John Hudak/Jason Kahn/Bruce Tovsky - For the Time Being (Cut)

John Hudak/Jason Kahn/Bruce Tovsky
For the Time Being
Cut

A better way of writing the artist list would be like this: John Hudak w/ (Jason Kahn, Bruce Tovsky.) Hudak is the common term to both pieces on the disc, on the first he collaborates with Kahn, and Tovsky he works with on the 2nd. Both collaborations were recorded live; the one with Kahn was at the Diapason Gallery, located anomalously near Koreatown in midtown Manhattan (the only Gallery I know in the immediate vicinity), and the 2nd at the Roulette Festival of Mixology. I remember putting both of these dates into my mental calendar, and swearing profusely when I realized that I’d forgotten both.

There’s a type of experimental music that I haven’t figured out how to categorize yet. Maybe "circular music"? The best way to tell is to put the suspected piece on repeat and listen casually; when you’ve been through it a few times, pay close attention for a few moments and try to figure out where you are in it’s linear progression. If you can’t really figure it out, than that loss of temporal referent in a piece of experimental music is what I mean by circularity.

I suspect that this sort of thing has its roots in Satie, but I find it to have taken its highest form in the work of Maurizio Bianchi. I’ll quote a friend of mine, Jim Flannery, who wrote about this aspect of MB on an old post to DroneOn:

The evanescence of the experience had something to do with the composition (or "decomposition", as he called it) as well ... Bianchi's special talent was for draining any hint of perceptible goal-seeking out of the material: no tension/release, no elaboration/reaffirmation of pattern, no building to high pitch/volume, no satisfied settling back into a tonic, no triumph of consonance over dissonance (or vice versa), no drama, no program. No progress. No history. Just this *block* of *sound*.

Circularity has something to do with narrative, and the absence of linearity thereof. When it comes to Hudak and Kahn’s duo laptop collaboration, the movement seems as such. When their half of the disc is on, the record sounds as though it could have easily started as few hours ago, and will end a few days henceforth. It likely has something to do with the sounds themselves; it is as though Hudak and Kahn are controlling interlacing clouds of sounds: slow waves of static hiss, pulsed sinewaves, clanking percussion samples, low drones. You can pick the layers out of you listen closely, but the blur is both vertically across the sound field as it is across time. The overall impression one gets is of days where the mornings aren’t beginnings; look to college life when the days seem to be bracketed more by the writing of papers than by the rise and fall of the sun, where patterns and habits emerge and dissolve in quick succession, and life seems to move in overlapping, intersecting circles. Hudak and Kahn are far more poised in their execution of these sorts structures than students like me who stumble through it, but regardless, the logic seems about to be the same.

The 2nd piece on the disc, the collaboration of Tovsky and Hudak, however, is of no interest to me. Tovsky plucks iterative patterns on his guitar, treats them through his computer, loops them, speeds them up, and adds some more notes, while (from what I’m guessing) Hudak drones away in the background. I find their duo to be astronomically dull and a chore to listen to; the two layers have a tangential relationship at most, Tovsky’s guitar seems to be entirely digital in it’s output, most of its contribution occurs in the higher end of the frequency spectrum, whether by plucked notes, or glittery metallic sounds. Hudak makes sweeping, spacey guitar drones. I wouldn’t want to say that there’s nothing of merit on this section of the disc, only that whatever merit is there, I am deaf to.