34 :: calls and responses :: 4/6/01
The LAMPO guy gets up and gives an introduction, mentions some upcoming shows. Phill Niblock is coming to town — Thomas and Lydia exchange anticipatory glances. Thomas notes how good that feels, to be excited by a particular name, and not to have to explain that excitement, not to have to translate it into words. To communicate it just by looking over and seeing it reflected back in the eyes of another. The LAMPO guy mentions that tonight Mirror will be accompanied by Jim O'Rourke. This is a complete surprise. Thomas and Lydia exchange glances again.
The set starts off quietly, with the sounds of twittering birds. Thomas closes his eyes and shifts his head into listening-space. He hears the birdsong as a complex acoustic network, a series of calls and responses. He enjoys this for a while, and then notices a low hum creeping into the mix, a gathering thrumming. A machine appears in the forest. The juxtaposition opens a dialogue between the voices of technology and the voices of nature, establishes a set of tensions for the music to manuever through. By putting certain sounds together, the musicians reveal something about the way they think about the world. It is like they are having a conversation.
Lydia is also listening. This pastoral phase of the music reminds her of the placid intros that start off so many techno songs, she expects some electronic beat to kick in any second. When she was a teenager, living in Detroit with her dad, she spent a lot of time going to raves, she did the whole pacifier / candy-necklace thing for a while. That ended when she moved with her dad to Indiana. She'd been ready to get out of the scene anyway. She'd seen her share of cute little X pixies in suspicious relationships with skanky undead-hippie guys in their forties. She'd seen her share of friends having nervous breakdowns.
Bloomington was clean and leafy and she felt purified there. She made friends with some of the guys from the music college; they were getting their hands on the work of minimalist composers: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley. She connected with that stuff immediately. After years on the dancefloor her ears knew how to follow shifting fields of patterns. She spent many hours in college lying on the floor, tripping on acid, watching the music build ornate Persian rugs in her optic center. From there it wasn't long until she found her way into drone, and from there she found Thomas' website, and she read his reviews of performances and those made her hungry for Chicago. When she graduated with her degree in Communications (class of 2000) she didn't have much of a plan, but Marvin and Paul, her geek friends, were planning to move up to Chicago, and they were looking for a third person, so she decided— why not?
She's a bit surprised to be here, in this concrete room, with Thomas. She didn't expect that he would have welcomed her e-mail in the way he did. She still sort of thinks of the Web as being part of the media, and so she's been surprised to realize that the people who produce its material are accessible, cut free of the usual hierarchies. She's been surprised to realize that the people who produce for the Web are aiming for connection. For fuck's sake, Thomas' e-mail address was on every single page of the site: how could she have thought that he wanted anything but contact?
Satisfied that she's figured something out, she lies down on the floor and returns her attention to the music, which is still birds— a complicated mosaic of voices—
