LIVE: Location Ensemble @ Saratoga Arts Center, 11/12/11

Matt Weston, Ray Hare, Patrick Weklar and Holland Hopson
Matt Weston, Ray Hare, Patrick Weklar and Holland Hopson

The performance by Location Ensemble at the Saratoga Arts Center last Saturday began and ended with gifts to the crowd. Before the show started, free sets of ear plugs were offered up to attendees to blunt the impact of the experimental sound troupe’s eight guitarists and one drummer.

And the show ended when ensemble members passed plastic cups filled with fizzling champagne around the audience – a bit of participatory theater that concluded their fascinating final piece, “Electric Guitar II” by Swiss experimental composer Valerian Maly.

“This last piece happens mostly on the floor. It’s quite a bit less loud than what you just heard, for the most part,” announced guitarist and ensemble member Holland Hopson before he knelt on the floor and placed a champagne flute on his guitar strings – a process repeated by each guitarist, one-by-one.

Champagne corks were then popped and the vibrating glasses filled atop a roomful of guitars, creating a dynamic, clanging hum before the experiment was over when ensemble members and the crowd drank up.

Before the effervescent finale, Location Ensemble – featuring, on this night, drummer Matt Weston and guitarists Tara Fracalossi, Howard Glassman, Eric Hardiman (who also played bass), Ray Hare, Hopson, Thomas Lail, Jason Martin and Patrick Weklar – performed three original pieces, accompanied by live video projections from Albany-based noise and video artist 1983 (Jason Cosco).

The group came together in 2010 as a way for local sonic experimenters to write pieces for a large ensemble.

During Eric Hardiman’s krautrock-influenced, minimalistic “Diversion #3,” a spiny fossil-like figure spiraled on the large video backdrop as Hardiman conducted the guitar army, indicating when they should rise up or mellow out as they played a single chord in multiple paired configurations.

Organic-looking images – from yellow flowers to blue-washed hairy roots – accompanied Hopson’s portrait of decay, “Six Chords Every Rock Guitarist Should Know,” as ensemble members played off each other, strumming chords and then waiting for their own sound to fade away before picking up again, creating multi-faceted layers of sound.

And “Untitled (All the Times She Loves Me),” written by soundBarn co-founder Thomas Lail, repurposed two alternate tunings used by Sonic Youth for their song, “I Love Her All the Time.” Half of the group played in one tuning and half in the other, recalling the dissonant, lonely and haunting mood that Sonic Youth evokes so well.

Review and photographs by Kirsten Ferguson

Thom Lail and Tara Fracalossi
Thom Lail and Tara Fracalossi
Howard Glassman, Eric Hardiman, Ray Hare, Patrick Weklar and Holland Hopson
Howard Glassman, Eric Hardiman, Ray Hare, Patrick Weklar and Holland Hopson
1 Comment
  1. Thomas Lail says

    Thanks for the nice piece. I should set the record straight that the Sonic Youth song referenced is titled “I Love Her All the Time,” there was a typo present in some of the programs. The correct text should have read:

    Ideas of pairing were the basis of this piece. The first formative ideas took inspiration from Gamelan music by pairing strings on each guitar and slightly detuning one string of each pair. At a Sonic Youth show last summer I was haunted by the tunings used for the song “I Love Her All the Time”- these too were paired and pairs were shared between the two guitars- with other enharmonics added or varying from these couplings. The resulting piece, “Untitled (All The Times She Loves Me),” uses the alternate tunings from that Sonic Youth song and divides the ensemble into two tuning groups. All strings are played open with the addition of harmonics in Part III.

    The SY original can be heard at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT82Y6C4RKY&feature=related

    Again, many thanks for making it out and for the piece!

    Thomas Lail
    soundBarn, LOCATION ENSEMBLE

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