Notes on the Splinter Orchestra & Log Rhythms

 [by nick]

Last Monday night, diSmithive and I went over to thelastbastionofcivilisation, which is a warehouse space above Mao & More on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Cleveland Street. We had to use the buzzer to get let in, and later on it became apparent that the noise of this buzzer would have occured during the beginning of the Splinter Orchestra set, which was already begun though barely above a restrained silence. The buzzer was a chance part of the total aural environment, as was the creaks of the audience in their chairs, the whispers and exchange of money at the front desk, the slight shifting of instruments by the performers.

The orchestra was 15-20 members playing the following instruments and more: snare drum and percussion, accordion, electric bass, double bass, cello, various types of saxophones and trumpets, violin, numerous variants of flute, laptops, and heaps more. The second piece they played involved a “conductor”, where a member of the orchestra raised a yellow piece of paper with a letter on it and slowly moved it from left to right across the orchestra. When then letter reached a performer, sometimes they played, sometimes they didn’t. It was obviously some sort of trigger. In the interval I went and talked to the “conductor”, Gerard, who told me the trigger was a secret, asked me to guess and then told me anyway. If the letter being shown was in your Christian or last name then you played a “note”. I also spoke to him about his influences, and he cited John Zorn and John Cage, but also spoke about mathematicians in quantum mechanics who inspired him. He was interested in a deep intuitive level of connection between people, beyond surface cause and effect, for him, where logic is pushed so for it starts to become mysticism.

What was immediately obvious was that the Splinter Orchestra is precisely the same territory as Log Rhythms aims towards. DiSmithive agreed with me on this, and was very impressed with what he called the ‘dialoguing’ going on in the orchestra. He did opine however (god forbid there be indeterminacy in his position) that the orchestra had 12-tone notes as a structural, if not basis, then touchstone from which to ‘dialogue’. Perhaps, yes, but a radically liberal notion of notes if there was one. But I do agree with there being a touchstone – more or less a structure – that allows Splinter to cohere on this intuitive level. I suggested that our touchstone could be silence, but it occurs to me now that maybe silence is Splinter’s touchstone also. But what do we mean by silence? I think of silence in this context as much (if not more) a listening or attentiveness to the total performance ecology rather than simply a not entering noise into the piece.

In any case, the point is that Splinter does have this intuitive dialoguing going on, and I think we would do well to look at it very closely to see what we can glean, or simply appropriate. One thing that struck me was the way the orchestra played its instruments. There was not one single so-called “pure” note and everyone was playing their instruments “wrongly”, most players looked like they were finding new sounds from their instruments by experimenting with it in ways it’s “not supposed” to be experimented with. In other words, there was a complete renunciation of the idea of individual virtuosity. Many people were adding sounds to the total work that were practically indistinguishable – for example, a blow of air through a wind instrument with no ‘note’ or resonance – but which did add to the total work. If someone had burst forth with a virtuoso solo or even just a ‘pure’ note, it would have destroyed the piece. This became glaringly analogous to our situation with Log Rhythms: the more a log has in connection with an individual, intentional, composed work the less it seems to fit into the total work. It seems to me if you have something with it’s own kind of structure, intention, narrative, rhythm, etc – i.e. a work in it’s own right – and you try to bring that own right of the work into the collective log, then it becomes less likely to succeed. I would say this is because that individual work prioritises it’s own righteousness (so to speak) over the total group performance, and by contrast, work that has an irreverent relationship to its own righteousness is more likely to succeed. A concrete example might be Aden’s experiments in logging. Last Sunday he brought some prose-y poem-y work. Almost immediately he realised he could not feed them into the group piece as they were, and so began to sample from them at will. This worked a whole lot better, but I would suggest that it still didn’t click as well as his choice of playing the kazoo at Graham Ave. It should be mentioned however that last Sunday at Albany Rd didn’t click as a whole like it did at Graham Ave all those weeks ago.

Another way of saying all this is we’re all still grappling with what exactly to log. I think the necessity of a focus on the total performance necessitates a lot of questions about the nature of how and what we write or produce. I find these questions fascinating and essential, though I am aware that others may not, but I think this is the challenge of this piece.