Saturday, January 2, 2021

Lockdown Festival IV: Opening Four Sets

Yesterday afternoon my wife and I turned to YouTube for the live-streams of the first four sets of Lockdown Festival IV. That amounted to two hours of performances, which pretty much hit the threshold of novelty that I could absorb in a single shot. Each of the sets was a pre-recorded video with its own unique Web page, and each of those pages was scheduled for viewing at an appointed time. As far as I can tell, all of those videos remain accessible through their respective URLs. I shall do my best to account for each of the four performances I viewed and hope to work my way through the remaining sets over the course of this weekend.

The Festival began with Arced a solo set taken from drummer Nik Francis. Francis positioned a single camera to take in two of his drums and two cymbal mountings, with the manipulation of his drumsticks at the center of the image. There were clearly other instruments not in view; but, most likely, the creation of this video was a one-man operation.

Within that constraint, it was an impressive one. Francis played two free improvisations, the first about ten minutes in duration, while the second lasted about fifteen. Watching his hands at work provided far more insight than any “audience view” perspective could afford. The viewer was better positioned to grasp how Francis parsed his overall improvisation into statements and elaborations of specific phrases. His capacity for invention was prodigiously prolific in filling his half-hour slot; and, from the point of view of appreciating basic technique, I can see myself returning to this video to gain better understanding of the connection between what I heard and what I saw.

The second set was led by another drummer, Scott Amendola. His set consisted of three improvised pieces, “Hummingdroids,” “Velox Humm,” and the Amendola Trio playing “Dream Freed.” Each of these pieces was accompanied by rich video imagery that served to supplement the performers’ activities, rather than examine them.

“Hummingdroids” was a duo performance by Amendola and Stuart Brown, both working with drums and electronics. The Amendola Trio consisted of Karl Evangelista on guitar and Jason Hoopes on electric bass. The video was edited by Ziva Amendola, who may also have designed the icon that identified the beginning and conclusion of “Velox Humm.” It would be fair to say that the video was the center of attention throughout the entire set, but the improvisations by Amendola and his colleagues definitely brought a unique perspective to those images.

The third set was a solo improvisation by violinist Gabby Fluke-Mogul, which ran for a little short of twelve minutes. Fluke-Mogul has developed a style around the diverse sonorities of extended techniques. The duration of her set allowed ample opportunity to appreciate just how diverse those sonorities could be, and watching her at work brought the advantage of allowing one to conjecture just how those sounds were made. (This was that another example of how video provided a significant improvement over “audience view” in appreciating Fluke-Mogul’s efforts.) To be fair, however, this was an improvisation of exposition with little priority for development.

Finally, the fourth set by the Usufruct duo of Tim Walters and Polly Springhorn combined a “narrative” episode with an instrumental duo improvisation. The scare quotes are meant to indicate that the text delivered tended to prioritize syntax over semantics. Similarly, the “characters” of this episode consisted of Springhorn sitting in a corner of a relatively featureless white room and a large shadow cast over her with a male voice (Walters). This was all playfully enigmatic but also a bit lengthy. The following performance with Springhorn exploring the sonorities of a bass flute assembled piece-by-piece with accompaniment by Walters’ electronics controlled by a graphic panel of his own design was more engaging, particularly as the nature of Springhorn’s timbres gradually unfolded again the “ground bass” of Walters’ synthesized sonorities.

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