Friday, February 7, 9 p.m.
Rozz-Tox, 2018 Third Avenue, Rock Island IL
Rozz-Tox puts on a free show of Iowa talent on February 7 as a companion event to follow an exhibition opening that showcases new works on paper by artist Lucas Berns. Acts include Quad Cities-based projects Aqualife and Dog Hairs and Iowa City-based projects Haunter and Gabi Vanek, and the show concludes with a special set in which all four of these solo performers play together.
Davenport-based multi-instrumentalist and lo-fi experimenter Andrew Stuart Cline records music under the name Aqualife. The charming recordings that constitute his newest four-track demonstration, which landed toward the end of 2019 on Bandcamp, were recorded straight to a Tascam tape deck. Cline treats this potential limitation as a boon, as it clearly streamlines his ideas into discrete layers and forces him to pare back any excess in favor of those four individual tracks – which roughly correspond here to electronic percussion, vocals, guitar, and synth/keyboard. All of these elements pick up a nice sense of warmth as they reach us through the tape-deck recording process. The mix-down renders his work as an organic bedroom-pop experiment in which droning synths and crashing guitars serve as a backdrop for his purposefully dreary vocal performances, which land somewhere in the realm of disaffected post-punk muttering. Tracks including “focal point (demo),” with its wandering, reverb-heavy guitar line and monotone vocal proclamations, evoke the work of the dearly missed Calgary rockers Women (or their modern offshoot, Preoccupations) in all their hazy, zoned-out glory.
Gabi Vanek bills herself as “bassoon noise wall,” and her tunes pack the extended technique woodwind bursts and dissociating improvised structures to back up that description. The solo recordings she has posted on her SoundCloud capture the extent to which she can transform her bassoon sound source into something completely alien and purely textural in execution. She processes the instrument through a rig of electronics that stretch, smear, and compound its tones into a standing layer of inhuman drone, which can then serve as a foundation for additional bursts of skronking bassoon soloing. In one sense, her music shares a spirit of unconventional formlessness and an academic approach to the transmutation of sound with experimental composers of the 20th century such as Elaine Radigue, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Edgard Varèse – composers who could coax completely unexpected and abstracted sounds out of traditional orchestral instruments, and who treated individual performances as fields of sound without clear structural markers for their audience to hold onto. Listening to Gabi Vanek’s improvisations seems to make the environment fade away in favor of some dark, at times uncomfortable, but always interesting interstitial zone where time is dilated and conceptions of what an instrument such as the bassoon can do are disrupted.
Aqualife and Gabi Vanek play Rozz-Tox on February 7 alongside Dog Hairs and Haunter, admission to the 9 p.m. concert is free, and more information is available by calling (309)200-0978 or visiting RozzTox.com.
