AnarchyMoon anok1
Using “glass, metal, suling , electronics, programming, space, body, and power,” Bob Bellerue’s Threat Level Charlie reveals meanings being sounds. He chooses “engineered materials that are emblematic of the consumer need for protection and comfort” to make music out of the substances of our lives. Threat Level Charlie is a harbinger of what’s already happening in your body. You just don’t know it yet, until you listen. Then you remember, and realize. Our body is a locus of forces at combat, and we do not control which forces win out. We try to, but we can’t. Bellerue translates this process into sound and matter, conjoined. Glass gets bown and blowed. Contact mics pick it up. The glass is actually hanging.
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Eep. Evocative whistles like alien landing signals and gristly bubbles and hypnotic resurgences of mild feedback – in and out, like a cave breathing deep – cause the whispery, respiratory air of the first track to absorb concentration. This beginning slows down your biorhythms; it gets you in a place where you can listen. You are a listening machine in fact. Something molten crinkles;
a cauldron of stirring tones glimmer thickly from a satellite to a star: bloodflow reorganized. It ebbs you in, it makes you receptive, and, once you’re ready, and the materials have undergone adequate preparation, density and nuance are checked and re-checked to assure absolute surrender. This track ends on the gentle fade of a passing star, but not before a sudden surge in the sixth minute makes it clear that no matter what is happening on the surface, something else is at work within.
Swervy abstract sirens whirr in the distance of the second track, but they’re not pure; they just rotate in sonic space the way a visual siren would. So many layers. Digital eagles swoop down, but not to attack, rather, to condemn us for not flying. Wildly pinging claps and swats are eaten by the static of the sounds surrounding them, and the skitterish radio tuning that began the track supports our concern: are we being infiltrated? Internal shrieks made audible would seem to corroborate the findings of the panel, but there is often no place to turn when you know you’re right. Thwispy washes of unselfish discipline emerge and recede to raindroppy thwacking. The layers of sound events disappear, appear, and dissipate. We can fight to disbelieve what surrounds us, or we can submit like reluctant angels to the fray.
A sharp transition demarcates cut 2 from 3, where a cellar door swings and screams. Glass is bowed, and the horror of a complex brain replete with too much psychological foiling draws attention to itself. Long streaks of bow action skip and squeak like car wheel brakes. A ball of jelly is strapped to a contact mic and slapped on a clean wood floor at the four minute mark.
By the time it finally explodes you’ve been begging for it. You want to turn it up and grimace in pleasure. Let it ride over you and overturn your cathartic ass. We are subjects and we are subjected to this harsh atmosphere and we do demand it. Acoustic scrapes and electronic hums come together, thrillingly inside each other, the one projected through the other, using the other as a resonating device. Howl and border.
An apron sexually torn.
You literally hear the electronics through the acoustic material.
There is something refined and bitter about the ending, like a friend that is out of control naturally, but somehow not fretted over. Bellerue harnesses the volatile energy of feedback like it’s a slinky, or his best friend, or a glass of water, or silly putty. Enter a Doppler-ish fade of swirls. This is physical and deeply abstract: the sounds could be the narration of a completely internal crisis, or they could be a status gauge of contemporary political life. A radio gets tuned in near the ultimate end of Threat Level Charlie , and it gets received through the very materials of our security and panic. Radios deliver news, and it is in these materials, traveling through them, whether we admit it or not, that the attitudes of our times are carried. We only have to tune them in to know it. We like to think we are safe, keeping ourselves secured and sheltered from the news – “it’s all in our minds/hearts/opinions/beliefs/votes” – but we’re not. The basic objects around us carry the waves, receiving them and holding them and shaking with their storehouse of atmospheric pulses. All it takes is a well-placed mic to hear them. I know I’m repeating myself. Do you? Are you repeating this? Where do repetitions come from? How does a threat work?
The news is always within objects – sometimes silently, sometimes not. The materials contain the broadcast, the news, the signals. It’s harrowing, gracey.
- Andrew Choate
This recording was done in 2002 in several different locations, then edited together later to form the composition. Here are lots of other details including a halfnormal statement about Threat Level Charlie.
Thank you Andrew for your reflections into the minutia. It’s good to come across this reviewed here even after it has drifted so far along the necroelectromagnetic aeon. Bob’s work consistently and inspiringly intertwines idea and practice for me, leaving ends you need to pull, unraveling in the direction of uncertainty. That art plays out the concrete existence of “warring elements”. That art is about making trouble, creating problems or being a problem and letting no one “solve” you. That we need not begin the process of making art as if we were already in the art history books looking back at ourselves with all-knowing eyes in that symbiotic antagonism called tradition, unless we wink, as if to say, with Blake’s woman clothed in the sun: the dry dry cake of life needs one thin layer of glaze alone: there are great cold distances under our fingernails, somewhere this blip already stopped, under a bleeding helium ulcer e pluribus unum, like asteroid scratch, rings a tea-bell no one hears. That we work in an area of freedom and in a spirit of discovery, almost of science, out of a basic instinct rather than from an ideology used to draw the line between legitimacies and consolidate the walls of corporate gain. Sugar? That we unmask powers operative at large in the materials themselves because they alone are the energies that compel us. On into the breaking point, a kind of collapsed inter-cultural space, where the more impressively sturdy ossature of the industrialist situationism still supports the thick skin of the era of supercollidors and eai. These are all things I felt in common with Bob’s articulation. I call his CD an articulation because it carries for me the same “sense” that his words do and because I see in his life a parallel to his art. There is a spirit of seeing out the process to the very end, even beyond that finality which violates the conventions of the representable and casts the work in terms that cannot be so easily converted into the tender of the unquestionable objects of bourgeois culture. This is very existential work. It has a rare honesty. But it is not a work that withdraws from posing serious problems for the consumer. There is a sense of vital and positive danger in Bob’s work that communicates on a subsonic VLF similar to those elephants use when they flock about to gather the bones of some elder. When I played Threat Level Charlie on the air in Albuquerque, NM, one of the station’s technicians called. He was evidently concerned that we had left microphones turned on in the studio then under reconstruction down the hall. It took me a full minute to fully comprehend what he thought he was hearing on the radio and another minute after he hung up to consider the likelihood of disguised commentary. When Bob came to perform a week later, downriver from Los Alamos, I was to learn shortly that the glass was not being hung. It sat horizontally on blocks (Styrofoam, as I recall) where in addition to being bowed it functioned as a kind of resonator absorbing and transmitting acoustic sounds from his other instruments. Although I might have been disappointed that I was kept from the anticipation of the glass breaking up before us all, I began to hear echoes of the large glass in a very different way, not the obvious ones. There is more going on here than meets the ear. But what is the next threat level? When will it really be reached, what…will it sound…
onward anarchy moon...
I'm glad to find your comments here jeff - I was talking to bob last night and wanted to read over this piece again after thinking about some things and your voice is a nice surprise - even if it has been a year since you wrote them!
Bob's going to have a residency at Dangerous Curve here in LA for a couple weeks, with two performances in January. He taps our culture with a special sensitivity and I'm really looking forward to these next performaces.
You're especially on target when you highlight his honesty - he really deals with stuff and makes it sonicly and objectly and ethically present.
Posted by: unwrinkled at December 22, 2006 11:41 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................