Cellist Amanda Gookin Plays a Harrowing but Guardedly Triumphant Solo Show at Roulette

Survivors of child abuse are like the unjabbed. They walk among you, unnoticed, steeled in what Catherine Austin Fitts calls the “refiners fire,” but scarred for life. At her solo show this past evening at Roulette, cellist Amanda Gookin channeled equal parts resilience and numbed horror as a child abuse survivor herself.

She asserted that she had few childhood memories, and from those she shared with a near sold-out audience, it’s easy to understand why. The daughter of a troubled woman who could sing Brahms beautifully but was crippled by what appears to have been serious borderline personality disorder, Gookin began the show seated on the stairs to the stage. With a steady calm, she read a revealing letter to an unnamed sister, mentioning their shared depressive tendencies. She would reprise that letter at the end of the concert: its authorship came as no surprise.

From that introduction, she picked up an amplified frame drum with ball bearings inside and took a slow stroll through the audience to the soundboard and back, as hypnotic waves washed over the crowd. Perhaps this attested to the push and pull of abusive relationships from a child’s point of view.

On one hand, Gookin’s parents had the means to send her away to Bible camp in Texas during the summer. But then her mother found her Jesus diary, discovered her daughter’s entreaties for parental healing, and that was the end of that. As Gookin told it, Wilton, Connecticut in the early 90s was a tough place to be a kid from the one home on the block where the ambulance or police cruiser would be a regular presence. The moment where she recounted a friend’s mother trying to get her to open up about her feelings, late one evening on a quiet staircase, was unaffectedly shattering.

And yet, years later, when her mother died of cancer, Gookin was overwhelmed with grief, and was quick to acknowledge how codependency is a double-edged sword. It was rewarding to hear how she was finally able to move on emotionally.

From the music, Gookin clearly conquered those demons, even as they sometimes wafted to the surface, in a tightly wound, rather minimalist electroacoustic performance. With her own spoken-word between-song segues, it wasn’t always clear where one composition ended and another began. The first piece, by Pamela Z, was a blend of spoken word chopped and cuisinarted through a mixer while Gookin layered shivering, muted harmonics and subtle ambient textures.

Often Gookin would begin a piece or an interlude with the hum of singing bowls, or the creepy, music box-like timbres from a set of wind chimes. Gentle rainshower sonics dripped behind her spare, midrange cello washes as she spoke of a “body submerged in the cloud,” rising to a frenetic, chopping peak.

On a Jessie Montgomery composition, she slammed out a steady, hypnotic series of chords before veering into hazy harmonics and then an aching, microtonal cadenza where she finally veered off into a crazed cello-metal coda.

Throughout the rest of the night, stark octaves, fleeting harmonic accents, the occasional anxious wail and a crescendo into a fragmented evocation of madness figured in turn throughout works by Sarah Hennies, Camilia Agosto and Seong Ae Kim. A concluding piece by Inti Figgis-Vizueta included a paraphrase of I’m in the Mood for Love, simple chords and a spare, elegaic, spacious melody that grew more anthemic with glissandos, eerie trills and raga-like riffage.

The next concert at Roulette is quite similar if perhaps not as personally devastating. On April 12 at 8 PM, singer and sound artist Muyassar Kurdi leads an improvisational electroacoustic trio tracing the lineage of the Arab diaspora. You can get in for $25 in advance.

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Remembering a Rapturous Annual Brooklyn Festival of Cutting-Edge Vocal Music

The annual Resonant Bodies Festival of avant garde vocal music ran from 2013 to 2019 at Roulette, and had just begun to branch out to other major cities when the lockdown crushed the performing arts throughout most of the world. This blog was there for the initial festival, and subsequent editions matched that year’s outside-the-box sensibility. Roulette’s vast archive still exists, and presumably everything from those often riveting performances was recorded. Let’s hope that there’s been enough resistance to the lockdown, and enough talent left in New York this fall to resume the series; if not, there’s a fantastic live compilation album featuring some of the highlights from over the years streaming at Bandcamp.

The lineup here is a who’s who of some of the most formidable new-music vocal talent out there. As was often the case with the series itself, all of the singers here are women, most of them composer-performers playing and singing solo. All but two of the tracks are from the festival.

Charmaine Lee‘s Littorals makes an apt opener. Her shtick is that she uses all the sounds in the international phonetic alphabet, plus some that may not have symbols. Part human beatbox, part devious infant, part comic, her solo performance will leave you in stitches. It sounds as if the mic is inside her mouth for much of this. This might be the funniest track anyone’s released this year.

Julia Bullock brings a beefy, soul-inspired vibrato to John Cage’s She is Asleep, Milena Gligić supplying muted, percussive microtones under the piano lid. Pamela Z’s highly processed solo diptych Quatre Couches/Badagada spins an increasingly agitated pastiche through a funhouse mirror.

Backed by clarinetist Campbell MacDonald, Sarah Maria Sun delivers Thierry Tidrow‘s grisly murder ballad Die Flamme, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire recast as arsonist. Tony Arnold nimbly negotiates the multiple voices and disjointedly demanding extended technique of Jason Eckardt’s Dithyramb.

Arooj Aftab joins forces with pianist Vijay Iyer and bassist Shahzad Ismaily for En Route to Unfriending, a slowly unwinding, ghazal-inspired, melancholy tour de force from the 2017 festival. Iyer’s gently insistent staccato, evoking the ringing of a santoor, is masterful.

