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‘Turned On’ to Music of War and Gloom
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
“Turned On: Electronic Music by Atlanta Composers.” Monday at The Five Spot in Little Five Points. atlantacomposers.blogspot.com
Is the nation on the right track or the wrong track? That’s a question typically asked by pollsters working for news organizations and political parties — not by classical music composers.
Yet artists, in their work, often display an acute sense of the current cultural vibe. They also can be dead-on accurate when it comes to predicting large-scale political trends, whether they mean to or not. (That’s why, historically, when a repressive government seizes control, artists who speak truth to power are the first to go.)
So what’s our cultural mood? Judging by a concert Monday night called “Turned On: Electronic Music by Atlanta Composers” our future is bleak.
Of the 13 “Turned On” composers — many of them younger than 30 — eight offered music fraught with anxiety and gloom. None made overt references to 9/11 or the on-going Iraq war, although militaristic undercurrents ran throughout. I suspect the producers had no political agenda, but heard as a group the alternate title could have been “Apocalypse Soon.”
The outstanding 90 minute show — curated by ambitious and imaginative composers Darren Nelsen and Adam Scott Neal — was a cross section of lesser known local talent. The Five Spot, a dive-bar nightclub in the Little Five Points neighborhood, made an ideal venue: “art” music always benefits from beer and bar chow.
Since none of the music required live performers, Nelsen and Neal ripped all the music onto a DVD and — smart planning — gave everything a visual accompaniment. A few composers created their own videos; Imani Odelia supplied the rest with ambient computer graphics, some of which looked like slowly twirling screen savers.
The musical selections were short, from Nelsen’s one-minute “Slipstream” — of droning rumbles and wispy clouds — to Colin Bragg’s depressing “Aeolus,” more than nine minutes of groaning cosmic dread. Here the composer took the acoustic sounds of an autoharp, processed them through a computer and put us in a tunnel with no light at the other end.
And so it went. Daniel Swilley’s “Shadowed Moon,” based on Pink Floyd’s music, felt at once futuristic, menacing and claustrophobic. Brent Milam’s “Dying Pulsars” successfully evoked a deep space system spinning towards collapse.
Former Atlanta College of Art instructor Don Hassler wrote “weave.7.26.2005” on the day his school was subsumed into another art college. He clearly wasn’t optimistic about the merger.
Past wars inspired several pieces, pointing to the pointlessness of death on a mass scale. Composer-curator Neal’s “In Flanders Fields” twisted a reading of John McCrae’s famous World War 1 poem — poppies blossom in a blood-soaked battlefield — into a sonic stew, both pastoral and monstrous.
In a program note, composer Nicole Randall called her “MW5” an “attempt to identify with my father’s experience in the Vietnam War.” The thick swoosh of chopper blades fly low overhead, like the Grim Reaper’s scythe. Distant gurgles suggest a jungle stream, yet like a scary nightmare where nothing actually happens, the prevailing mood is of stomach-churning foreboding.
Randall’s “MW5” wasn’t the most sophisticated work heard this evening, but it was the most disarming and emotionally frank score of the group. As she learns her craft, Randall could be a composer of substance.
In the “Turned On” context, the most polished and also frightening piece was “Mi.T.-CON 04 #3,” created by Conrad Schnitzel (a founder of the ambient pop group Tangerine Dream) and Michael Thomas Roe. The title simply combines the composer’s names — pronounced “Mighty-Con” — yet sounds more like code for nuclear missiles on high-alert.
Although written in 2004, the music had a 1980s feel, of boppy pop, aerobics videos and leg warmers. If hints of war and gloom seemed encoded within the perky sonic matrix, a listener could interpret a different message: War Will Set You Free. (Like the music, it seemed a mentality from the end-of-Cold-War ’80s.)
The evening’s most appealing works came from a different mindset. Mitchell Turner’s “…black…color…hair…” remixes a folk-song setting by Luciano Berio. The sound was silvery bright, like a Eurythmics pop song, with a lovely aural halo, a steady pulse and layers of shifting sound colors. Fresh, engaging and at times touching, it was the most rewarding piece of the night.
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By Darren Nelsen
February 21, 2007 9:45 AM | Link to this
Thanks, Pierre, for attending and reviewing our concert. Adam and I had a blast hosting it.
We have more shows in the planning stages (with live performers next time). It’ll be interesting to gauge the collective (un)conscious of the composers then.
We loved hosting at The Five Spot and look forward to doing it again.
Special thanks to all who attended. We are so very grateful.
For upcoming concerts, you can always check out the Atlanta Composers Blog