Reviews

BOX #19 - 22 December 2002 - Paul Abad - Toy Satellite

Review by Rigel Sirus

Sunday 22nd December 2002:
Paul Abad
Toy Satellite

As the festive cheer descended upon the lands, and only 3 days before the fat guy in the red suit was scheduled to deliver goodies to all the good people, small black box was again delivering aural and visual delights for all to enjoy.  The evening?s bill presented Paul Abad in a solo, ambient performance and Andrew Garton of Toy Satellite with a presentation of Memory Effect.

Known for his organization of community events nearly as much as his music these days, Abad arrived direct from the Woodford Folk Festival where he had been assisting in the set up of the Jungle Arbour. He took the stage first, announcing the vast majority of his set was constructed from less than 2 minutes of source material; itself a combination of field recordings, synthesis and signal processing effects. What followed was nearly an hour of continuous ambient music.

With the obligatory laptop running the majority of his set, Abad took his source file and played with it, extracting thematic material from minutiae, smearing temporality into the frequency domain.  The constant interplay between rhythm and frequency achieved a satisfying musical result.  Though the set was largely improvised there was an obvious sense of development throughout.

Abad used numerous linked software applications to achieve his results, his skill in performance being the manipulation of these programs in real time and keeping the entire system under control (and under the CPU overload limit!).  On occasions, the system would glitch as he added a filter here, tweaked a granulator there, but this didn?t detract from the performance. It reminded me that the performer is human and these glitches were rather like a fluff note in the middle of a jazz solo; little moments of vulnerability when the audience can penetrate the artist?s persona.  Footholds in the otherwise vertical surface of new music.  

In all a competent set, though I think Abad has still not realised his full potential as an artist.  I look forward to his future outings.

Andrew Garton was next presenting Memory Effect, a collaborative piece by Toy Satellite, a Melbourne based non-profit multidisciplinary production house.  It was a performance of considerable complexity, both logistically and semantically and  of exquisite beauty.  

Eight  computers (donated for the evening by various sbb enthusiasts), each playing a single part were arranged on stage in a semicircle around Garton?s conducting position where he controlled a ninth computer, various electronic effects and mixage.  Each computer?s part was algorithmically generated using SSEYO software processing GPS data collected by Justina Curtis.  Her near obsessive recording of her travels using a hand held GPS device meant the latitude, longitude and altitude of her every move around specific locations was translated to music.  The co-ordinates of each of the locations was displayed on the various computer screens and had me guessing the identity of the cities and locales.  

The software, configured as tone generators, particle synthesisers (granulators) and delay lines, processed the GPS data to produce sparse, largely tonal meanderings. Each of the ?parts? entered the composition at five minute intervals, adding complexity and sonic density.  Garton?s mixage was fluent and effortless, keeping the relative levels of the various PCs (all with different soundcards and presumably output levels) in balance and adding the occasional effect and ?melody? with an infra-red controlled theremin. The progression from simple tonal musings to closely packed sonic clusters was evocative of the cumulative effect of memory with multiple layers of empirical recall cascading over each other.  

The work was originally conceived for multiple speaker diffusion system and though the stereo version was flawless, it is easy to see how multiple points of audio projection would add to the performance, allowing spatial separation between the ?places?.  The organisers of small black box need to consider their PA arrangements carefully, and ensure that the quality and requirements of the PA meet the needs of the performers and audience alike.  Something to consider moving into the third season of small black box in 2003.

Two video projections accompanied.  The first showed images collected contemporaneously with the GPS data and was displayed on a small screen.  These images were all worthy of closer inspection, and were not just a pile of arbitrary holiday snaps.  The occasional fleeting image of Garton or Curtis reminded me this was not just a collection of beautiful images but visions seen through the eyes of the artists.  The second projection was a complimentary video piece Rot Emulsion originally from the installation Tat Fat Size Temple.  It was projected over  much wider screen area, spilling over Garton, the computers and even the smaller projection of still images.  The semi recognizable, blurred, dirty, organic looking stream of images served as part visual focus, part lighting effect and perfectly united the human, technological, visual and aural components.  

Symbolism abounded; separate computers for each separate location; their arrangement in a semi-circle around the composer like some sort of silicon orchestra; the two projections suggesting the memory/recall (travel images) and the continuum (Rot Emulsion); the music arranged in canon building gradually, each element a record of a journey, a place; each element contributing to a wider experience - a memory, a life.  

Many artists seem to sacrifice some of their humanity when they attempt to articulate emotion with technology but not so Garton/Curtis/Toy Satellite.  The performance was one of the most intensely personal I have ever enjoyed.  Knowing that the composers had seen with their own eyes the images being projected and that the music was a direct translation of their physical perambulations around these places gave me a feeling of incredible connection to the work and the performance.  I had seen with another?s eyes and understood their journey.  

In all, a fantastic end to another season of small black box.  I look forward to see if the rumoured tweaks for the 2003 season can improve on what is already a regularly successful event.