4th December 2010

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Ikue Mori at The Stone

Thursday night I managed to catch Ikue Mori at what I suppose is probably my favorite space in all of New York: The Stone. For those unfamiliar with her, Mori is one of the founding members of the super-incredible and important no wave group DNA (along with Arto Lindsay and Tim Wright). She played drums for the group, but in the mid 80’s she started using drum machines, and since 2000 she’s been using a laptop to further effect her sound. She’s been a vital part of the New York experimental music scene since basically the instant she got off the plane from Tokyo in 1977.

Her performance Thursday night was drawn from her recent Class Insecta recording, an odd mixture of percussion; oscillating, ringing electronics; and trafficking alien craft. Different images conjured in my head by these sounds all shared a theme of a sort of ordered chaos; a complex factory displaying the oddities of production, a strange part of town with which you thought you were familiar but soon find to be much more otherworldly than you knew, traffic patterns of insects and other strange creatures. Each of these scenes soon torn apart and left in a sizzling, crackling pile of refuse.

When I read a review of a piece of rock music, and the writer says something like “it makes you wonder how just three people could make so much noise,” I always wonder what it is that they’re listening to that they actually find that kind of thing odd. Mori creates more interesting and complex sound by herself than most other ensembles, and it’s truly stunning.

Tagged: Ikue MoriThe Stone8-bitelectronicsDNAArto Lindsayno wave