The Village Voice review of Music for Homemade Instruments

I'm posting this to the * * * Tuning list * * *
because a lot of Music for Homemade Instruments
material uses some kind of microtonality.

Jason is a buddy, I was on his Perfect Sound Forever web radio
a few weeks ago. The Luver folks were so impressed they
gave me my own show. Oh...so flattering!

Check out his ezine, he gets around -

Perfect Sound Forever, the net zine:
http://www.furious.com/perfect/index.html

There were three concerts this year, June 4, 5 & 6.
I was at the Sunday show, Jason went to the Friday and Saturday shows.

And I'll stick my little comments in, here & there.

> Story of Junk
>
> Taking a primitive tack
> that's more DIY than any punk band's, Skip La Plante's
> collective Music for Homemade Instruments recycles the
> city's garbage for its annual concert series, which has
> been held in La Plante's Bowery loft since 1976. An eight-piece
> group of middle-agers banging on pans and boards and blowing
> on tubes and bottles fresh from the dumpster� seems
> like a damn farce, and it is. But there's also a landfill
> of know-how behind it, all in the lowbrow/highbrow
> tradition of P.D.Q. Bach and Spike Jones.
>
> Fresh from an Avery Fisher
> Hall exhibit,

And the American Festival of Microtonal Music too.

> MFHI bucked the usual "here's our art,
> eat it up" attitude for the crowd of 40 or so (including
> many precocious tykes), with each of the composers
> explaining their pieces and the instruments. David
> Simons's Harry Partch tribute ("This Hoary Perch")
> featured "string stretchers" (hinged wood strung with wire)
> and sounded like a crazed ukulele troop
> playing Sousa.

This piece was performed at AFMM this year. This version
included a third slide *guitar* monochord. These instruments
have the ratios marked on the wood under the string and use
whatever for a slide. In the past - tin cans, I noticed
a shot glass or two on Sunday afternon. I think the
wood body was molding [you know, between the floor and the wall].
The string and the wood sat on top of Styrofoam packing
material, a common Music for Homemade Instruments resonator.

> His "The Collective Chok" had
> a chorus of label-intact soda and juice bottles
> tooting. John Bertles's solo barrage, "Critical Mess,"
> deployed turntable chimes, a toy car equipped with
> microphone, and alarm clocks. His other piece,
> "The Camel's Back," was introduced as "the first
> virtuoso piece for soda straws." For Jody Kruskal's
> "Latex," huge balloons were scraped and deflated,
> and later distributed for audience participation.
> Lisa Karrer's "My Cousin Paula," a spoken-word account
> of a nightmarish boating accident, was punctuated by
> spinning, droning windwands (wood strung with rubber
> bands). La Plante contributed "Cycle for Blown Instruments"
> with plastic tubes played as trumpets and bagpipes,
> climaxing in dissonance.

Flutes and bottles. Real nice on the fly microtonality.
A big drone. What's the tuning? Incidental!

> The centerpiece was La Plante's
> "Themes and Variations," a childlike 13-part arrangement

This is the 13tet piece from the AFMM Microthon with extra movements.
By the time I heard it, they really fine tuned the performance!
I still really like that canon.

> executed with table-leg marimba, broiler pans, and humidor
> panpipes, as intricately played as a gamelan piece
> (half of MFHI moonlight in gamelan ensembles).

And for me, this gamelan experience really shows in the compositions.

> The show was at once laughable, educational, ridiculous,
> and inspiring. Kids, try this at home. � Jason Gross

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* xouoxno@virtulink.com
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