Saturday, January 2, 2021

Lockdown Festival IV: Remaining Five Sets

Over the last several hours (allowing a break for lunch) my wife and I returned to YouTube to view the five sets of Lockdown Festival IV that followed the four we viewed yesterday afternoon. In terms of drawing attention, there was more variation in these latter sets than we had encountered in the opening four. However, since all of the sets were only half an hour in duration, there was never a significant strain on attention.

The set by Shayna Dunkelman was a half-hour excerpt from a 24-hour performance that she had presented in Brooklyn. The title of the piece was Answer to (XX), and the excerpt for the Lockdown Festival came from the final hour. The motivation behind the entire project was political, “challenging, protesting, and questioning the system issues that are embedded deeply in the gig economy.” The performance took place outdoors, and the video was created by a single camera that provided a rather distant “audience view” of Dunkelman and her drum set. This contrasted sharply with the highly informative single-shot close-up of Nik Francis’ drum solo at the beginning of the Festival. If there were any undercurrents of political urgency, they did not come across on the video; but, considering when the video was made, there may have been a significant fatigue factor.

The video of the Grex duo of Karl Evangelista and Rei Scampavia was significantly more compelling. Given that my only past experience of the duo was their performance of all five tracks from Alice Coltrane’s album Journey in Satchidananda live-streamed from Bird & Beckett Books and Records this past July, I was not prepared for this set consisting of six relatively short vocal works. It turns out that both musicians are poetically skilled in delivering rap, and Scampavia’s singing provided an engaging complement to her keyboard work. It is also worth noting that she can use a keyboard as a controller as effectively as if it were an instrument; and, in this case, her skill included providing percussion for the rap selections. As might be expected, there were political connotations associated with several of the works performed.

Those connotations were even more evident in Elephants in the Room, presented by William Roper. Roper is a low-brass virtuoso, dividing his skills between the low register of the brass family and more “natural” instruments, such as animal horns and didgeridoo. Unless I am mistaken, Roper also provided me with my first encounter with a cimbasso outside of an opera house. His performance took place in front of projected films, which is how the elephants first appeared. However, about halfway through the set, Roper shifted over to riffing about recent politics, and he wasted little time in associating those elephants with the Republican party. He knew how to engage just the right amount of humor to avoid sounding like a soapbox orator, but he never let his delivery undermine the seriousness of the current political climate.

Evelyn Davis improvised on the grand piano at The Lab for about 25 minutes. Much of her performance took place inside the body of her instrument, often involving other objects, such as thin rigid sticks. This approach to piano performance is not new to me, and I am afraid that there were few compelling moments in Davis’ set of improvisations. On the other hand I definitely appreciated the many camera angles that allowed me to observe the details of the techniques she deployed.

The Festival concluded with seven short films by sneal. These were amusing riffs of contemporary life, which provided a platform for sneal’s accompanying music. Nevertheless, the films tended towards self-indulgence; and I have to confess that I had hoped the Festival would end on a more energizing (and musical) note.

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