Although their styles varied, the performers at a showcase of avant-garde music over the weekend were generally united in their commitment to challenging boundaries. The two-day event at Lounge Ax included two forward-thinking Chicago groups, Gastr del Sol and Tortoise.
English duo Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith, who play an unusual blend of ecclesiastical choral music and improvisational rock using guitars and cheap keyboards, showed visible delight in scrambling their audience’s expectations. They undermined the solemnity of their music with cheesy drum machine beats and their cheerful onstage demeanor.
Gastr del Sol, a shifting aggregation of players that coalesces around multi-instrumentalists Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs, opened and closed the showcase with very different sets.
The first night they were joined by seminal minimalist composer and violinist Tony Conrad. They performed his 1971 composition “Ten Years on the Infinite Plane,” accompanying Conrad on bass guitar and a homemade electric monochord, a three-stringed instrument. The 45-minute performance conjured an atmosphere of ritual contemplation through measured repetitions of sustained string tones.
The second night, accompanied by drummer and synthesizer player John McEntire, Grubbs and O’Rourke played a set that successfully spotlighted their juxtaposition of incongruous elements. They ranged from jagged rock rhythms and feedback washes on a medley of “The Wrong Soundings” and “Thos. Dudley Ah! Old Must Dye” to the dense “Quietly Approaching,” which layered accordion over keyboards to create a brooding soundscape.
On the second night, Conrad performed a piece from his new album “Slapping Pythagoras,” which was recorded in Chicago last year with the assistance of O’Rourke and Steve Albini, providing the weekend’s most challenging moment. His string trio played a 55-minute version of “The Heterophony of the Avenging Democrats, Outside, Cheers the Incineration of the Pythagorean Elite, Whose Shrill Harmonic Agonies Merge and Shimmer Inside Their Torched Meeting House.”
The piece’s title is a response to the Pythagorean concept of celestial harmony, in which music is a reflection of both cosmic and social organization. Conrad (also a trained mathematician, an experimental filmmaker and a professor of media studies with the State University of New York at Buffalo) intends his heterophonous music, in which the various instrumental voices stand out without blending, as a democratic response to autocratic ways of thinking-musically and socially.
Tortoise, which employed drums, bass guitars and keyboards, closed the first night and opened the second. The quintet’s music is less concerned with overriding aesthetic questions and more oriented toward laying down a groove, and the success or failure of each piece depended more on the quality of the playing than on the compositional ideas.
