Plantasia Review
Plantasia is a two-day ambient music festival held in Chicago's Garfield Park Conservatory. The festival takes its name from Mort Garson's 1976 record, Mother Earth's Plantasia.
~ Day 1 ~
Vines:
Very meek. Domesticated Music that is careful not to impose on anything or anyone, like an unsure Weyes Blood.
Even when the music was “loud” it felt forced. The mistyness of the synth work doesn't even conjure up interesting gasses to put us to sleep, just a weak grey haze.
What is with this neverending fog of ambient music? Nothing is distinguished except for the escaped excesses of whatever sound effects the person is using. This certainly falls below the ideals of Brian Eno's conception of what ambient music should be — “as ignorable as it is interesting”. This checks one of those boxes! Vines shouldn’t bear the brunt of this problem by herself though. It’s a boringly naturalized problem - see “Drone” rodeos/sleepovers.
Boredom is as much a sickness as it is a defense mechanism. I felt myself getting angrier the longer I had to listen to this music because of its aestheticized boringness.
During a song a train passed, after which she looked up and said “I actually don’t mind the train passing by.”
I bet you don’t! But you don’t even have a choice do you?
Mild Mannered Millennial Music.
Kara Lis Coverdale:
The steely inharmonic shards Coverdale played created its own kind of sweetness and harmony. This was undercut after she introduced some heavy-handed bass which I’ve noticed as a gimmick a lot of electronic artists use to give the music a mask of solemnity and “body”.
The synthetic and “cold” unnatural quality of electronic music gets pulled back into the “warmth”. It takes a lot of talent to wrangle electronic music back into a flattened naturalism. Air and Earth.
The most interesting parts of the music were where she drifted away from the Disney pagan synth warbling she was doing.
Suzanne Ciani:
Suzanne Ciani’s set had the virtue of not kowtowing to the self-imposed soft-spokenness that pervaded the entire festival.
I don’t want to make it seem like I prefer loudness over quietness, but what’s actually frustrating is one gets the sense that most of these artists have inherited a style that has become uninteresting because it’s lost sight of what it's doing formally. Rote performance.
Modernist artists used silence as a protest against the hustle and bustle of the ever same. Silence is not the literal absence of sound or words, but the expression of what can’t be said. As Theodor Adorno put it “Aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute: in Beckett’s oeuvre a language remote from all meaning is not a speaking language and this is its affinity to muteness. Perhaps all expression, which is most akin to transcendence, is as close to falling mute as in great new music, nothing is so full of expression as what flickers out.” Ambient music's quietness forgets this, but wants to continue making music through tepid whispers, sans formal questions. Quietness represses silence.
Those that stress Suzanne’s importance as a pioneering female electronic musician do an injustice to the music at hand. But then again maybe the impulse to prop her up as a figurehead for female artists is because there might not be much to talk about. Her arpeggiated harmonies become dead sound objects zooming through the speakers.
Ultimately her performance felt more like a demo performance for Buchla through quad speakers.
~ Day 2 ~
Voice Actor:
I walked into the Horticulture Hall and noticed everyone was already sitting on the ground like an adult daycare. If a Noelia Towers painting could make music it would sound like this.
There was a screen set up that wrapped around the stage so one couldn’t see who was performing. It was shaped like a cage. Videos projected onto this screen-cage. I reached out to grab my drink and when I looked up I realized that I could see the performer through the screen bathed in red light. Mid length brown hair and a short grey dress. She kept her head bowed. I don’t remember her ever looking up directly into the crowd, even with the barrier. Given the strangeness of the set up it felt like an art installation.
On her cage was a badly projected small square video of horses. The young girl's “horse craze” was something already recognized by Anna Freud. Erotic identification with the horse and sublimation of penis envy. Horses have become the subject of many young women's art today. However, what seems to be repressed now is that the young girl's identification with the horse was a pleasurable phallic activity and not an enclosed image of passive femininity. Horses are men, not women.
Partway through the show, I noticed I was blocking out the music, so I forced myself to pay attention. The distanced playful music of artists like James Ferraro, Dean Blunt, Inga Copeland, etc., that cut up and rearranged the music of their time seems to have provided the foundation for the artsy adult contemporary of a new generation.
At times her voice sounded like a fusion of Fever Ray and Bjork, and I was able to catch some words she spoke-sang: “What is this embarrassing desire of mine? What is that? Why is that?” The funny thing is that none of this stuff is hers, it's all received from the culture.
It was like watching and listening to a music box that contained all the accumulated online images of the not-so-distant past that have become the scars of honor for the anemic youth, projected back without any sense of pride or ownership — if anything she was embarrassed about them.
Can the caged e-girl sing? No. But she can murmur a few lines about an injured innocence and sheepishly display what she's been hoarding.
Tim Hecker:
A presentation of beautifully bruised and self-pummeling music. The destructive character of Hecker’s music registered a problem. It was almost as if he was trying to get the passive spirit of ambient music to fight back by beating it black and blue.
The sub pulses strangle the cliched mid-range vocal sounds into new shapes and forms, suffocating the floating, disembodied vocals, and every vowel that manages to escape is a different shade of purple — a “harmony in ultraviolet” indeed .
There was an awesome moment where Hecker started to play metal-esque power chords and the fog evanescing from the stage appeared to take the form of a swanlike figure, drifting into the crowd.
Someone I was with said they didn’t like the set because it was too cinematic, but is this not the case with everything that can be categorized as ambient? There is a valid criticism here in that it rightly sniffs out the Wagnerian spirit of mystification. But this critique has also become too common among academic musicians. Really, the supposed hatred of manipulation expressed by the anti-cinematic sentiment has come to express the fear of being moved. Maybe the real problem was that it wasn't Wagnerian enough to break listeners from this turgid mood. What was most disappointing was not that it was too cinematic, but that it seemed to consciously register a problem, yet out of fear of losing the audience, fell back into the glum exercises that have been endlessly repeated — the ready-made melancholic experience.
Ultimately Hecker’s destructiveness was not enough to escape the deadness of ambient music and music more generally. But anything new must confront the old, and we have been living through the neverending practice of kicking that can down the road. This gives all attempts to create something new a monstrous overgrown character. Like tumors, all the old predigested forms and impulses find a home on this deformed body. The unquestioning artist welcomes the “new” growth with a smile because it hasn't yet prevented the beast from limping along in a circle. The serious artist must be this beast’s surgeon.
//
The next, an autumn light,
offered up to a blind
feeling which came that way. Others, many,
with no place but their own heavy centres; glimpsed and
avoided.
Foundlings, stars,
black, full of language; named
after an oath which silence annulled.
All Souls
by Paul Celan
