Fast Forward | Statement

About Musique a’ la Mode
Fast Forward

Photo by Jeremy Welsh

Musique a’ la Mode is a concert work in which all the instruments are derived from the common day kitchen. Kitchen utensils and cooking hardware are familiar artifacts in my performances, from the large scale Feeding Frenzy concerts to all types of metal pans and bowls and food in my solo and group works. The difference in Musique a’ la Mode is that all the musical instruments are cookware. If you need a mallet, you use a spatula, or a wooden spoon—for a diversity of notes, a collection of stainless steel bowls...

Originating as a solo work over the last year and performed at the Umami Festival in New York, Musique a‘ la Mode allowed me to experiment with a carefully selected array of kitchen tools, from cake pans to blenders, to chinese sauce pots, to bamboo wok brushes and beyond. The prerequisite for including particular objects was for them to possess an inherently interesting sound character. From that starting point, the music was built up through an empirical process of working with the instruments to discover how they could best be used in the composition. If the results were sonically unsatisfactory, then the instrument was discarded.

While creating that solo version of the work, I came to the realization that developing further compositional complexities would involve using more players than just myself. Counterpoint and versatility could only really be achieved with more performers. Thanks to the generous support of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in Berlin, a quartet was formed to create the group version for a concert at Sophiensaele in Berlin in October of 2009. David Linton, Michael Evans, and myself traveled to Berlin from New York and I invited my long time friend and collaborator David Moss to join us when we arrived. We came with almost no instruments and absolutely no composition. Over the course of two weeks, we amassed a large battery of kitchenware from stores, donations and flea markets and isolated ourselves in a studio for ten hours a day until the work was complete. The intention was to have three musicians playing the kitchenware and one musician to control and guide the resultant sounds. During my years with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, we always had someone to occupy this role. Their ‘instruments’ are the sounds that are sent to them. They have final control over where and how the sounds are placed and heard in the space and therefore how the soundscape is perceived by the listener.

Biographies of Musicians

© Mutesouvenir/Kai Bienert

Fast Forward is a New York based english composer and performer who makes music with almost anything. He is probably best known for his in depth musical explorations of the Trinidadian steel pan and his music-theatre works for diverse instrumentation. Feeding Frenzy, a culinary concert for 5 musicians, 5 cooks, 5 waiters and the audience has been performed in many countries, for many occasions, including the 15 year celebration of Freunde Guter Musik at The Museum for Contemporary Art in Berlin and the Time of Music Festival in Finland. It ran for three seasons at the Kitchen Center in New York. For 3 years, he toured extensively as a guest composer and musician for The Merce Cunningham Dance Company and continues to work closely with them as a musician and composer. As a teacher, he teaches master classes in composition, improvisation, and music/theater at various institutions including: Time of Music Festival (Viitassari, Finland), Bergen and Trondheim Art Academies (Norway), STEIM (Amsterdam, Holland), Wien University (Vienna), CNDO, (Amsterdam), Theatre pour Danse Contemporain (Paris), Podewil (Berlin) and New York University.

Forward is the first musician to combine the sweet repetitions of Reich, the raw decibel power of Branca, the randomness of Cage and Wolff, and even the stochastic textures of Xenakis. It's a potent combination,carried out with irresistible momentum.

—Kyle Gann,Village Voice.

© Mutesouvenir/Kai Bienert

David Moss is considered one of the most innovative singers and percussionists in contemporary music. He has performed his solo and theater work all over the world, from New York (Lincoln Center) to Venezia (Theatro La Fenice) to Brisbane (Festival). In 1991 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship; in 1992, a DAAD Fellowship (Berlin). Moss is the co-founder and artistic director of the Institute for Living Voice.

Moss has sung with the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, made his Carnegie Hall debut with the American Composers Orchestra, sings regularly with the Ensenble Modern. Moss was twice a featured soloist at the Salzburg. He sings in Heiner Goebbels’s orchestra work “Surrogate Cities” and music-theater work, “Prometheus.”

Moss is currently a fellow at the International Research Center Interweaving Performance Cultures in Berlin.

© Mutesouvenir/Kai Bienert

David Linton (born Newburgh NY 1956) is a Time based multiple media artist traveling the vectors of sound, subculture, and signal flow. He has been active in the downtown NYC experimental arts community for nearly 30 years. Originally a percussionist, David created sound, music, and something in between, for many collaborative dance, theater, & performance settings since his arrival in NY at the end of 1970s. By the later 80s—after a good deal of percussion work along side other musicians: Lee Ranaldo, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Elliott Sharp among others—he was equally known for his live wired solo electro-acoustic drumkit performances as well as his soundscore productions for the Wooster Group & choreographers Karole Armitage & Steven Petronio among many others. Throughout the 90s Linton became a dedicated advocate for the expansion and appreciation of realtime performance in electronic media through the design and/or production of event/environments such as ‘SoundLab’ (1996) and eventually ‘UnityGain’ (1997-present). In 2004 David embarked upon his present course with the launch of his solo audio-visual project: the Bicameral Research Sound & Projection System. With this, Linton aims to make vibrational wave induced perceptual energy states manifest by deploying interconnected measures of electric sound & pulsing light in live action with hand manipulated objects in physical (live camera) space.

He employs an integrated recursive audio & video feedback system of his own perversely simple design modulated by freehand intervention to deliver vigorous eye, ear, and—sometimes—body shaking realtime audio visual performances from which a kind of retro-tech animist ritual “medicine show” emerges where subject and object blur. Thematically David likes to consider that within the 20th Century, 60 Hz alternating electrical current gradually came to function as a primary subliminal Prana in the mass bio-energetic body/culture of human life in North America...

© Mutesouvenir/Kai Bienert

Michael Evans is an improvising drummer/composer whose work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics. He has worked with a wide variety of artists nationally and internationally including: Carla Bley, Alexander Hacke (Einstürzende Neubauten), Fast Forward (GOBO), God Is My Co-Pilot, Gordon Monahan, Evan Parker, William Parker, Elliot Sharp, Christopher Walken, Hal Wilner, and John Zorn. While his primary instrument is an unconventionally altered drumset, he also works with unusual sound sources including found objects, homemade instruments, the theremin and various digital and homemade analog electronics. He has studied movement/sparring/drumming with Professor Milford Graves, drum technique with Joe Morello, tabla with Misha Masud, kanjira with Ganesh Kumar, piano with Connie Crothers and Haitian/Afro-Cuban hand drumming with John Amira. He has performed at the Guggenheim Museum, Lincoln Center, the Dia Art Foundation, the Kitchen, The ICA London, and PS1 to name a very small selection.

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