Diffuse was the name of a concert I attended on October 16, the second night of the Music Gallery’s X Avant Festival, this year titled TeXtures, now in its 19th season. The event was the realization of a long-held dream by Michael Palumbo – to produce a concert where the music is diffused through multiple speakers. At its heart, the evening was both a celebration of improvised music and the release of the vinyl LP You are the Right Length.
Palumbo organizes and curates Exit Points, a monthly series of recorded, free-improvised concerts held at ArrayMusic on the last Friday of every month. Excerpts from these improvised sets were selected for the LP, and this concert premiered both sides of the just-released vinyl album in surround-sound mixes co-created by Palumbo and sound engineer Matt Legee. The album is a kind of sampler of the entire Exit Points discography, crafting shorter beginnings and endings from the more extensive original improvisations. Each excerpt was then given an innovative title.
Live solo performances by Zoma, Gayle Young and Palumbo himself rounded out the evening. During the intermissions, a photography exhibit curated by Mike Filippov – featuring photos from the past 18 months of Exit Points – was also available for viewing.
The room was arranged in the round, with four concentric circles of chairs facing 12 speakers that surrounded the audience. At the center was the digital setup for Legee, Young’s instrument (the Amaranth), and a microphone for Palumbo, who acted as the MC for the evening, giving the pertinent details for each piece. Since there was no stage to focus on, Palumbo began the evening recommending the audience close their eyes and allow themselves to be fully immersed in the sounds as they moved around the room.
Since improvisation is at the heart of the Exit Points experience, some of the tracks we heard highlighted the magical, spontaneous moments that often happen in that setting. One piece, This Is Where You Find Me, featured an unintended sound: a mic placed to capture the kick drum was accidentally knocked over during the intermission, landing inside the drum, possibly right against the drum skin. This resulted in a deep, resonant tone that was emphasized in the LP mixdown.
Another excerpt, From Horizon, I Am Sun, captured what happened after the improvising group thought they had reached an ending. Instead of applauding, both the audience and performers sat in silence for 40 seconds until poet and playwright Xina Gilani punctuated the air with the spoken phrase “Be the Word.” Madeline Artel immediately followed on trumpet, with Meghan Cheng on violin, David Sait on 21-string guzheng and Palumbo on modular synth quickly joining in. The performance exploded from there.
The album title was another happy accident, instigated by Xina Gilani, when they said, “You are the right light”. Palumbo misheard it as “You are the right length”, and decided it would make a great album title. He later realized his mistake, a type of misinterpretation known as a mondegreen.
Two other works caught my ears: in Creatures Rise iii: Arrival Home, a prompt by singer and guitarist Dieufaite Charles for the audience to sing along created a lively texture of interlocking rhythmic phrases, joined by vocalist Laura Swankey and the other performers. Unfortunately, the audience’s voices were not mic’d. It’s Only Fifteen Dollars for a Potato Party featured a stunning performance by vocalist Christine Duncan, whose voice delivered constantly shifting cries and melismas that spun amongst the speakers.
Concerts featuring acousmatic music—music specially created for presentation through speakers—are a rare opportunity for Toronto audiences. Such concerts, however, have a strong tradition in both Montreal and Vancouver. Before New Adventures in Sound Art relocated to the Almaguin Highlands, they regularly presented spatialized concerts in Toronto. Palumbo’s vision is to bring acousmatic concerts back to the city and encourage both artists and audiences to fully explore the potentials of this highly textured art form.
