Bits of Gongs, Sitars, Pianos, Tuvan Throat Singers, Rhodeses…

The Stone, 8 p.m. ($10)
Michael Clemow, Performing Granular Synthesis

This guy promoted his show to the list serve for ChucK, this musical programming language developed in Princeton that I’ve been using for a while, and when I responded to his e-mail with a confirmation that The Stone is an awesome place he was pretty excited.  I missed the first part of his concert/lesson, but apparently he explained what granular synthesis was and had participants/audience members demonstrate by clapping their hands to make some music.  He had this innovative method of analyzing recorded sounds, breaking them down into their constituent parts, and manipulating those parts to reach new timbres and rhythms.  So, it was interesting from a technological standpoint (actually, from a ChucKist’s standpoint, very interesting) but not exactly artistically visionary.  The entire process of breaking something down into its individual parts–analysis and reconstitution–is so interesting, both artistically and philosophically, that it seemed conspicuously absent from the artistic vision of the performance.  That said, there were definitely parts that caught me off-guard, especially toward the end when he forsook explanation of the art for performance of the art and just went for it.

Drop Beats Not Bombs

The Tank: 45 W. St., Hell’s Kitchen

Bobby Previte and Benton-C Bainbridge

The second set at The Tank, with the shape-shifting percussionist Bobby Previte and visuals by Benton-C Bainbridge was energy fused with enough anarchy/coherency that it started to make sense by the time it ended.  While in most cases it would be easy to pin the politics (the “message”) on the one in control of the visual cues (that is, the mosque moving back and forth across the bottom of the screen, shooting down Jesus-fish space invaders) Previte’s pounding, terrifying electronic drums shocked and awed as much as Bainbridge’s epileptic flashes across the screen.  Add to that the occasional W. sample and you have a full-on polemic.  But it would only be a polemic, after all, if it weren’t done so well; if the electronic chaos hadn’t made me think of 80s Berlin long before W. came into the picture, I don’t know that it would have had the same effect.  The strategy: go for the jugular, then let us know you don’t like U.S. foreign policy.  Aside: one of Previte’s long-running bands, Bobby Previte’s Coalition of the Willing, is on my must-see list.

(left to right) Bobby Previte, W., Benton-C Bainbridge's Son, Benton-C Bainbridge