Music review: ‘Under Glass’ brings together just about everything
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“Under Glass” was, Wednesday night at the Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax, a one-time collaboration (or “music/media mash-up,” if you like) between composer and “laptop funabulist” Carl Stone, improvisational video and installation artist Carole Kim and singer, composer, actor, director, poet, playwright Paul Outlaw. Where to begin? With the sound of static, of course, tuning into the vast beyond. And a sideways mushroom cloud.
Or at least that was how I chose to interpret Stone’s warming up and the moving Rorschach test-like image on the video screen. But anything I say about “Under Glass,” you can say differently. I mean that as a form of praise.
Officially this was the fourth in a series called “Blast Phemy,” a joint venture between the Pasadena-based NewTown artists’ collective, the Cinefamily (which has turned the Silent Movie Theatre into a venue of cinematic exploration) and the long-standing L.A. Filmforum. The idea is for three experimental organizations to create a modest, funky art particle accelerator. Arts and artists collide with the hope that new art particles will emerge that can tell us a little something or other about creation.
Not knowing what to expect is the main thing. Portraits of silent film stars line the walls of this theater, and although “Under Glass” displayed a curiously sweet existential gravity, I kept noticing Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd. The lesson from these slapstick greats was that we are our mishaps. Each pratfall can prove a meaningful change of direction if you let it.
The silent stars also remind us that film’s origin – and maybe it lost essence – is in performance, not only in the improvisational aspect of early cinema but also in the application of live, and most often improvised, music to the silents. The experience of movie-going was once not to be en-goggled in 3-D spectacles and predigested surround sound, but to be surrounded by surprise.
Stone sat stage left at his laptop, its glow casting him in a pale, pasty glow. Kim sat stage right at her laptop, similarly illumined. The stage itself was an installation of projections on large scrims front and rear, with a smaller flat-screen monitor between them. The projections were black and white and often murky-misty. They somehow had the quality of seeming to greatly expand the size of the room, creating an open, outdoor, sacred space, something like the ruins of a Greek temple in an alternate universe.
Outlaw’s area was the theater’s perimeter and his purview was the personal. He slowly pushed a cathode-ray TV on a cart. He who pushed was dark, barely seen. But Outlaw on the vivid color video screen was a compelling, dominating presence, while he became a more mystical one when Kim toyed with his video on her larger playground.
His contribution then was a gradual awakening of self on the screen. ‘How do you feel tonight?’ he asked himself after tearing wads of cellophane tape off a glass surface to finally reveal his face. He mused on his image as he dressed. He mused on glasses: He doesn’t need them to see but to be seen. He reflected on reflection, questioning the role of self in the senses. Is seeing believing? Is hearing?
Stone, on the other hand, made hearing disbelieving. He is a master of non-counterpoint. Rather than accept rules of how one line of music must behave when it comes into contact with another, he makes magisterial layers of sound. He tends to start simply and end his journey filling a listener’s head with a rapturous sense of thrilling multiplicity. There is never less, always more. Two and two, in his sound world equals five or, sometimes, six.
The charm of Stone’s music began with the source material. From static, he seemed to tune in to some cosmic Internet radio station coming across alluring Middle Eastern and Asian song as the starting points for enhancement. One never had a clue watching him, the mad scientist at his laptop, as to exactly how he was chopping, dicing and combining his ingredients. But he made fragments grow into fabulous new sonic species.
In the end, “Under Glass” was less collaboration than cohabitation. Unlike in mass-market film or popular song or mainstream opera, individual artists weren’t asked to compromise for the sake of a unified vision. This, instead, was an open house, with the welcome mat lit up.
-- Mark Swed
