During the last quarter of last year, The Living Earth Show (TLES), the duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson, has been releasing “singles” of recent additions to its repertoire. I have been doing my best to track these by folding them into the queue I maintain of recordings to review. As of this writing, I have accumulated three of these releases, all of which are available through Bandcamp Web pages. (I recommend Bandcamp for this music, because that site is far more consistent than Amazon when it comes to providing any text content that would amount to liner notes.) Thus far, I have accumulated three of these recordings.
The only one of the three that presents the Andrews-Meyerson duo is “The North Pacific Garbage Patch,” composed by Damon Waitkus. This is an uncompromising musical response to all of the ugly implications arising from the accumulation of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, which, in Waitkus’ own words, is “wreaking havoc on marine life.” Those familiar with TLES know that the duo can deal with any rhetoric, from the stillness of quietude to rock riffs at their mercilessly hardest.
Waitkus’ score allows TLES to exploit that latter rhetoric unto an extreme. Turning again to the composer’s words, the music “is largely an expression of anxiety, anger, and bewilderment at the scale of the problems before us.” While it is unlikely that this music will have any impact on those with the power and resources to address this problem, at least it provides the rest of us with an outlet for catharsis.
The other two releases are solo performances by Meyerson. Readers may recall that, in September of 2019, Meyerson gave a solo recital at Z Below consisting of five pieces composed for him by five different composers. One of these was Christopher Cerrone’s “A Natural History of Vacant Lots.”
Cerrone had originally composed this as a quartet for Third Coast Percussion. Meyerson requested that he prepared a solo version, which he could use as the score for new choreography by Robert Dekkers to be performed by his Post:ballet. Dekkers’ partnership with TLES goes all the way back to August of 2016, when his Do Be was given its world premiere. The performance took place at Z Space, and one of the factors that made the performance memorable was the way in which Dekkers had the musicians share space with the dancers. That sharing has continued in his subsequent partnerships with TLES, and it can be seen in the YouTube video of “A Natural History of Vacant Lots.”
From a musical point of view, Cerrone’s score complements Waitkus’ violent rhetoric. His “Natural History” is far more subdued, blending electronic sonorities with the shimmering reverberations of a vibraphone. In Meyerson’s performance at Z Below, one could appreciate the evocation of a “landscape” of vacant lots, established through a rhetoric of poignancy; and that poignancy can also be observed in the video of Meyerson playing his vibraphone in the midst of Dekkers’ dancers.
Meyerson’s other solo recording is “Extra Time,” composed for him by Sarah Hennies, who is also a percussionist. This is a four-movement composition, each movement of which takes the title of a song by Prince. Hennies’ approach to composition involves intricately reworking those tunes to a point where even the most rabid Prince fan is unlikely to recognize them.
Meyerson had performed the third of these movements, “Kisses,” at Z Below. This was the most demanding of the movements. The title of the entire composition may have been based on the need for the percussionist to maintain simultaneous tempos; and, in “Kisses” Meyerson has to manage four of them, meaning that two hands and two feet have to function independently. To add to the complexity, he also had to throw (or at least try to throw) objects into a bucket. In other words the score had been “programmed for failure,” meaning that the audience could not help but feel an almost enthusiastic satisfaction when one of those objects did land int he bucket!
By now readers probably realize that visual impressions are almost essential to TLES performances. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained from “listening without seeing.” Even when the music is at its most aggressive, as in Waitkus’ score, there are almost always subtleties that are likely to escape the ear when the eye is “otherwise engaged.” These recordings are likely to be most useful to prepare the attentive ear before encountering the rich physical extent of an actual performance.
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