If you’re lucky enough to hear a typical number from Wellington act the Not Quite Quiet Choir, it might go something like this: “Burbleurbleurble. [Silence.] BURBLEURBLEURBLE! Ping. Blap. Twaaang …”
The NQQC are one of a growing number of Wellington acts – including the superbly named Goatslappers, the Slab and the Brown Marks – committed to making what’s loosely labelled “experimental music”. They avoid, or at least subvert, danceable drumbeats. They explore disturbing soundworlds and intense improvised textures. And they have nearly all emerged from the dark vaults of Newtown’s venue terrible, the Space.
The Space’s owner and brainchild Jeff Henderson conceived the venue as “a place where musicians and performance artists would have to try really hard to be stranger than the local Newtown residents”. Sure enough, the Space’s reputation for unorthodoxy has gradually brought together a louche bunch of demented geniuses.
Henderson is King Loony. His prodigious talents as one of New Zealand’s most exciting and technically proficient saxophonists are equalled by his propensity to onstage violence, loud squealy noises, random invective and gratuitous nudity.
During The Last Days of the Space, a weekend of competitive outweirding in early May, Henderson’s favourite alter ego – “Danish pianist” Jahne Kohlewaller – stole the show with his stirring performance piece largely consisting of attacking the insides of two upright pianos with a bunch of breadknives. For 20 minutes. In the nude. Wearing a rubber Nelson Mandela mask.
Other highlights included a solo vocal item by local composer and improviser Jonny Marks. Marks is something of a rarity: a musician who offsets his perceptive musical instinct with a Hutt-boy tendency to make loud, indiscriminate noises. Through a fug of incoherent yammerings and guttural ululations, Marks produced a dizzying array of sounds from his vocal apparatus. He won’t be winning the Mobil Song Quest any time soon, but he demonstrated what a remarkably versatile instrument the human voice is.
Both Henderson and Marks “conducted” and “sang” in the Not Quite Quiet Choir, a refreshingly lo-fi rebuff to the purist’s quest for choral perfection. And in free-improvisation group the Ortiz Funeral Directors, Henderson grumped away on baritone sax while Marks twiddled knobs on his beloved 1960s-era EMS Synthi – a beeping, burbling gadget bringing to mind old Dr Who episodes.
So when the Space officially closed its doors in May, Henderson moved onto his next project: a mid-city experimental performance venue that would go one better than the Space. It would be bigger. It would be brighter. It would be called Happy.
Located in a basement bar on the corner of Vivian and Tory streets, it’s part of Henderson’s aim to improve the standard of free improv in Wellington. Aware of eroding standards and the Space’s shady reputation, Henderson was looking for fresh impetus.
During Happy’s unofficial opening week in late August, I attended Simia ex Machina, staged by local experimental music-theatre collective Amalgam.
Happy has a cosier intimacy about it than the Space. The stage is draped in David Lynch-style red curtains, while low mood lighting bathes the bar’s wood panelling in a soft glow. As we sat sipping our beers, four boiler-suited performers emerged onstage and began a barrage of stippled percussive effects on drumkits, pianos and cello. From beneath the acoustic cannonade came splintering electronics (grating modem squeals, incomprehensible texts read by computer), all rendered large through an array of loudspeakers.
Meanwhile, two video projectors displayed enigmatic images on opposite walls. On one wall: sped-up stock footage of trained dolphins pirouetting and flipping. On the other: pixellated images of circuit boards, instruction manuals and a puzzling sequence involving a woman, a bucket of water and two fluffy balls.
The obscurity of the material veiled deeper subtexts about the banality of life in the digital age. Although this show is less pieced together than previous Amalgam affairs, I found myself longing for more variation. This was almost achieved when the two actors, Ciara Mulholland and Tony Wyeth, expatiated on the subjects of life, love and Pringles. But the welter of sonic and visual material subsumed their soliloquies; this potential point of repose became another layer in the mêlée.
Amalgam are known for their points of difference, be it venue (previous shows have taken place in a pinball arcade and WWII tunnels) or boundary-pushing concepts (such as Meatworks: part theatre, part political piece, part butchery). Yet Simia ex Machina didn’t quite find its differentia.
But bravo for having the sort of artistic chutzpah to inject New Zealand’s art scene with some shameless vitality. We need groups such as Amalgam. We need venues such as Happy. We need their continued nose-thumbing to stop ourselves becoming too precious and too blinkered when answering that old question: “what is music?”