The title of Kamala Sankaram‘s slowly crescendoing solo electroacoustic piece Ololyga reflects a shrieking mourning ritual practiced in ancient Greece, which men reputedly scared off all the guys. Needless to say, the Bombay Rickey frontwoman pulls out all the stops with her five-octave range.

Another solo electroacoustic performance, Caroline Shaw‘s diptych Rise/Other Song is considerably calmer, with a gently incantatory quality. Gelsey Bell‘s Feedback Belly is one of the more imaginative and intense pieces here, drawing on her battle with the waves of pain she experienced during a long battle with endometriosis. “If there’s anything you take away from this, please take women’s pain seriously. There is nothing like having a women’s disease to radicalize a feminist in this incredibly misogynistic health system,” she relates in the album’s extensive, colorful liner notes. Manipulating feedback from a Fender amp inside a metal canister hidden under her oversize dress, Bell builds a strangely rapt, dynamically shifting atmosphere punctuated by pulsing electronic grit.

Duo Cortona – vocalist Rachel Calloway and violinist/vocalist Ari Streisfeld – perform Amadeus Regucera‘s relationship drama If Only After You Then Me, beginning furtively and ripping through many moments of franticness and sheer terror. The iconic Lucy Shelton sings a dynamically impassioned take of Susan Botti‘s Listen, My Heart, a setting of a comforting Rabindrath Tagore poem, accompanying herself energetically on singing bowls and metal percussion.

Anaïs Maviel plays spiky, circling ngoni on In the Garden, a hypnotically moody, masterfully melismatic retelling of the Garden of Eden myth. The album’s closing epic is Sofia Jernberg’s One Pitch: Birds for Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers. Is she going to be able to hold up through seventeen minutes of nonstop, increasingly rigorous falsetto birdsong-like motives…let alone without a break for water? No spoilers!

Deep Listening, Courtesy of Starkland

It’s hard to imagine why anyone would go to some random club just to hear a ten-year-old album playing over the PA when they could do the same thing at home without any of the stress. Last night at the delightfully laid-back new Ludlow Street new-music venue New Spectrum (lots of “news” there), Starkland Records’ Thomas Steenland and his dedicated engineering crew staged a special kind of listening party for the label’s well-loved Immersion DVD compilation – a release from 2000 that’s one of the avant garde’s alltime greatest hits – along with Phil Kline’s fascinating, landmark 2009 DVD Around the World in a Daze. The drawing card? Both recordings were played in surround sound, revealing the complete, trippy mix that most stereo systems, let alone DVD players, can’t come close to replicating. Steenland explained beforehand how he’d been intrigued by the idea of recording a high-definition surround-sound DVD, and marveled at how many composers had responded to his offer of commissions considering that when he began reaching out to them for the project, the technology to make it didn’t yet exist. Given how few times these recordings have been publicly staged – Kline’s was screened once at the old Tonic a few blocks east about ten years ago, Immersion maybe never – this was a rare opportunity to witness some deliciously clever early 21st century works exactly as their composers intended them to be heard. It was like seeing a series of black-and-white images in color for the first and maybe only time.

Hearing Pamela Z mess with the fundamental premise of the recording – via her composition Work/Live, which she said she hadn’t heard in so long that she could barely remember it – was surreal and amusing to the extreme, her tongue-in-cheek operatics not just panning between right and left but from behind, then right-center, then straight ahead. Bruce Odland’s Tank, a swaying, thinly veiled trip-hop percussion piece with washes of microtonal Ron Miles trumpet, also took on playfully unpredictable new dimensions. The effect repeated itself ad infinitum, with varying degrees of surprise, humor and intensity. Another composer in attendance, Lukas Ligeti, explained how his contribution, Propeller Island, took its title from the Jules Verne cautionary tale and its source tonalities from samples of homemade Caribbean-style steel pans. Ligeti’s signature stylistic trait is polyrhythms, which in their original context here turned out to multiply from all angles to the point where the center completely disappears, adding a welcome undercurrent of unease to this bright and attractive work. Paul Dresher’s Steel, a similarly pointillistic work, was transformed much in the same way into a bustling, cheery factory floor.

2000 White Turbulence, by Maggi Payne, was the most ominously enveloping of the bunch with its echoing cumulonimbus sonics. The most downright comedic piece, Twilight’s Dance by Paul Dolden has a punchline whose straightforwardness was made even more amusing by how un-quadrophonic it was, while Ingram Marshall’s Signs and Murmurs: A SeaSong offered more subtle revelations: that moody neoromantic piano isn’t at the seashore at all, it’s on the opposite side! The final track from the DVD was Meredith Monk’s Eclipse Variations: hearing this in its original form was something akin to being in the 21st century church where Thomas Tallis suddenly found himself teleported from his medieval sanctuary and was inspired to come up with a work to celebrate it. A Carl Stone composition was the only one that grew tiresome: its 33-RPM-at-78 conceit was fun for thirty seconds but got old quickly.

Having a primitive homemade stereo recording from the listening party for reference later on turned out to be useful, to a point, but there’s no substitute for the real thing. It would undoubtedly have been just as much fun to stick around for the entirety of the Kline DVD. Where should these works be staged next? At the Hayden Planetarium. Move over, Pink Floyd.