A giant head. A giant head and a not-so-giant head. Still a giant head. Longing... A dark night under the Brooklyn Bridge. A happy gum man on the floor of the subway plaform. He liked the show more than we did. Listening to a bootleg tape of the show. Has nothing to do with the show, but a very impressive toenail design nonetheless.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the train-wreck of a "show" at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage on June 8th was the result of a simple misunderstanding -- one with its roots in the current ambiguity of the word "performance." I, and it seemed most of the rather large crowd that showed up at the cavernous space underneath (in fact, inside of) the Brooklyn Bridge, assumed that the performances mentioned in the press and advertisements for REMIX were to be performances in the sense of someone on a stage, or at least in the room, doing something you could see, with some connection to what you were hearing. Instead what we got was one long, occasionally shifting DJ set, with no real breaks, no apparent performers and no indication of who was doing what when.

Okay, with that off my chest, let me start at the beginning. The Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage is a huge space inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge (on the Brooklyn side) in New York City. A group called Creative Time produces an interesting and ambitious variety of art/installation and music events in the space. The current installation is NOISEGATE, a video/sound piece by the Austrian duo Granular Synthesis (Kurt Hentschlager and Ulf Langheinrich.) REMIX is a series of 3 "performances" that are meant to have something to do with NOISEGATE. From the brochure: "REMIX: Live collaborations by internationally renowned electronic composers that contextualize Granular Synthesis within the larger field of electronic music. The performances create new sonic imprints on the immersive audio/visual environment of NOISEGATE."

NOISEGATE is projected on 6 large screens. Its main feature is a giant male human head, usually with its colors inverted and tinged with blue or green. The head doesn't do much of anything, it mostly just sits there looking serious, which is in itself a bit disconcerting. Then every once in awhile it jerks around a bit, as if the possessor of the head had been suddenly shocked. Occasionally the colors revert to their normal values, and you the viewer are shocked, as it's a unnerving to see this rather abstract head thing you've been watching suddenly turn into something that looks just like a normal person. Once in awhile the screens begin strobing, adding yet another layer of uneasiness to the visual mix. On the aural side, loud low drones predominate, with occasional loud crackling and clicks that seem to be somehow synced to the video (the head seems to jerk around more during the crackling sounds.) These sounds work extremely well in the space, which is a huge echo chamber. More delicate, detailed sounds would be easily lost. My pant legs were vibrating the whole time!

After about a half hour the sound began to change, which I assumed meant that Pole's set had started. The cool low throbbing stuff went away, and was replaced by ho-hum ambient bleeps and bloops, with some breathy, shokohatchi-ish melodies over the top. No beats, nothing to dance to, no one to watch, not much to do but wander around. This is when I started to hear major grumbling from the crowd, who had already paid $17-$20, waited outside in lines for about 46 minutes and stood around in a dark, loud, smokey, crowded cave for half an hour. And now that the "show" had started, there was nothing to do or see! I heard a number of people talking about it being a hoax, and saw several others who were visibly agitated. Most everyone else just seemed a bit confused.

The new sounds went on for awhile, then sort of faded away and the droney stuff returned. My friend saw Scanner (Robin Rimbaud), who was supposed to go on 2nd, and talked to him for a bit. Then Scanner looked up towards the balcony where we assumed the DJ booth was (it was totally obscured from view) and said "Oh, I have to go on now." With that we got a little excited, thinking that finally something would happen...

Well, not much happened. For a while some gritty synth pads started shaking things up, but they were followed by more mellow ambient stuff. I felt like I was in a crowded, smoky bar with a really bass-heavy sound system. We weren't even really sure that Scanner was responsible for the sounds we were hearing until some typically Scannerish chopped up vocal samples and stuttering voices appeared in the mix. That only lasted a few minutes, though, before the ambient synth pads came back. Hrmmm. By this point many people had left. Most of the others seemed to be trying to talk on their cell phones! There was even a group of "bunny rabbit with the hand shadow on the video screen" people over in a corner. I was getting sleepy.

There were some cool moments after that, some nice varispeed sample playback and airplane sounds, strobing video screens with low rumbles, occasional percussion riffs, icy metallic hurricanes... But not much really that grabbed me. We were there for about 3 hours when finally we couldn't take it anymore and decided to leave. We still didn't know who, if anyone, had been doing what, or whether µ-ziq had even gone on yet (although I suspect he was responsible for the hurricane noises). As we left there was a guy by the door yelling into his cell phone: "Don't come. Do not come. If you come I will not be here. DO NOT COME!!! No, no, no!" Apparently he didn't want his friend to come.

So how could this happen? How could a show in such a cool place, with three pretty big names in electronic music, be so disappointing to so many people? As I said above, I think it was all a simple misunderstanding. As an installation, NOISEGATE is quite nice. It was pretty effective even with several hundred other people milling around, and I can imaging that it would be very impressive if you had more space and latitude to explore it slowly on your own (I plan on going back sometime this summer to check it out during the day.). It deserves to be the focus of your time at the Anchorage, which is probably why the "performances" were so low key. But the way the event was publicized made it clearly seem like a concert type event, instead of an opportunity to experience a video installation while ambient music played in the background, which is what it was. And at $17-$20, I can't blame people for feeling a bit betrayed. It's usually free to get into a gallery to look at an installation or to stand around in a bar listening to music and talking to your friends. Still, there are bills to pay, and I'm sure that µ-ziq, Scanner and Pole did not just pop in for fun. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco/Camel Cigarettes is the main sponsor of the project (A rather questionable and crude sponsor -- my friend reported Camel projections on the walls of the "VIP lounge" where he had to go to buy Camel cigarrettes! And the brochure sports tacky "Surgeon General's Warning" blurbs in various spots.). Perhaps in the future, sponsors of such well-intentioned and forward-looking events could be prevailed upon to help keep the ticket price more in line with audience expectations, and the publicity for the events could be more clear about what exactly is being publicized. Otherwise an awful lot of people are going continue being turned off by these events, which isn't good for anyone -- not the artists, the producers or the public.

There are two more REMIX sessions scheduled for this summer: We, Fennesz and Vladislav Delay on June 15th, and Ryoji Ikeda, Naut Humon, Kaffe Matthews and Alain Thibault on June 22nd