Wobbly
Wet Gate: Peter
Conheim, Steven Dye, and Owen O'Toole
Scott Looney Quartet,
w/ Aaron Bennett and Dan Plonsey, saxophones; Richard Saunders, bass.
Wobbly,
entirely unknown to me, was on this occasion a single person named
Jon who made great little
tape loops and sometimes added live piano on top.
The piano style is hard
to describe. So are the tape loops. I liked it a
lot! I give Wobbly seven-hundred
stars! He has CDs; you can hear for
yourself.
About 118 people paid
good money to see Wet Gate. Wet Gate is like a
celebration of projectionists.
You see the three projectionists projecting
from onstage onto the
back of a screen between you and them. Each one had a
dozen or more film loops,
and they spent almost as much time changing loops
as showing them. They
also processed the sound tracks, mostly (exclusively?)
by changing speed and
adding delay. Many of their loops seemed to come from
industrial and commercial
films. I liked them a lot too. I liked seeing them
working to project.
The actual images were pretty mundane, but sometimes
they superimposed them,
or reflected them onto walls. The flimsiness of film
itself as a medium was
also close to the surface of the performance, what
with the difficulties
experienced and the occasional breakage. They can come
back again!
Scott Looney is relatively
new in town. We didn't do a great job with the
tunes, but the improvs
were good - the addition of tiny toy instruments
worked well, I thought.
Another varied evening! How nice for us, isn't it?
- Dan Plonsey