Stasis Duo performance at the Paddington Substation 18.03.12

[Charon]

What follows (eventually) is a little spontaneous scribbling I did during the Stasis Duo performance this afternoon at the New Improvised Music Series in the Paddington Substation in Brisbane, organised by Adam Sussmann. I won't call it a review as such, more of a reaction. I'm not making any attempt to organise these notes into anything more substantial, but I am reproducing them in chronological order, so maybe you can get a sense of what it felt like to be there listening:

It is the audience that is on the stage this time.
They begin without warning.
Needles of feedback, silk-thin.
A dust-orange sampler that has just fallen from Mars. NASA yet-to-be notified.
a deep thrum slides in imperceptibly, eddies in the high pitched swim
sudden harsh intrusions from the back of the room, mechanical repetition. Ghosts of old generators waking -merciless, they subside.
fingers flash over buttons with sci-fi bleeps
The deep thrum returns, swells, chatters, falls silent, and launches itself back at intervals - a more complex machine.
Wheezing, faint mechanical breaths, in-out, in-out.

THUD THUD THUD THUD (x8)

machine-gun chattering, sea spray

A needle passes clean through my ears.

Descent and Ascent are simultaneous, a seasick cycle, we glimpse briefly, as waves crash on Arctic shores ignorant of sentiment (settlement?)

The cycles realign themselves periodically, bit it is a complex relationship. We wake up on a train. Clean, efficient, bound for Brussels.

All illusions disappear, and we are left in miraculous Stasis, orbiting nothing. A sound thicker, denser, louder, and HEAVIER than if you took all of Stasis Duo's records, cut them into one minute fragments, and played all those fragments simultaneously. It reminded me of an organ.