Michael Renkel/Sonia Bender - 7ft._KONKA

Absinth
011

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. A couple months back, Erstwhile released “Gdansk Queen”, the collaboration between Toshimaru Nakamura and videographer Billy Roisz (working under the name, AVVA), an interactive performance in which the sounds created on Nakamura’s no-input mixing board directly affected the abstract video images designed and also real-time manipulated by Roisz. As great a disparity in taste as there is among eai listeners with regard to music, I’d hazard a guess that there’s an even larger divide when it comes to the visual arts. My own reaction to the video portion of that disc was that it was often too “thin”, too akin to much that I’d seen and not particularly cared for since at least the 70s in that field, although there were certainly numerous moments when everything clicked.

There’s a certain amount of structural similarity between that project and “7ft_KONKA” by Renkel and Bender but the results are strikingly different. Obviously, the music itself is something else entirely, Renkel’s guitar and electronics work dealing more with quasi-melodic repetitive patterns that almost always retain an underlying tonal quality. And Bender’s concerns lie largely with concrete imagery albeit layered within abstract motifs in a manner that recalls Rauschenberg’s print collages. The central difference is that whatever the particular connections between Renkel’s activity and its role in instigating the video images, it’s not as overt as in the AVVA disc. There are times when it’s clear that a shift in the sound input is altering, in some fashion, what’s flashing before your eyes but more often, there’s not a overt correspondence, even if you get the slight impression that it’s there, somewhere. This makes for a much more subtle and cohesive experience, independent of how one feels about the music and video as such. Your consciousness is free to flit back and forth between that part of the music acting on the video and those parts washing over the images on their own if indeed you’re able to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I found both the music and the videos quite absorbing when experienced in tandem. I have a feeling that Renkel’s music, by itself, wouldn’t have struck me quite as positively as has much of his recent work, such as last years fine “Errorkoerper III”. Indeed, there’s a sequence midway through on this disc where he lays out an acid rock, full fuzz assault, the inclusion of which is as baffling as it is annoying, even if paired with appropriately psychedelic video. Bender’s work, on the other hand, held my attention throughout. She strikes a fine balance between rapid fire images and sustained shots. The x-ray “movie” of what appears to be a child’s skull, held for several minutes, is hauntingly beautiful. She uses a great deal of staggered repetition, a back and forth approach that I could understand some viewers finding grating although I thought it generally worked quite well. A later montage that includes a black and white TV image of a young guy writing, overlaid with shots of a man repeatedly turning in his sleep and another gently caressing his penis, is as oneirically moving as a subsequent bathroom sequence is nightmarish.

I don’t want to make too much of any comparison between two projects that really only share superficial similarities but while the best portions of “Gdansk Queen” are, in my opinion, more profound than the work displayed herein, “7_ft. KONKA”, on the whole, provided me with a more consistently rewarding experience.

absinth

Renkel