An aural collage becomes a collision
Subverting ways of perception in any medium, be it visual art, film, or music, is hard work. Or, to put it another way, tedious, which is an apt description of DJ Spooky's confused and jarring performance of "Subliminal Strings: Nature Morte."
Spooky, a conceptual artist when he's not at his day job making beats, intended the performance as a commentary on the interaction between software and instruments, but as is often the case in exercises like this, the emphasis fell too heavily on the concept without much consideration for the art.
Introducing the piece, he called it a "collision between recordings of the ensemble and the materials they are playing," although it's unlikely by collision he meant train wreck.
Creating an aural collage of live cello, violin, and bass, then digitally manipulating them in real time is an intriguing prospect, and at moments the ensemble made it work. In one passage toward the finale a dramatic four note pattern developed organically into a groove as the DJ worked sound bites of gentle string scraping into a percussive loop, but moments of cohesion like this were rare.
More often the musicians would begin with an idea - a creeping repetition, or an ominous, echoing stab - that could have landed well on its own as unsettling avant-gardism, but before long Spooky would come in with uninspired noise or incongruously arrhythmic drum patterns that merely distracted and unmoored any musical footing. The result was something like a symphony of car horns, or listening to a horror film soundtrack on a skipping record. Rather than playing off each other, Spooky and the trio played against each other, competing for the listeners' attention. It felt something like sitting between two rehearsal studios, a hip-hop group practicing in one room and a classical group in the other, snippets of sound bleeding through the walls. An accompanying film collage only further complicated matters.
Spooky described his "strange experiment" as a "work in progress," which is true in the way that falling down a flight of stairs is a work in progress toward smashing your head. 