Aural art

"Work Knot" players Two Holes, Tarpigh, and Cerberus Shoal bring performance art to Portland's music scene

by Pete Hodgin

Tarpigh will perform on Saturday the 16th at 7 p.m. Cerberus Shoal will perform on Saturday the 23rd at 7 p.m.

BODY ART: Tarpigh's Tim Harbeson performs Saturday night as a "pacer."

It's Saturday night and Tom Rogers, drummer for the area's experimentalist cult-heroes Cerberus Shoal, is silently greeting patrons filing into The Bakery at 61 Pleasant Street for the first installment of local artist

Colleen Kinsella's "Work Knot" exhibition. Dressed in a snappy blue suit jacket and a half-cut black mask over his eyes, Rogers taps his greeting from behind a raised drum kit, occasionally revealing an open-mouthed grimace, but in all, seemingly oblivious to everyone passing by. His hypnotic drum signature shifts and swells uninterrupted for nearly two hours, providing a compelling audio constant for the evening and leaving some patrons to smoke cigarettes and simply stare at him -- spellbound by his performance. And like a guard at Buckingham Palace or a piece of kinetic sculpture, Rogers never reacts to onlookers, never flinches. He doesn't let on that we are even there.

Kinsella's inclusion of live music in her ambitious, three-week "Work Knot" series (see accompanying article on facing page) is not an afterthought, like the jazz combo apologetically stuck in the corner of a gallery while patrons browse and eat brie. Herself one of the newest members of Cerberus Shoal (along with bassist and Red Light City alum, Erin Davidson), Kinsella believes in the power of live music to help transform an artistic atmosphere. "The music should not be background at all," Kinsella explains. "I think it should grab you. I want people to wholly experience it."

The performers Kinsella has chosen to accompany her art installation -- Two Holes performing tonight, and Cerberus Shoal and Tarpigh performing on upcoming evening -- represent a breed of Portland musician who, like Kinsella with "Work Knot," attempt to create an environment with their stage shows, throwing elements of theater, and visual and performance art into the mix with their music.

Both Cerberus Shoal and local trio Tarpigh have thoroughly charmed and confused Portland audiences with their exploration and challenge of musical boundaries. Rather than pandering to well-worn pop sensibilities (verse-chorus-verse, save the hit single for the encore kind of stuff), bands like these create arrangements that fall outside of any readily recognizable idioms, utilizing both Western and non-Western instrumentation and song structure. Like similarly genre-bending national acts Don Caballero, Fibreforms, or The Azusa Plane, "Systems Music" composers like Steve Reich and LaMonte Young, and not coincidentally, Kinsella's entire mixed-media exhibition, the art created by the bands challenges the very way you regard art itself.

And that's what's going on tonight with a performance from Two Holes, an improvisational artistic vehicle of Cerberus Shoal's Chriss Sutherland and local musician/writer Karl Greenwald. After walking through the gallery surreptitiously pelting people with dried flowers, Two Holes sit behind a piano, piecing a song together, in what appears to be the thrall of a real, fictional, or perhaps just metaphorical drug kicking in (at one point Sutherland declares, "I'm feeling it! I'm feeling it!"). The conversation and creative process at the piano take place both with us and without us. Two Holes were creating a musical window, and suitably some standing in front of it were transfixed, while others moved on. Two Holes then literally stumble up the stairs of the gallery to an awaiting array: a Roland JX-3P keyboard, alarm clock, toy horn, bike bell, whistle microphone, etc., and a Nobukazu Takemura LP in continuous rotation. The artists crawl around the floor like toddlers, grabbing different instruments, and creating a sweeping sound collage that fills the gallery space. I feel as if the music were being created specifically for me, knowing full well that my individual reaction was incidental to the creative process.

"There are people coming with interests and thoughts, and . . . they are coming to be challenged or to be motivated," said Sutherland, the day before the "Work Knot" appearance, of Cerberus Shoal performances. "They're coming to get a spark of some sort. It's kind of our job to try the best we can to deliver that." But he admitted, "Musically we always tried to ignore the audience and just get into what we're doing ourselves," as relying on the reactions of any given crowd to gauge if what you are doing is artistically compelling is often intimidating, inaccurate, and unnecessary. "It kind of steals your magic," Sutherland remarked with a smile, adding later, "We're our own worst critics."

Tim Harbeson, trumpet, keyboard, sakuhachi, and accordion player from Tarpigh -- and along with Erin Davidson performs as one of Saturday night's aptly titled "pacers" -- described a similar artistic balance between drawing the audience in and keeping them at a distance. With its use of such devices as masks and puppetry, Tarpigh integrate a theatrical element to their musical performances. "I like to look at everything that I do in that way. It seems like a better way to look at projects that you're working on, basically putting on a show, catching people's fascination in any way possible," Harbeson explained. "I think that's a lot of what Colleen's trying to do here. Involve people in a way, or engage people in a way that they might not be used to being engaged or involved." He adds that "it's hard to think about that while you're performing something, because it's a distraction from the world you're trying to create. I don't like to think about people watching . . . . I get outside of myself and whatever character I'm trying to create. When you start to think about the audience is when it turns into exhibitionism . . . . I don't like the way that ego gets into theater."

All of this talk of performance being independent of audience reaction may at first sound completely contradictory to Kinsella's hopes of removing barriers between the art and the public through a series like "Work Knot." However, as this evening's performance illustrates, that separation can be incredibly liberating and may actually connect artist and public in a more genuine fashion. How many live music performances have ground to an artistic halt by reminders from the act that we should come closer to the stage, that we should dance more, that the band doesn't sound like they want to sound, or that we should check out merchandise? How often is the implication made that we should simply be a different audience in some manner? When such distracting ephemera is put aside, and when constant reminders that "Hey, we're on stage and you're out there!" are taken out of the loop, some are better able to truly immerse themselves in the artistic moment. (I'm sure it cuts both ways, as in fairness, I can only imagine how artistically frustrating it is to actually crave audience feedback and only get people yammering for covers they want to hear, or just plain yammering for that matter.) As there will never be an effective social contract between performer and audience, perhaps just letting both artist and audience do their respective things stands to forge the most meaningful connections. Synergy between an artist and an audience needn't always be something vocalized or made tangible.

Both Tarpigh and Cerberus Shoal aren't tipping their hands too far as to what patrons can expect at the remaining two installments of "Work Knot."

"We wrote music, not exactly, specifically in mind for this, but we definitely knew that we'd be doing a performance . . . so it's kind of been designed for this in a very roundabout way," Sutherland explained of the acoustic, more organic instrumentation of Cerberus Shoal's upcoming set. "We've been pushing that way for months. The gallery would be perfect to try this out."

Harbeson is revealing even less, as in his words, he wants to preserve "the element of surprise." The real surprise, of course, the best surprise of any exhibition, is how it impacts the patron. You'll need to come down and figure that out for yourself.

Pete Hodgin can be reached ph4872@aol.com..