker system was packed, with people seated in the aisle and on the floor. The performers had hooked up their instruments to a separate PA system. I'm all about experimental performance, light and sound theater and dissonant/atonal/weird sounding music. I was looking forward to see something totally bizarre that I probably wouldn't totally understand, but enjoy.
Instead, the first hour and 20 minutes of the show was a way-too-loud continuous looping of speaker feedback. I go to live shows and clubs all the time where the music is too loud, but can get into the music. In this case, it was impossible.
Projected visual art played in tandem with the dissonance, a mishmash of insect nature videos—hatched caterpillars eating their eggs, beautiful jellyfish floating underwater and blurry suggestive images. The artists, toting electric violins with rubber strings attached to the ligatures, scraped their bows across the modified instruments and tweaked strings with wild abandon and no perceivable technique or order.
At first, the music built up dramatically, with undertones from the violins merging together, the high pitched squeaking of rubber strings providing somewhat creepy and dramatic counterpoint. Fantastic rhythms emerged from timpani drums. Then I realized it:
It was all crap. It got really loud. Feedback sounds were mixed into the cacophony like it was actual music. My head started throbbing. I thought about nausea, and immediately it became true. Forty-five minutes into the torture, I thought about animé cartoons with flashing lights that gave children seizures. The butterfly videos disappeared to be replaced by strobe light-style flashes.
I was able to survive by holding my ears closed and occasionally resting my head on my knees or against a wall. I looked back at the audience, aghast: they were totally unbothered. When part one ended, everyone clapped and cheered.
I didn't scream "What the fuck is wrong with you people!?" I didn't inform anyone that sitting in this concert forever is exactly how I imagine hell is like. I simply turned around asked the young couple behind me what they thought.
"At one point, I though I was gonna throw up," the girl told me. Yes! Some camaraderie! "But I enjoyed it, you have to appreciate the history of these people."
Her boyfriend, some kind of sound designer, agreed. He was totally earnest in his respect for sitting through over an hour of what a 7th grade Serbian hardcore band sounds like on the first day of rehearsal.
"You could bring earplugs if it's too loud!" he offered. "It's all about feeling the rhythm in your chest, and experiencing sounds you've never heard before."
Nobody warned me ahead of time it was going to make my ears bleed, jerkoff! And there are plenty of sounds I never want to hear, like the inside of my parent's bedroom on their anniversary night, or what it sounds like when you're trapped under a subway car.
I reluctantly stayed for part two, which was shorter, more enjoyable and not horribly loud. The harmonics and atonal sounds came through more clearly and with less volume, but I can't get behind the sounds produced when someone like P-Orrige started slapping her violin robotically with the bow, as though it was playtime and she was punishing a misbehaved doll. To my "untrained" ears and eyes, the performance came across as a self-serving display of old tone-deaf folks improvising on DIY instruments; enjoying themselves thoroughly at the expense of a comically reverent audience trying to capture a moment of post-modern genius to validate their yupster existence.
Photo by Gerry Visco / http://www.flickr.com/photos/gerryvisco/
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