Beyond a Minimal Distance

Posted by admin on May 30th, 2007 filed in music

AVVA: Toshimaru Nakamura and Billy Roisz

A crowd of no more than fifteen turned out to listen to Nakamura’s no-input mixing board at the Star and Shadow last night. Billy Roisz’s video mixer fed beautifully off the signal, immediate responses that actually suggest something new, drawing out connections and new elements in a way that avoids the banality of many shows that include ‘live visuals’. It seems common for attempts at ’sound reactive visuals’ to attain little more than a knee jerk response. But in this performance a connection was made; an excitation of matter, rendering sonorous and visual the silent and invisible, making consistent the silent noise of material forces.

Nakamura presents a feedback which cuts, attaining a proximity that almost burns, cutting straight through and bursting the minimal distance or framing of representation or spectacle. The intensity of sound causes a happening on the inside, every turn of the listeners head brings about a change in tone and timbre. Sound fills the room and comes in from all directions, enveloping listeners. The task becomes finding a comfortable space between the waves. The performance involves the establishment of ephemeral fields, audio and visual fields void of any sense of distance. The cutting noise was one of the finest examples of the machinic phylum at work in sound. Roisz’s visuals presented an emerging field of noise, a noise which is constitutive of the space it fills, a space which collapses in on itself when the performance ends. The same is true of the sonorous experience, as the performance ends the field collapses and the world fades back in. Spatial senses are reawakened in a somewhat heightened state after having become thoroughly confused in sonorous extimacy. This extimacy is afforded by a privilege of sound, its material-force capable of such intensity, of an imprint upon, as well as movement through and beyond, the body.

This type of work performs an individuation along the lines of what Deleuze refers to as the One-Crowd: “The people must be individualized, not according to the persons within it, but according to the affects it experiences, simultaneously or successively” (A Thousand Plateaus, 376). This was a construction of fields across which various signals passed, a rare experience unfortunately missed by many.