5th March 2010

Video with 2 notes

I’ve just returned from Gamelan Galak Tika & Ensemble Robot’s performance at Bowker Auditorium on the UMass campus, and, although I’ve had some odd luck with performances at the space, I was quite happy with tonight’s performance.

I’ve never seen gamelan in person before, and the performance seemed to take in to account that there would be many unfamiliar with the style in the audience.  They began with two traditional pieces, providing an introduction to the music that was almost aggressively complex in rhythm and tempo.  There were so many changes in meter and speed that I almost forgot to pay attention to the actual timbre of each instrument.  For a drummer, I don’t think there could be a sight more exciting than a stage full of people wielding hammers, and they really went to town up there knocking the shit out of whatever those things were.  I’m still not sure what most of those instruments were, although I’m pretty sure somebody was playing a turtle.

The second piece also made use of two traditional Balinese dancers.  Once they were announced, I began to wonder how one would dance to music that made time it’s bitch like that.  The answer was that they dance both fluidly, and at times robotically.  The expressions on the dancers faces were creepily intense; the piece was about two bumblebees playing, but, to my ears, it sounded so much darker.  With the expressions of the dancers so intensely statuesque, the whole thing was almost macabre.  It ended up being the high point of the night, I thought, and it made me wish I had more than five dollars in my pocket, since CD’s were fifteen.

After that, they moved on to their original compositions, each of which involved contemporary western instrumentation, creating interesting textures in combination with the traditional gamelan.  The star performer of the night was Heliphon, described by Ensemble Robot’s website as “a double-helix shaped robotic metallophone … it uses solenoids to hammer metal keys, and each key lights up as it plays.”  The instrument sounds like a glockenspiel, and though I won’t say it’s the prettiest sounding thing I’ve ever heard, it meshed well with the rest of what was happening.  Also used in these pieces were electric bass that ranged from droning to straight funk, electric guitar that was almost Quinian in style, as well as violin, accordion, an EWI, and an upright bass.

The original compositions, while interesting in the variety in timbre, did seem to lack the intensely complex rhythms of the traditional songs.  Musicians were playing in multiple time signatures at once, but the changes arrived at a much less rapid pace, and though I think it may have been a bit much to continue like that the whole time, I do think they may have shot their wad by beginning the way they did.  I think that, and the fact that the Heliphon was not actually just C-3PO playing the glockenspiel were my only complaints.

Tagged: robots fucking