Ear & Eye

For seven years, Music at the Anthology has scoured the world in search of emerging composers with an edge. Executive producer Philip Glass and artistic directors Eleanor Sandresky and Lisa Bielawa then use the annual MATA festival to showcase this up-and-coming musical talent by pairing the young composers with high-quality ensembles. While the commissions, performances, readings and workshops have quickly put MATA on the map, this year’s festival digs deeper by enlisting composer Randy Nordschow to curate MATA’s first ever show of sound-art installations.

Setting the Tone extends MATA’s reach to include composers in their 20s and 30s whose pieces have outgrown the concert hall, as well as visual artists whose work is inherently musical. As this exhibit makes clear, the barriers between sound, music and art have melted and melded for a growing number of young artists.

Visitors are greeted at the door by Kurt Coble’s P.A.M. Band (Partially Artificial Musicians), a kinetic sculpture of elaborately wired violins, guitars and drums that play by themselves. An eccentric homage to retro ideas of robotics, the motions of the instruments are rigid, and the music is ghostly and sparse. Once past the automata, a field of single sunflowers jammed into black Astroturf beckons you into the ambient world of Joe Diebes’ Sound Field.

After escaping the spell of the flowers (they seem to have powers like the enchanted poppy field en route to Emerald City) you will see something that resembles a botched attempt to secure the gallery against terrorism: 13 rolls of duct tape unfurling down an imposing white wall. They are part of Charles Gute’s oeuvre exploring the perception of duration. As the tapes unroll to create seemingly haphazard and distorted cracklings, Beethoven’s Eroica symphony pours in at slow speed. With the gallery only open for six hours a day, you’re best off not waiting to hear the finale. Turn 90 degrees and see a screen depicting a video of Gute’s hands tapping out repetitive sequences on a tabletop. The video segment is three minutes long and hypnotic.

Break out of the trance and climb the stairs to the back, where four boiling teakettles, situated spatially on timed hot plates, gurgle, spit and screech in an animated dialogue. Like Sound Field, Vienna-based sound artist Bernhard Gál’s zhu shui (Mandarin for "boiling water") is meant to be walked through. As orientation changes, so does the hypnotic landscape. Although in the past, Gál placed real tea in the kettles, this time water is used to avoid turning a sonic experience into an olfactory one.

The next piece of the puzzle is a valentine to the record in the form of Canadian composer Duncan MacDonald’s Self-recorded Record. Following this line are the archived collaborations between VJ Pillow (Vietnam-born video artist Thien Vu Dang) and various electronic musicians, whose work ranges from minimalist to pumping techno. Linking habitual behaviors to machines through intensive rhythmic studies, these audio-visual gems bring the exhibit full circle, back to the relationship between the human need to create music and the increasingly synthetic environment that surrounds a new generation of composers and sound artists.

Setting the Tone, through Sat., May 31 at the GAle GAtes et. al., 37 Main St. (Water St.), DUMBO, 347-296-0190, 12-6 p.m., free.