Concert by Curtis Roads: Review

Concert by Curtis Roads
Friday, 19 October 2012
8 pm
Flexible Performance Space, Lasalle College of the Arts

It is easy to know what to expect from a typical contemporary music concert: performers and their equipment on stage in full view of the audience, who can perceive where the music comes from and what effect the performers have on them. It is more difficult to predict just what kind of musical experience we are getting ourselves into as we take our seats in the flexible performance space, reconfigured such that instead of facing an open stage empty in anticipation of the performer, we are made to face nothing but a projector screen.

Electro-acoustic music composer and accomplished academic Curtis Roads’ sound and video equipment for this concert stand in the centre of the house near the latter rows of the audience. By displacing the musician from centre-stage, this clever arrangement effectively shifts the audience’s focus from the main performer and his techniques, to the performance itself, promising an immersive experience both visual (via the on-screen projections) and auditory (via the speakers placed at the four corners of the house).

As the house lights fade at approximately 8:10 pm, we hear the soft voice of Curtis Roads introducing himself and his collaborator and assistant Brian O’Reilly, who monitors the video projection. Roads maps out the show: 17 individual pieces, each about three minutes long. “i will let you know just before we play the last piece,” he explains, “and after the last piece you can react however you want.” He expects no applause until the end and nobody to keep count of the pieces; we are thus encouraged to sit back and take it all in, just the way we would an unusual dream.

His decided assertion that the sound system provided by the school is “the best [he has] ever performed on” soon becomes indubitable as we are plunged into a novel, sonic world of unstructured and irregular beats and tones, the result of Roads’ extensive practice of granular and pulsar synthesis. The sound is unusual and sharp, ricocheting off the walls and enveloping the theatre.

The overall 50-minute experience does feel dreamlike in its surrealism: a soundtrack that seems to have no discernible main theme is juxtaposed with a series of abstract, occasionally jarring visuals incorporating vaguely recognisable commonplace objects or patterns, to evoke various moods or sensations that can be felt but not defined: one piece brings to mind a sense of speed, another of desolation in what looks like a bleakly lit tunnel, yet another that sounds like a waterfall but looks like a furnace.
The use of different colour schemes for each piece accompanies the mood of the sound, shifting and morphing rapidly at each change of frequency or pitch. What particularly moved this reviewer was a distinctly upbeat score set to vibrant orange-themed visuals featuring what appears to be wild and uninhibited brandishing of bold strokes of paint on screen, very much strikingly reminiscent of the work of the artist Jackson Pollock, specifically Convergence (1952).

There appear to be momentary pauses between what seem to be different parts of the same piece, prompting one to wonder if these indicate breaks between songs or not. We are reminded that this is irrelevant: akin to a dream, there are no breaks or definitions in this remarkable multi-sensory experience.