Soliton — a recent collaboration between Chris Corsano and Jenny Gräf — played the only set of this particular event to an audience sitting on red velvet stools beneath still-in-Saigon ceiling fans: a Sunday night’s light entertainment, short and, as they say, sweet. Well, sweet may not the most apt of descriptions for the sounds, but it might be apt enough for the warm feelings induced in my innards. And I say short, though I don’t really know; the sense of time passing was lost to me as the music quieted my inner monologue’s inane witterings. But when the pulses, thrums, and clattering were abruptly withdrawn with a quiet off-mic “thanks” from Gräf, I felt both calm and — like some other members of the audience — that more would certainly have been welcome.
Jenny Gräf (one part of Metalux, sound and film artist) synthesized sounds by turns murky, grainy, jagged, or shrilling; she sang too, all meaning lost along the signal chain; sometimes she looped little guitar figures, also quickly lost in the mass of sounds created with or processed through a particularly intriguing device, the tranoe. One, I’m told, of only four in the world, it’s a synth that can be patched in any which way, including skin contact: an interestingly tactile instrument, put to good use in the construction of diverse and gritty sounds. And while Gräf provided the texture and much of the shape of the performance, Corsano’s ever-frenetic drumming was responsible for driving up the tension, pushing and pulling on Gräf’s muddy loops and distorted vocals. As he has been known to do, Corsano manipulated the timbre and pitch of his drums with blocks of wood, bowls, and other miscellaneous objects without even so much as hinting at slowing down, circling around the beat and studiously avoiding the temptation to lock too rigidly to it — not so much accompaniment as provocation.
Afterward, Corsano told me he would rather push things toward falling apart than just watch it happen; maybe so, but from an external perspective, the way the two played off each other was pleasing. Soliton may be a newish collaboration (this was their fifth show), but the two are old hands at collaborating, and it’s easy enough to see in their give-and-take. Their combined tendency to avoid stagnation ensured it was a performance that never became settled, never too satisfied with finding itself or anyone else. Taken with the abrasiveness of many of the surfaces provided by Gräf, this might seem to preclude inducing any sense of bliss or tranquility; all the same, at the end of the evening I left with a peaceful feeling.
