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The Tennyson Power Station is an unknown quantity for most Brisbane
residents. Tucked away beside a suburban railway line, its streamlined
deco-fascist façade provided a highly theatrical stage-set for this evening
performance by Elision, Australia's leading
contemporary music ensemble. Travelling to this somewhat isolated venue, I
knew that what I have just called a 'performance' might better be
described as a collaboration/installation/event, but I still had little
idea of what to expect. Hitchcock would have loved it: arriving at the
floodlit security gate, trying to remember the password ("Er, the Elision
concert?"), and then stumbling down the rain-spattered drive towards the
hulk of the abandoned building…
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Entering the building by way of a narrow fire-exit, I made my way up a
couple of flights of stairs before passing through a doorway into a vast
industrial space. It was the station's old Boiler Room. I was standing on
an upper balcony level, looking down and across the room to the dim
concrete floor below, where the boilers had been removed and the
performers, their instruments, and a barrage of electronic equipment had
been set up. Various loudspeakers were positioned at audience level on the
opposite side of the void, with one (a tweeter, I think) suspended from a
hook hanging from one of the steel girders.
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The accompanying visual installation, by Indonesian artist Heri Dono,
attempted to match the emphatically non-human scale of this interior.
Shadowed by immense concrete pillars, rows of tea-light candles flanked
channels filled with water. To the left of the performers, more tea-lights
surrounded a group of bowls, also filled with water. Behind and in front of
them, bamboo torches marked out the structural relics of the space. At the
rear, two large back-lit screens featured shadow puppets while another
flickered with projected visuals. A pair of gigantic, grotesque puppets
accompanied them, suspended on wires from the ceiling. Ambient,
electronically-generated drones and wafts of incense added to the
already —- somewhat disturbingly -— ritualistic atmosphere.
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The event's title, transmisi, carried the intriguing notion of
complicity between East and West, suggesting that the performers would
enact a cross-cultural transmission of ideas, values, and aesthetics within
the liminal space of this industrial shell. The concert program explained
that the Dutch word transmisi became respelled in its colonial
Indonesian environment, pointing to the way in which inter/intracultural
transmissions are also translations. Cocooned in our urban
spaces, digital re/production promises us eidetic memory, total recall;
transmisi confronted these banal certainties by drawing our
attention to how the structures of transmission themselves distort or
generate information. (Shadows on the screen: might we recast the history
of Dutch/British/Chinese colonial aggression in South-East Asia in terms of
a low signal-to-noise ratio?)
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Gradually the music began to swell, drifting and forming eddies and
currents of sound. Live electronics played off against acoustic
instrumentalists (saxophone, clarinet, and percussion —- including what looked
like a huge bamboo marimba). Electric guitar with ebow and MIDI uttered a
series of high, sustained wails, an eerie voice piercing the wall of
ambient noise. Occasionally, the instruments would fall into a pattern of
call and response (always emerging, never definite), and then disappear
back into the field. Soothing chords would rapidly transform into
screeching histrionics: think Bill Pullman playing sax in David Lynch's
Lost Highway. Then the saxophone's blue notes would rise
wistfully like smoke, like memories of black urban music tossed into the
fray -— the memories of a machine?
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Aficionados of electronic dance music styles such as ambient, trance, and
dub are familiar with collaborative performance practice and the creation
of immersive environments. transmisi extended this pop- or
sub-cultural rejection of goal-oriented music (a feature traditionally
associated with the Western tonal system), by engaging in an exploration of
tonality itself. This was carried out in part through Elision's exploration
of acoustics and amplification, experimenting with the particular dynamics
of this unique performance space. Different species of electronics
(synthesisers and amplification) combined to enrich harmonic colour; while
frequency shifting and the use of delay worked to project the ensemble's
sound through time and space, creating multiple echoes and harmonic
textures.
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This experimental direction can be traced to composer Richard Barrett's
engagement with Indonesian musical forms, as well as the ensemble's
grounding in European avant-garde tradition. A brief historical note may
help to elucidate this point. French conductor and composer Pierre Boulez,
a consistent champion of new music and director of IRCAM (Institut de
Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) since 1977, paid tribute
to a particular East/West musical parallel when he introduced a so-called
'Balinese section' into his work Répons. Boulez's interest (along
with American minimalists like Reich and Cage) arguably sprang from the
fact that the traditional Indonesian gamelan orchestra, composed of
xylophones, marimbas, gongs and drums, could be said to practice a form of
'minimalism' in that it builds extremely complex rhythms and textures from
simple 5-note scales.
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Yet such transcultural exchanges are never one-way processes. Heri Dono's
provocative mix of digital imagery, projection and live performance was
instructive here. In particular, Dono's individual takes on both
traditional and contemporary puppetry was innovative and teasing. His
shadow puppets were a direct reference to Indonesian <wayang kulit>,
in which puppeteers are accompanied live by gamelan orchestra
for night-long performances; but these not-quite-traditional, sexualised
figures were accompanied by images from contemporary news media. There was
no direct relation between Dono's imagery and the music, although at times
the images did seem to be in synch with the music. In the last minutes of
the work, assistants lit the wicks of tiny tin war-boats and set them
afloat on the pools of water. The heat generated by these flames powered a
tiny clacker on each boat, until the room echoed with the murmuring,
whirring sound of these endlessly circling boats. A comment on primitivism,
on socially and environmentally destructive capitalism, or a reflection on
South-East Asian current affairs? It was probably all three, but the
interpretation was ultimately left up to the viewer.
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Looking back on this remarkable event, my only regret is that although it
had three performances, attendance was restricted to Asia-Pacific Triennial
conference delegates and invitees. It deserved to attract a wider audience,
and it is intriguing to speculate over how the concert might have been
promoted (perhaps a return season is in order?). Ultimately, transmisi
suggested that in spite of the habitual phrase we use to describe
it, translation is not merely a function of loss. Perhaps it is time to
recast this negative concept of translation, and begin to think of
translation in terms of what is loosed -— what is generated, what
is produced, what becomes.
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Details
transmisi, by Elision.
A satellite event of the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art.
Tennyson Power Station, Brisbane, Friday, 10 Sep. 1999, 8 p.m.
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Citation reference for this article
MLA style:
Catherine Howell. "Chromatic Fields: Elision in Concert." M/C Reviews 11 Oct. 1999.
[your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/music/trans.html>.
Chicago style:
Catherine Howell, "Chromatic Fields: Elision in Concert," M/C Reviews 11 Oct. 1999,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/music/trans.html> ([your date of access]).
APA style:
Catherine Howell. (1999) Chromatic fields: Elision in concert. M/C Reviews 11 Oct. 1999.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/music/trans.html> ([your date of access]).
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