Constructed Deconstruction

In four separate, darkened rooms sit five performers. One prepared piano, a Hardanger fiddle, clarinet, and guitar with electronics. It’s a chamber concert for wanderers, with each instrument piped into the other rooms via wires and speakers. The format has been exploded, and while the fragmentary sounds of Stephen Mediell’s “Metrics,” which they’re performing, are nice to listen to as I wander from room to room, it’s their resultant constellation that’s of value here. Questions of listening practice come to mind: Am I in the right place, do others hear what I hear? No two people in the audience perceive the same thing: by splaying it out across the different rooms, the chamber concert’s intimacy is brought into a sharper focus. The way I heard the piece, closing my eyes and sitting on the floor of one chamber, walking backwards from one to the next, was indeed intimate, as was the audience’s strange relationship with the performers, who, instead of finding themselves on the pedestal safety of a stage, were on the floor with us. Some found themselves cut off from the sight of their fellow musicians—only able to communicate with each other through the disembodied sounds of their instruments.