(NOISEGATE @ The Anchorage 6.15.00) :performance/anti-

[Clic-Clic Alondra <a_clic_clic@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Last Thursday night at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage a reasonably sized 
crowd (some of you included) gathered to visit NOISEGATE, a rather mammoth 
video and sound installation conceived by Austrian artists Kurt Hentschlager 
and Ulf Langheinrich, a.k.a. Granular Synthesis. The Anchorage is in itself 
a marvel of impossibly high arched connecting hallways and chambers, it is 
the sort of space that begs for an installation and this is not the first of 
its kind. What distinguishes Granular Synthesis' piece is its sheer size and 
volume. Here's an idea that (literally) fits the Anchorage. Four or six 
screens, according to whether you choose or not to see twin image beds as 
one, dominate the space. Walking away from them is no use, for even when you 
escape the main chamber, its incandescent glow follows. The experience of 
sound is similar if somewhat more nuanced. Eight great monitors, four at 
each end of the center chamber, are enough to invade all but the basement 
nooks yet do so with varying intensity. Additional monitors on the two 
adjacent side chambers provide distinct atmospheric variations, their echo 
and rumble spills unevenly throughout. Were you to follow your ears and not 
your eyes, NOISEGATE may be thought of as a maze. Walk around in it, get 
lost, find your way back, or out.

Deliciously punished by the strobe or languidly blank, I preferred NOISEGATE 
without its single (minded) image: a male head variously filtered and 
ghosted and side slammed and slurred in irregular intervals. This is how 
Granular Synthesis choose "to overwhelm, rattle and disturb". The visual 
component of NOISEGATE is numbingly literal, reminding me of little else 
except for my own techno-existentialist adolescence and its accompany 
WaxTrax!-era thump.

Scandinavian Vladislav Delay, New York's own WE and German glitchmeister 
Fennesz contributed jointly to the installation's morphing soundtrack. 
Although mannered to fit the project's brutish mood (ie remixing the 
original GS score), brief solo sets were heard at 11am, midnite and 1am. 
Delay's trademark subtlety, his penchant for layered and buried detail, was 
in evidence, as was the New York duo's cat-and-mouse style romance with bass 
and beats. But all too soon, and sadly, each mini-set was swallowed by the 
stupefyingly monotonous textures of the collaboration. Even Fennesz, perhaps 
the one composer who could inject some irony into NOISEGATE's pomposity, was 
lost in the mix.

Unwilling to spell out my disappointment, or rather, unwilling to give it 
the simpler form of an expletive, and before I exited the Anchorage, I 
thought of three names, seemingly at random and in an involuntary, perhaps 
reactionary effort to rekindle hope: Bruce Nauman, Bill Viola, Sven Vath.

For all ye who entered....
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