(June 6, 2024)
by maggie astrid clark
If—as Phil Elverum sang during his performance of an unreleased Mount Eerie song at the West End Cultural Centre (WECC) on June 26—recorded music is a “statue of a waterfall,” then concert reviews are poems about a blurry photograph of said statue. Words cannot capture the experience of a sound, let alone reconstruct a memory that is already fading from the mind.
But this isn’t a review of that concert. I’m here to talk about a different concert that took place at the WECC earlier in the month: “Pulse,” the Cluster Festival show featuring Debashis Sinha, Jason Tait, and Compost. I do not know exactly why the festival organizers felt inspired to group these acts together on the same bill, but I’m glad they did. It made for an entertaining and eclectic set of tunes.
The evening began with the festival’s artistic director Ash Au introducing all three upfront and closing with a plea. “The world’s burning,” Au said before encouraging the audience to take the energy we received from the night’s music and put it back into the community. I couldn’t quite envision what they meant by this—and, moreover, it’s always been difficult for me to discern where my energies are best spent—but it was a lovely sentiment nonetheless.
Up first was Debashis Sinha, an electronic composer from Toronto. He played a quadrophonic drone composition which I seem to recall Au telling us was untitled but which the program pamphlet I received referred to as “Rückstreuung.” (This is part of the reason I opened the review with a reference to that Mount Eerie lyric. I am writing about this concert a month-and-a-half after the fact, so my recollection’s a bit hazy at this point. Unless you were there and remember otherwise, you’ll just have to take my word for it!)
In describing the piece, Sinha noted that the “physics of the sound” change depending on where you were in the auditorium; it apparently sounded different to each person. He invited us to sway, to get up and walk around, as the drone itself was—by his own admission—“not very dynamic.” As he began his performance, the screens behind him displayed swirling, grey plumes of smoke that seemed to move slightly but which very well could have been an optical illusion. I’m once again uncertain, but it seemed thematically appropriate.
I now offer you a series of descriptions of the sounds that I believe I heard over the course of Sinha’s approximately 20-minute performance: an aluminum can being kicked around on a tiled floor, a metallic whir, 2-by-4s clanking together, the static hiss of a record spinning in its groove, a shaving razor, wind flapping a chain around a pole, creaking wooden planks. When someone opened the door—to go out for a smoke or to buy a beer or to use the restroom, I can’t say—it too became part of the piece.
As I shifted my head from side to side, leaning across the empty seats next to me, I could detect slight variations in tone and texture. Perhaps these might’ve been more pronounced if I had stood up and walked around, but I was comfortable where I was seated and didn’t feel like moving. I guess I’ll never know what the piece might have sounded like from a different vantage point. I’ll have to live with that lack of knowledge for the rest of my life.
Once the drone had concluded, Sinha rubbed his hands together and said, “Thank you, everyone,” to which I felt like responding: “No, man, thank you! All I did was sit here.”
Second, on the docket was Jason Tait. I was curious to see what his performance would entail, as I was previously familiar with him as the drummer of a little-known local outfit called The Weakerthans. Would it be an extended percussive arrangement, Steve Reich-style? Apparently not! Tait’s offering was instead a semi-improvised modular synth piece. It was syncopated, polyrhythmic, and fun, so I had a grand old time. Unfortunately, I don’t know how else to describe the composition beyond an appeal to the concepts of “bleep” and “bloop.”
After the performance, I ran into a friend of mine who explained to me and my partner what a “modular synth” even was, which helped immensely. It’s one of those terms I’d been aware of for many years but, for whatever reason, hadn’t felt inclined to Google. And now I don’t have to!
Tait left the stage area without a word and made way for Compost, a three-piece instrumental jazz trio. According to the Cluster Festival program, the band takes influence from “90s beat makers and European electronic music, cycling between movement and meditation,” but I would describe them—perhaps reductively—as “Winnipeg’s answer to BadBadNotGood.” They, too, devoted their allotted time to the performance of a single piece titled “Decomposed.” The drums, bass, and electric piano were accompanied by spoken word sections and a time-lapsed video projection of unfurling stalks, growing seeds, and pulsating yellow fungus.
To accommodate the video display, the WECC killed the lights—a choice that made perfect sense in context but which had the unfortunate side-effect of making it hard for me to scribble in my little notebook. One phrase in particular rang out to me, however.
“There are no words for anything.”