By Caleb Easterly
Friday evening’s performance at Roulette was dominated by youthful manipulations, both analog and digital. Audrey Chen, classically trained in both cello and voice, has been developing a singular personal language as part of her SOLO project. She uses a haunting blend of cello, voice, and electronics to express the exceedingly intimate and soul-baring – I have seen few performers as purely honest as Chen. Her inspiration comes from a place few musicians access; her voice, sometimes pure, sometimes harsh and metallic, bubbles up from her chest and is released in a throaty uninhibited yodel.
Like her voice, her cello playing is unique and innovative, using harmonics and preparations such as a metal cylinder and a chopstick. True, some of her statements were more successful than others, and the bridges between them halted her momentum – sometimes a welcome opportunity to reclaim your breath, sometimes as an unnecessary pause. She played two pieces – one short, one long – with a discreet use of electronics, often just a glorified click track. This in is contrast to what I have heard of her recorded works, in which electronic effects are far more prominent. Luckily, the colorist effects achieved by her cello and voice were expansive and visceral.
The trio consisting of Jeremiah Cymerman on clarinet, Nate Wooley on trumpet, and Brian Chase on drums used more looping and distorting electronic effects, creating vast landscapes of sound as they pedaled and turned the knobs on their setups. The most exciting performer to watch was Chase, a whirlwind of motion playing with microphones, sticks, brushes, and cymbals on his drums, producing surprisingly little sound. Their music, an abrasive sort of free jazz, never settled, and at times it seemed clumsy and directionless – one could sense that they had not played together for long. Some moments were luminous and successful, but as a whole the performance was inconsistent.
This explains the nature of the crowd, perhaps: small and disconnected from the performers, not knowing when to applaud (especially during the trio’s performance) and barely knowing when the concert was over. The musicians seemed to be in a different world, a glass cage, where their music existed solely for its own sake. In experimental music, there’s a fine line between the innovative and the needless – and the trio’s performance, regrettably, fell on the wrong side of that balance.