Wide Eyes Studio: Re:sound at Mare Island: Concert Drawings

February 14 and 15 Re:sound produced a show of experimental music -- or sound performances.

Note: While there, I asked performers whether I could call this work "music". Most were very polite and said something like "If you must", but there was a voice saying this is not really "music" and we are just being nice because we're so happy here in the sunshine.

Labels in places where boundaries and traditions are being tested, and sometimes exploded, tend to always be suspect.

So, long story short, here are some more "concert drawings".

The performances took place in Magazine A-168, where ammunition had been stored. It's a large concrete building with no electricity (there was a generator out back, a glass filled with pomegranate seeds sitting next to it). Mare Island Strait was visible from the place, its blueness and its boats. The coastal hills of Vallejo and the East Bay rose nearby. There were trees, sure, but also the wreckage of World War II preparations all around. It's interesting that what seemed an impossible dream of swords to plowshares decades ago when I was an idealistic college student has come real all over America; these military establishments are so passe. (Some of the repurposing of these facilities supports artistic endeavors, and some implements forward thinking in ecological ways: at the Flyway Festival that weekend I learned that they are allowing the natural biological processes, assisted by the way scrub jays move seeds around, to re-forest Mare Island.)

There were three sound performances each day, as well as the audio/video installation by J. Frede which played both days.

Saturday:
Kevin Corcoran & Jen Boyd
Jorge Bachmann & Michael Mersereau
Jim Haynes

Sunday:
Gretchen Jude
Joe Cantrell
Voicehandler

Each of the performers took advantage of the natural darkness of the space and the acoustic properties of the vast concrete building.

Some readers may already be familiar with my concert drawings. Basically, I draw during performances on an 8" x 6" tablet of toned paper with an ebony pencil. The drawings are just responses to the sounds. Sometimes images, sometimes just abstract shapes. Often a particular sound gets translated into a shape or image, which might repeat if the sound repeats. I let anything happen, and sometimes I have no idea what is emerging. Also, it's dark during the performance, so I am not really looking much at the paper.

The images of the locale figured strongly in some of the drawings, but some of the performances created their own worlds or narratives.