Music review: Vibration Institute Orchestra and Evidence at Royal/T
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A sure part of the allure with Wednesday’s ambient-oriented “experimental electronic music” evening was the ambience of the hosting housing, the back room of the unique eatery/art gallery/happening venue Royal/T in Culver City. Spaces matter.
Palatable ambient sound streams by the electro-acoustic-digital quartet called Vibration Institute Orchestra and the laptopping duo Evidence worked up their respective, improvised soundscapes amid works from the impressive contemporary art collection, including work by Kara Walker and Mike Kelley, of Royal/T owner Susan Hancock.
A giddy factor is indulged through Nick Rodrigues’ quirky “Porta-Party,” an outhouse-sized, iPod-shaped cubicle equipped with a disco ball, suggesting a variation on the ‘orgasmatron’ in Woody Allen’s ‘Sleeper.’ In such company -- the antithesis of the neutral black box effect -- peripheral “distractions” translated into mood enhancements.
Overall, this evening represented a friendly neighborhood brand of electronic/computer music, more gently hypnotic than bracing or challenging. Vibration Institute Orchestra, led by bassist John von Seggern (on fretless electric) and here including electric guitarist Matt Piper, violinist Laura Escudé and noted studio/jazz musician Steve Tavaglione on electronics and EWI (electronic wind controller), is a malleable collective sound-painting unit.
Combining physical instruments and digital sonic manipulators, they conspired to create ever-morphing textural washes. In keeping with the ambient code, dissonance or tensions were generally kept to a minimum, and there were moments on Wednesday when airs of jam band aesthetics and post-Grateful Dead space-outs matriculated into the mix. But soon enough, the musical conversation moved elsewhere, through different emotional colors and group-think notions.
Setting the physical instrument issue aside, the entity Evidence operates from the simple equation of two men (Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood), two laptops and a mixer between them, as practical and symbolic connector. Their hour in the spotlight was more cerebral, an evocative canvas of sounds at once abstract in origin and tinged by hints of field recordings from the “real world” (the “evidential” aspect?). Melodic motifs and fuzzy groove elements emerged and receded in the mesmeric sonic fog, and the set conjured up the sense of a journey to whereabouts unknown, but not at all unpleasant. Ambient mission accomplished.
-- Josef Woodard
Above: In a previous appearance of the Vibration Institute Orchestra, John von Seggern, left, play alongside musician Steve Tavaglione. Credit: Photo by Jeremay Raab