“You want us to turn the house music down before you start?” the sound man at Cafe Nine said. Chris Goudreau smiled. “It might be better than what you’re about to hear,” he joked.
According to the audience, what Goudreau had to offer was way better.
But the joke got at the heart of the latest installment of the Uncertainty Music Series, which has been running for seven years under the stewardship of Carl Testa. Most of its shows happen at Never Ending Books on State Street, but the series has appeared at venues all around town. Performances have straddled jazz, classical music, and songwriting and ranged into free improv; what unites all of it, as Testa said in a New York Times profile in 2011, is that all the music has “some unknown element.”
Last Wednesday night’s show was about electronics.
First up was Draggers, composed of Matt Luczak on drums and Andrew Morelli on electronics, which he designs and builds. Their piece started off with white noise that sounded like static and ocean waves at the same time.
As Luczak started to lay down a bed of percussion, the electronics zeroed in on what Luczak was doing, until they were producing musical figures too tight to be done without machines. Yet it still felt organic, too; it was two people making music.
Chris Goudreau’s (pictured) set had something in common with Draggers, but where Draggers felt energetic and exploratory, Goudreau’s stuff was tense, and menacing. Sounds reminiscent of passing traffic, or distant voices in an airport, suddenly shorted out or were obliterated in a burst of noise, as Goudreau’s hands moved across the equipment with the deftness of a piano player.
BRIAN SLATTERY PHOTO
Jon Eriksen celebrated the release of a new record, Shadowanthems, with a squall of noise that at first sounded almost like an electric guitar being played to its fullest, and then morphed into something harsher, howling in turn at every frequency.
The audience stood completely still for that one; when Eriksen cut it off abruptly at a fever pitch to signal that he was done, there was a brief moment of silence; then someone in the audience blurted out a congratulatory expletive that starts with an f, and applause followed.
Subfloor (pictured) —Chris Cretella on guitar, Dave Parmelee on drums, and Testa on electronics and lighting — finished the night with a set that was like the extended solo section to a great rock song without the rest of the song as the trio passed around ideas, resulting in a piece that started with wails, peaked in a cacophony, and ended in musical pointillism.
For the last two sets in particular, the pleasure wasn’t just in what was heard, but watching it get produced in front of your eyes, and seeing just how much communication was going on, between the performers, their instruments, and each other. Casually widening the borders of what music can encompass is part of what the Uncertainty Music Series is about. And afterward, with my ears opened that wide, the soundtrack of New Haven — the engines and sirens, the voices on the street, the bursts of noise from cars passing with their radios turned way up — seemed a little more composed than usual. Almost as if there was a plan.