The Justice

Media Credit: Courtesy of Wayne Marshall ELECTRO-TOT: The above image is a still from Prof.?Wayne Marshall's multimedia work "Nico Concreto 0-3 Months."

If you had the right mindset and the wrong expectations, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio's Friday-night concert was something of an exercise in absurdist theater rather than a true concert. Imagine the surreal theater scene from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (but in a good way). Then imagine the theater turning into Space Mountain. Between the ridiculously high temperature in Slosberg Recital Hall, the long, unexplained set-up manoeuvers between songs and the pitch-black lighting throughout a few songs, the audience was generally bewildered throughout the concert.

The Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio was founded by former Brandeis music student Gustav Ciamaga "in the days before MIDI, before synthesizers, when you had to use razorblades" to cut tape, said current BEAMS director Eric Chasalow (MUS). Such electronic music luminaries as John Cage and Alvin Lucier worked and premiered works at Brandeis during the studio's early years.

This concert is the 8th annual BEAMS "Marathon" concert. In the past, Marathon concerts have lasted up to twelve hours; this year's concert began at 8 p.m. and fell rather short of 12 hours in length. The performances varied in both visual and sonic aspects; one instrumental performance barely incorporated electronic elements, and other performances consisted entirely of pre-recorded music played back over the speakers of the dark auditorium.

Highlights included Prof. Wayne Marshall's (AAAS/MUS) "Nico Concreto 0-3 Months," which consisted of a photo montage and remix of his baby's cries, grunts and whines. Said one elderly concertgoer near me, "It's fabulous!"

Perhaps Marshall's background in hip-hop-a genre that people actually listen to-equipped him to make a remix of grunts and snorts into something highly entertaining, while other featured composers just baffled the audience. The lack of introductions for the works and the unconventional nature of the music itself left the audience with no idea as to when to clap or what to think.

The first performance, a vocal piece performed by Abbie Fisher and composed by James Borchers Ph.D. '12, took lyrics from various Petrarch poems. Sinister electronic whooshes, scrapes and other sounds accompanied Fisher's voice so closely that at times it was difficult to decide whether the hums and coos were coming from Fisher or from the recording. All Slosberg needed was some neon lights and some stumbling actors and we'd have had an Alphaville rendition of Mulholland Drive. This sort of exact marriage of electronic music and acoustic performance was what I expected from something that calls itself an Electro-Acoustic Music Studio.

Continued...

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