by George Grella

There are other conventional places to hear music, conventional in that they specialize in unconventional music. Roulette is the host of the perennially strong Interpretations series, which ended the current season with an unusual, fascinating and complex program of two unique musicians/performers who presented physical poetry and the destruction of digital information. Tomomi Adachi used the instruments of his voice, his body, a computer and out-board devices, a wrist-strap controller and even clothing, including an important t-shirt and his own Infrared Sensor Shirt, to perform musical interpretations of his own texts and poems from Dada figure Hugo Ball and concrete poet Seiichi Niikuni. Adachi offered brief explanations before each work, then literally put the concept and the words into physical action. The underlying quality was focussed physical action, Adachi energtic but not exhausting, the electronics responding immediately to his every action, creating a dense yet transparent flow of information. He modulated the volume and quality of his voice, at times dramatic, at others sing-song, really vocalizing words into sounds. The concept of this work can be described through examples; Niikuni’s work Rain graphically conveys both the idiogram for the word and the physical quantity, and Adachi performed it by making a clicking droplet sound in his throat while scrolling through each image on the page, pausing partway through to remove his shirt, underneath which was a t-shirt with the same idiogram printed on it. For Voice, he simultaneously spoke the parts of his face while striking them with his hands in accompaniment. The final piece, using the Sensor shirt, was phantasmagorical, extremely physical and involving. While this type of performance is, in the context of general experience, avant-garde, there is a fundamental simplicity to it that reveals the synthetic artifice of most other types of art. Adachi uses his body to produce expressive results, and even working with the computer there is an immediacy between the cause, his movement, and the effect, a sound, that is as natural as setting one foot in front of the other and feeling the road rise to meet us. If this is avant-garde, it is the cutting edge of basic humanity and communication that is both pre-verbal and highly, abstractedly, sophisticated. It was a unique and thrilling experience.

Tone, an original member of Fluxus, works from an opposite extreme, taking mp3 files and degrading them via a software process. His earlier work with deliberately damaged CDs is attractive and important, his current method means working entirely with digital, binary information and then processing it to some point of disintegration. He’s working with fascinating ideas about entropy and technology, but the results are not for the weak of ear. His MP3 Variations is industrial in the extreme. The trained ear can pick out certain specific features, like a touch of ring modulation or the use of a square wave in a low frequency oscillator, but what is actually going on is obscure. It’s a screaming, skittering, throbbing landscape of sound along the lines of Merzbow. He is unmaking something, but we never can tell exactly what the original something is or, if we do hear it at the start of the performance, it is already so chaotic that its unmaking is exceedingly subtle, too much so to fight through the audio of the results. While the sound is full of fascinating details, and the extended time his process takes creates Cageian moments when the mind’s ear starts to form its own coherence out of the audio, this is process-based art, and with the process so difficult to hear it wears out the ear before it actually ends.