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185668232.
At the beginning of his set, 185668232 asked everyone in the audience to say their names while he held out a microphone. “One, two, three,” he said, and everyone in the audience said their names. The syllables blended in the air. 185668232 looped the sound. “Do you like your name? Can you say it with some energy?” he asked. We did, and he mixed the two samples together. Now it was a surging mass of noise, swelling and subsiding, creating a rhythm. Now 185668232 was ready to begin.
185668232’s set was the last in “Ambient Chaos,” a four-set evening of experimental music overseen by Robert L. Pepper, a Brooklyn-based musician who goes by the name Pas Musique. Pepper explained that he had reached out to Never Ending Books asking if he could host an evening of “Ambient Chaos,” and the folks at Volume Two agreed. So Pepper arrived with HSFB, or Head Separating from Body, a project of New Haven-based musician Max Hamel; Infrasubcontra, from New Jersey; and 185668232, also from Brooklyn. The small but enthusiastic audience who arrived to listen was then treated to an evening of trance-inducing musical experiments altogether in keeping with Never Ending Books’s tradition as a spot where artists can come to try things out.
HSFB began by opening a small wooden box about the size of a backgammon set. Inside was a mass of wires and lights, boxes and knobs. It was circuitry, though in a rather precarious state. Hamel started by getting his gear to emit a long burst of gurgling static. He dimmed the lights in the room, then got out a small metal brush, which he used to disrupt the circuits by pressing into them. They emitted squeals, as if Hamel were a sadistic dentist. But as he went on, the sounds began to feel exploratory, and in time, like a conversation, between a person and a circuit board in the midst of shorting out, as if through dialogue human and machine might reach some sort of understanding with each other. Near the end, Hamel closed the box and let the circuits rattle around in there, emitting more noises. At last he was still, and smiled at the audience, who applauded.
Hamel explained to Pepper that he had built the circuits himself off of a model he found online. The circuits were built on cardboard, which made them fragile, prone to misbehaving. “If you’re trying to do something predictable, it’s a problem,” Hamel said. “But I try to use that to my advantage.”
Infrasubcontra then took the stage and used a series of horns — tuba and euphonium — mutes, electronics, and pedals to create a soundscape built on low-frequency drones that suggested the soundtrack to your favorite eerie science-fiction movie that hasn’t been filmed yet. The organic sounds of the horns, sampled and manipulated, in time took on the aural texture of synthesized sounds. Dragging them up into higher frequencies created chirps and static. A single horn called into the atmosphere they had created before everything seemed to coalesce into something like a dial tone, which then melted away.
The set seemed to stun everyone into silence. Intense applause followed.
“Now that was a sound, man,” Pepper said.
“It was beautiful. You guys did beautifully,” said an audience member.
Pepper then switched from host to participate, introducing himself as Robert. “This is my project, Pas Musique. I hope you enjoy it.”
An echoing voice set up a rhythm made explicit by the cold kick of a drum machine that bloomed into a highly danceable rhythm, like a club for cyborgs. Rhythms turned and shifted into other rhythms as Pepper overlaid them with drones, wails, and his own voice — sometimes drenched in echo, sometimes run through effects until it was unrecognizable as human. Harsh in its details, it was almost peaceful when taken as a whole. Pepper’s music thus straddled a line. It could be approached as dance music loaded with abstract elements, or as meditative music with a pulse. As the music continued to develop across the set, Pepper never forgot to take the audience with him.
After sampling the swell of the audience’s collected voices, 185668232 proceeded to use it to build a rhythm, starting with jittery percussion, a rumbling bass, and more sampled voices. It reached a peak; then 185668232 cut it off. For a moment, there was nothing but glitches. Then the rhythm came in twice as fast, elements piling on elements as if spiraling out of control. It was all swept up in a whirlpool of static, taken up by the visuals, which moved from serene to frantic. Again the music reached a fever pitch and then dropped into sparse, ambient territory. Then everything began to resurface, like a big engine starting up. Percussion staggering in, sounding a bit like the short circuits of HSFB’s set. But underneath all of it, the sampled voices swelled back in, a reminder of where 185668232’s set had started — with us.
