Reviews

BOX #9 - 27 January 2002 - Fiona Bennett - diaspora

Review by Luke Jaaniste

Sunday 27 January, 7PM-10PM
Metro Arts Theatre Space

FIONA BENNETT
with Mark Pedersen & Jane Fenton Keane
?Renaissance?

DIASPORA
feat. Lloyd Barrett & Joe Musgrove
?Onan Ritual Transmission"

Small Black Box successfully slammed into its second calendar year, government endorsed and all! Brainchild of local sound artist and aus_noise moderator Andrew Kettle, SBB came kicking and screaming into the seedy underbelly of Brisbane?s cultural life in May 2001, and has since grown to be part of the staple diet of Brisbane?s experimental music audience.

The night was, for the first time, held in the Theatre Space of Metro Arts. Home to experimental performance of all sorts for the past decade or more, the Theatre Space has an experimental history you can smell - literally (any Metro Arts parton would know what I am talking about - though it wasn?t so bad this time...).

Before the we get to the debut ?experimental? appearance for Fiona Bennett and the third for Diaspora, before we got to hear any of the audio surprise that draws us all to SBB, just a quick mention of the new-and-improved SBB program. Chunky, packed with words, pics and ideas, it?s the sort of program you want to take home and keep - but I suppose you know what I?m talking about if you are reading this right now.

Now to the sounds... actually I am of the opinion that words about music have a very high risk of ?sounding? better that the sound of music itself. Try ?pulsating rhythms with undulating sub-bass melodies...? which will most likely sound far less ambiguous and sensual than that... at least that?s my experience form reading various underground and mainstream music reviews, and then hearing the music itself.

So instead of going down the ?describe-the-sounds? road or even the ?describe-the-emotional-responses-of-the-reviewer? road, I just want to pen a small perspective on what we in the academy call ?performance practice? - how the performance happens, and how it affects the audience. What performance happened, rather than what sounds/music was made.

And in the context of the sounds/music/performance of Bennett & Diaspora, it is the performers? body and their connection with the sounds-produced AND the listeners? eyes and their connection with the sounds produced that?s wot I?ll talk ?bout now...

Bennett, a recorder player eager to get it on with electronic sounds and instruments, got help for her ?Renaissance? from poet Jane Fenton Keyne and Roland 505 player Mark Pedersen. What I noticed most with my eyes was the defraction of their stage presence. Fenton Keyne seated and hardly moving as she whispered prose fragments into a microphone; Bennett standing and hardly moving as fingers twitched over tenor and alto recorders and melodic and guttural-sounding ?screams? were blown into a microphone; and Pedersen standing behind his beat box, mixer and keyboard increasingly shifting around and finally dancing on the spot (?he was feeling the funk?) as bass-prominent beats and ?groans? came out of his instruments.

The further away the sound production was from the voice/body, the more the performed moved (Fenton Keyne was still, Bennett was swaying, Pedersen was gyrating). The greater the lack of connection between bodily processors and sound source, the greater the need to PROVE that there is still a connection between bodies and sound, it seemed. I wonder why this was the case?? Probably unplanned but I think there is some sort of cultural story here that is important to connect with but I just can?t think clearly enough about it yet...

Diaspora on the other hand denied their performative bodies entirely - Lloyd Barrett and Joe Musgrove?s bodies were hidden by a big slide projector screen... or were they? We never really got to see them (can anyone remember seeing them at the gig at all??) and we certainly didn?t get to see their sonic tools which were hidden in Bennett?s act, with some effort, by a big wall of milk crates. Actually, I walked up the side of the theatre space so I could take a quick look at what they were using, (?there?s always one is there?) but I really can?t tell you what I saw can I, coz that?d spoil it, wouldn?t it.

What we did get to see however was a disparate collection of different-sized slide projections that had various medieval, mystical, urban and rural subject matters. No real narrative here. Found out later that it was Kettle who put them together - reminds me a bit of the blind/visual date that he set up between a nature doco and Andy Bagley?s sounds late last year at a previous SBB.

In Bennett?s work the bodies were lit, whereas Daispora?s light was what hid them. It is up to our imagination?s alone to inform us about the nature of Diaspora?s sound sources. From the sheer volume, repetition, and timbres that get poured into the slowly-changing soundscapes, we could tell it had to have plenty of digital/recorded sounds but there?s was lots of live mixing going on as well. Here our imaginations are probably more wild than reality, and perhaps this fits snugly with Daispora?s ritual aesthetic. Just as the glyphs Diaspora employ take away the majority of semantic function that track titles have and therefore give us far more potential space for our own labels/meanings, so too killing the performative bodies, or at least hiding it, denies the semantic function of the performing musical body and the audience?s eyes, prompting our eyes and minds (and ears?) to wonder and wander. We hear and see things we can?t remember, making us enters a state of now... unless we?re bored in which case we?d probably be very much in a state of I want to go now.

Not that this is what I was particularly thinking when I left half-way though Diaspora?s set. A friend was DJ-ing in the valley, but I was damned to leave SBB early because the night ended up costing me an extra $200 because my car got towed away, but that?s another story. I missed out on the only body Diaspora gave to us - a dancing feminine body do belly-dancing-esque stuff if eye-witness account to me are to be trusted. Boys making the bodies of girls move and grove. Boys choreographing girls? time, girls choreographing boys? eyes, but that?s another story again.

SBB seems to have had a rather different vibe for each night. In this case it was an intense journey in two parts - of mostly haunting sounds, and oddly uncomfortable bodies. Can?t wait for more.

Luke Jaaniste.
Feb 2002.