One
by one the lamps and droplights are doused, and the stars come out.
Through the vapor of a weakly sputtering fog machine they wink, deep blue pinpricks
atop the non-invisible speaker tower and strewn across the floor before the seated
audience.
There is an all-encompassing chorus of insects. Perhaps frogs. Night sounds.
Vague illumination is provided by the diffuse glow of the windows and a trio
of candles arrayed around a custom-built wood-housed organ, but the scattered
stars most draw the eye. As well as, by their barest gleam, the dim form that
picks its way between, swinging a bunch of smoldering incense like a somnambulant
priest bearing a censer. Organ notes cycle blankly against the swirl of natural
sound. "Each life, a light." The air is sweet and smoke-embellished.
He calls himself Mudboy, but his manner suggests not such simple, earthy origins,
but ceremony and reverence. There is something otherworldy about his motions.
His recitation builds in force, then quiets. We are told we are standing in a
field, and almost believe it. Back at the organ, new notes lurk amid the prior
loops; fingers twist their sounds into new, dissonant shapes that dart and wander.
He is speaking again, as the sounds turn more violent, begin to claw, mewling,
from shadowed speaker mouths. "I am Pig!" Words delivered as a kind
of curse. Motions becoming shakier, more forceful as he crosses and recrosses
the gulf of stars before us. "When I approach, babies get up and run." Sounds
building to cacaphony, tones overlapping and annihilating eachother. An animal
stirs at my back, just someone's dog, but the effect is startling. More startling,
Mudboy's words are suddenly being echoed into angered incomprehensibility.
His eyes blink bitter red. With a lunge, we are suddenly blinded. There is
a roaring
in our ears, vision swims to make sense. As he spins, we see: he grasps one
of the droplights, turning its harsh light directly down on us as he calls
out again.
And then he is swinging that light by its cord. A comet arcing just over our
heads. The audience is transfixed, or I am; I am no longer aware of them around
me. And then the roar breachs and falls away, the light dying, all easing out
more careful organ sequences and wearied, stumbling drums.
Text by Nate Dorr: February 06, 2009
www.imposemagazine.com/photos/mudboy-at-silent-barn
:PROJECTS :
:MUSIC
MOSTLY :
"NIGHT EYES"
INSTALLATION UP NOW:
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY MFA SHOW (Till Sat 16th)
mudboy's "Night
Eyes" installation is an immersive and darkened space which uses
analog
hand made holographic light projectors, sculptural figures, and wall murals
to create a visual realm,
analogous to the auditory dream meditations of
mudboy's "Night
Eyes" musical performance for pipe organ,
cell
phone and electronics- recently performed for ISEA 2010 in Dortmund Germany.
The musical composition (itself predicated by the 1984 meditation on dream
state
know as Nightmare on Elm Street), is now be re-imagined as the
soundtrack to this "other"
place of transition, transformation
and mutation.
Night Eyes is both collision of sensation and a machine for
sensing sense,
the audience complicit in its workings and anticipated by
its form.
The initial installation was at the Mountain Fold gallery in NYC.
For a written program about the score by Mr.Roland
Robert Cowperthwaite see here:
Facebook event listing here:
(myspace
page)
mudboy
on facebook |
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