This past weekend, Old Ken and Lady Marmalade were strolling by
Machine Project just past the intersection of Sunset and Alvarado. What's happening in there, we thought to our selves? Turns out, a performance by avant-garde vocalist
Carmina Escobar was a-brewing. Walking into the gallery, we found the room darkened and rocks strewn all over the floor. The audience had seated themselves in folding chairs set up in a "u." Flashlights directed inward from the elbow of the u cast the rocks into elongated shadows ...
... reminding yours truly of Samuel van Hoogstraten's visual meditations on shadow-play, which we see above.
To this point, Ms. Escobar was no where to be seen. She could be
heard, though, chirping and howling quietly behind a scrim. When she emerged, she was singing with a light in her mouth -- a dazzling effect I've tried to suggest in the drawing above. Having traversed the gallery with the light in her mouth, Escobar then removed the light and crouched down before a rack of effects pedals. For the next twenty minutes, she used these devices -- recording, looping and interacting with her own voice - - to make inarticulate noises that nonetheless recalled and mingled with the local environment in interesting ways. A passage of bird-like trills gained in intensity, bleeding eerily into the siren of a passing police car. And juxtaposed by a suggestive bodily pantomime, Escobar's wordless melange of pitches and tones melded with the babel of tongues -- Spanish, Chinese, English -- of passersby on the street.
Perhaps this was the most interesting aspect of Escobar's work for Old Ken: the mixing, the literal confusion of stimuli. With light and sound confounded in her mouth, for example, Escobar also held a magnifying glass before her lips as she chirped and howled -- amplifying the visual appearance of her teeth and I suppose, poetically if not practically, augmenting her noises. In the end, the audience (who had to that point acted as little more than sound-dampeners on the folding chairs) were brought into more robust service. The artist escorted each of us out of our seats and began blowing resonating vibrations into our backs -- actions we were expected to repeat upon one another. Everything in the gallery, so the point seems to be, is part of the art, even as the art inside is inseparable from the accidents (the sirens, the street talk) bleeding in from without. This, no doubt, could be taken to the more metaphysical level begged by Escobar's title for the piece (
The Cave) and her repeated incantations near the work's climax (about being "the anima in the cave"). But I'll spare you those high-jinks. For now.
Labels: Art, Avant-garde Music, Los Angeles, Machine Project
