Bunker Musicology

Shortly before Christmas last year, I found myself walking south on Broadway, somewhere in the mid-170s, tapping a steady beat on a snare drum strapped to my waist.  Next to me, a former classmate was doing the same with a bass drum.  Along the way, passers-by would ask us to play something a little more inspired–we were in Bachata territory, after all.  But we took orders only from the monotonous click-tracks playing in our headphones.

I lasted until the 130s, but others continued for the rest of the day, ending up in Battery Park with six hours of drumming recorded via contact microphone.  Hours that–when sped up into minutes–make a pulse-wave Christmas medley.  The video was taken by a camera mounted on the snare.  As you’ll see, the project was led by Doug Perkins, Chris Peck, and the Dartmouth Contemporary Music Lab as a part of Make Music New York.

“Do you want me to wear purple?” asked Peter B, shortly after taking the stage.

“Yes!” replied an audience of about a dozen people.

B (short for Blasser) disappeared into the basement of The Stone—not for the last time that evening—to return wearing a purple polyester track suit emblazoned with “Ocean City, Maryland.” On the table in front of him lay a hodgepodge sonic arsenal: bugle, trombone mute embedded with contact mic, and a couple pieces of complicated woodwork with plastic knobs and metal elements poking through the surface. It’s looked like it was going to be an interesting show.

And it was, in spite of the fact that—as he admitted to the audience about two-thirds of the way through—B gets nervous when he performs in New York.  As a matter of fact, B’s performance benefited from his mock-anxiety. At one point, he asked the audience to tell him what time it was. “8:33,” said someone. A little later, he asked again, clearly hoping that he could justify ending his performance. Instead, the same person shouted back, “8:32.” Not missing a beat, B acknowledged that his music has made time go backwards and played on.

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For the remainder of January, The Stone will feature musicians on the Shinkoyo label. I’m going to cover as many of them as my schedule and wallet will allow (admittedly, not that man). Knowing nothing about Aki Onda other than that his compositional medium is cassette tapes, I headed downtown last night to see him perform.

Standing in the aisle to the right of the audience, Onda raised a hand wielding a combination Walkman/radio with its silver antenna extended. Click went something—I wasn’t sure what: the “play” button of the Walkman or the “on” switch of the radio. Static came first, then the sound of drums and a woman singing.  It was too distorted for me to decipher, but to judge from the labels on his cassettes, it was some genre of traditional Moroccan music. Then came more static, as though Onda were slowly turning a radio dial.

But I suspected that he wasn’t; the music seemed too fortuitous.  Instead, I guessed that Onda was playing a little trick on the audience, tilting the Walkman slightly this way or that as though fishing for radio waves when in reality it was a cassette tape all along. Next came the sound of two men conversing, but their fuzzy babble was soon filtered by changing speaker direction as Onda walked to the front of the audience, transitioning into the meat of his performance.

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A couple weeks ago, as my brother and I were driving across the Mid-Hudson bridge, I noticed that the lights running along its suspension cables were rainbow-colored for the holidays. My brother mentioned that on some nights the lights have been known to flash on and off with the rhythm of whatever song is playing on the classic rock radio station (WPDH). I suppose that tells you something about musical taste of the people at the New York State Bridge Authority.

In any case, I liked the idea of lights flashing being the bridge’s way of tapping its foot to the beat. Then I looked in the liner notes of Joseph Bertolozzi’s Bridge Music (Delos Records, 2009) and saw a nighttime photo of the bridge wearing those same rainbow lights.

Bridge Music is Bertolozzi’s ode to the Mid-Hudson bridge, which spans the Hudson River between Highland, NY, and his hometown of Poughkeepsie. Composed for the 400^th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage up his namesake, Bertolozzi intended it to be a series of live performances in which fellow percussionists would play the bridge like a musical instrument. When that plan proved too expensive, he made the album.

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