Marginal Consort, the Japanese improvisation collective, played as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival last Saturday at the Substation. Their performance was a liminal experience, exploring the boundaries of sound and movement in disparate yet cohesive practice between the four members – Kazuo Imai, Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, Masami Tada. I walked away from the night feeling expansive and able to listen in new ways.
The collective formed out of the East Bionic Symphonia of Takehisa Kosugi’s avante garde workshop at Bigakko in 1975. The group found inspiration in the fluxus movement and their practice continues to challenge the curatorial power of modern day music platforms. Since forming in 1996 they have met annually to perform a single improvisational show, with no planning or discussion as to what will be performed. The only condition set is the duration of the set.
There is no stage, artist and audience member are at the same level with no barrier. There is no front, back, left or right – the performance is multidirectional with each artist positioned in a corner of the room.
The distance between the artists is deliberate to avoid distract or any direct influence from others. Instead they can focus on their own performance and experimentation, like the John Cage and Mercer Cunningham performance paradigm of distinct acts occurring at the same space and time.
Before the show started participants can observe each of the artists gear and set up. Piles of pedals, percussion instruments, pylons, water vile, hanging pieces of insulation tubing, and many other made instruments and artifacts whose music purpose could not be discerned and only added to the mystery of what lay ahead.
The audience were free to sit, stand, lie down and rove around the space explore the sound from different vantage points.
Words are insufficient to describe the plethora of sound that occurred in those three hours. I can’t even recall any specific part of the performance in a linear or sequential manner. But I do remember specific sounds and tones and the shapes that made them.
Rhythm sticks were strung together and draped around the artists head who flung himself around wildly to create a swarm of clicks and clacks, and using sumo style stomps to create a rhythm.
Another member was using paper to create horns and flicking them through the air at different speeds to create a loud clapping sound that without any amplification was louder than the other drones. Not a simple hand flip, but an entire body movement that was repeated to various degrees of vigour time and time again. The physical exertion and fatigue was something laid bare for us to see at eye level with no breaks during the three hours.
Watching the way the sounds were made gave each one a palpable and visceral quality that often is hidden from the listener in our conventional listening experiences. Acoustic instrument have some degree of transparency as to how their sound is produced, where as electronic and digital instruments are completely opaque. High production values on music too means we rarely hear raw sound in any form.
The three hours passed quickly, my perception of time gone when there is not adherence to any conventional time keep practices.
The show challenged all notions of conventional music performance – the relationship of a group, the concept of a stage, relationship to an audience as well as all the typical concept of a song or musical structures like rhythm, key and melody.
The show highlight my conditioning of how to create and listen. From the medium of music theory and scales that determine our tonal palette, to the design and interface of instruments and how they shape sonic signatures. Right to the distribution methods that package sound into songs, albums, playlists for our consumption. In McLuhan terms ‘the medium is the message’, our music is the product of what radio, tv and streaming platforms allow for.
The Marginal Consort experience is not one that can be easily recorded with it’s multidirectional shape. They have released one album through PAN in Berlin that comprises of 8 23 – 25 min long songs that have each racked up just over 1000 streams each on Spotify. Not to the discredit of the musicians, but rather the limitations of the platforms that facilitate our consumption of music. All of the above only makes their performance more valuable and important today.
Work like this highlight how commercial industry control and shape artistic exploration and expression. Listening to music today is an omnipresent behaviour with streaming services giving us access to more audio content than we can consume and any time and anywhere. Yet the attention that can be afforded to a song or album has never been lower.
Whilst I’m not trying to dismiss popular music altogether, it’s important to still engage with experimental practices that challenge the way we consume and create and help us find that next frontier.
Marginal Consort are an act that cannot be contained in an album or song or a playlist, or video. With their lives shows rare I feel very grateful to have witnessed them, but maybe one day a fully immersive VR performance may come close to the real thing.
This Digital Life 