Audio By Carbonatix
Author Gertrude Stein wrote that all vigorous art is irritating–and once it ceases to be irritating and becomes pleasant, it is no longer of any use. The members of Instrument Panel, an aleatory Boulder-based quartet committed to turning any sound into music, couldn’t agree more. “We are dealing with pure sound, placing it above the specificity of notes or running through melodies and harmonies,” explains Panel guitarist Farrell Lowe. “We like to think of the ensemble as its own organism–and with each piece that we do, we strive to achieve a truly organic quality.”
The four Panelists are creative, adventurous and well-respected musicians who earned their reputations in the creative-arts community long before last year, when their latest group was formed. Guitarists Lowe and Mike O’Neil, both improvisatory junkies, worked together previously in the defunct experimental act Coyote Palace. Acoustic bassist Terry Sines has performed with vibist Karl Berger’s Woodstock Workshop Orchestra and the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble, and for three years he accompanied eccentric pianistic genius Joe Bonner. And percussionist Gordon Kennedy has been a member of innumerable groups. He says being part of Instrument Panel has allowed him to explore the rhythmic technique known as pulse drumming, as well as other, less categorizable styles.
If there’s one belief these players share, it’s that art is not nearly as interesting as life; they see their music as an attempt to break down the barriers that separate these two arenas. In this way, they hope to redefine the traditional notion that an artist gives meaning to reality by imaginatively restructuring it. Rather than working self-consciously, they try to remove personal control and self-expression from their work, so that the sounds they make can stand on their own.
Radical as these ideas might seem, they are far from new. For example, Mozart reportedly wrote a series of contredanses in which dice were thrown to determine which parts of a certain measure would be performed. Around the turn of the century, Charles Ives took a similar approach with a series of “chance” music pieces that required individual players to make different choices as they played. Instrument Panel has also been inspired by avant-garde composer John Cage. The band’s use of “prepared guitars” (instruments whose sounds are altered by battery-operated motors, alligator clips, knives, metal rulers, springs and resined fishing line) is a spinoff from a 1938 Cage project in which the composer used glass, metal, wood and other assorted objects placed on and in between the strings of a so-called prepared piano in order to turn it into a percussion orchestra.
“Everyone uses a lot of extended techniques,” Lowe says. And indeed, Kennedy has been known to cover his cymbals with towels or to dump two dollars’ worth of pennies on his snare drum in an attempt to produce uncommon resonances. Likewise, bassist Sines toys with volume controls, wah-wah pedals and unconventional bow work to produce intriguing high harmonics. When these peculiar approaches are combined with the uncommon sounds emitted by Lowe’s and O’Neil’s altered guitars, the result is a compelling noise.
As you might expect from such a musical risk-taker, Lowe firmly believes that catastrophes are not possible in chance music. “Anytime we play together, whether practicing or on stage, we have no preconceptions about what we are going to do,” he insists. “We just walk in and play. One of the things we have been doing recently is, we will come up with a set list of imaginary song titles that haven’t had any songs written around them. Maybe we’ll call a song `Venus Japanese Label’ and then proceed to take off from there. We try to use those words, the imagery that those things conjure, in some type of cohesive context. The subliminal aspect is very important to us. We’re really aware of that. We work in almost entirely a nonlinear fashion.”
For these reasons, Instrument Panel’s music sounds very little like music as most of us have come to define it. And perhaps that’s a good thing. After all, changes in the expected musical structures are long overdue–and who better to make them than these four jazz revolutionaries? “Our intention–and intentionality is a very strong part of what we are about–is that we play music that is honest and very real,” Lowe says. “It’s tangible, and we’re as honest with the world as we can be. This is who we are and this is where we are.”
And if the music irritates you, good.
Instrument Panel. 8 p.m. Monday, August 29, Bug Theater, 3654 Navajo, $3, 477-5977.
