Ethan Rose (of the music/film group Small Sails) is a rarity among electro-acoustic artists: he’s unafraid of dust, loose springs, or static electricity—and in fact revels in “a love of the archaic mechanizations of gears spinning and paper scratching… .”
The ambient universe of his “New Olden Days” sound (a gorgeous composite of melody, electro-acoustic contours, and an innovative use of automated musical antiquities— music boxes, player pianos rolls, and a carillon, 23 chromatically tuned bells housed within a monolithic multi-ton tower, no less) is a wonder. Just ask Glenn Kotche (Wilco drummer and solo auteur) or Gus Van Sant—they’ll agree that Rose’s work is superbly crafted, highly elevated mood music, rich in glacial development—not without precedents or neighbors, but truly singular work.
He shares with folks like pianist/composer Hans Fjellestad an element of scavenged sounds, a wunderkammer of bell tones, hand-cranked tidal melodies ebbing and flowing, ambient hum and incidental clatter; traffics in similar moods as an Angelo Badalamenti or a Harold Budd —but eschews fussiness, glowing, rhapsodic qualude smugness or facile, serene blankets of calm in favor of slowly unfolding textures that are seductively circumambient in their elegant jockeying between ancient and future strategies. Pitchfork Media nailed his “sense of rustic unity. . .Anachronistic is the right term — nostalgic is not.”
Rose artfully mines the ruins of the Old Weird America (both the gimcrack music-box detritus and the avant-garde trajectory) that produced lone prophets on the order of the Utopia Parkway surrealist Joseph Cornell and composer Conlon Nancarrow, a mad-monk who refashioned the path of compositional possibility for the Ampico Reproducing Piano, slipping a mickey to the pianola’s rolls.
He shares Joseph Cornell’s practice of, what the poet Charles Simic termed, “Dimestore Alchemy”: that restless drive that solders connections between seemingly dissimilar, random odds and ends, renewing and transform materials, sounds, images and experiences—igniting cast-off, forgotten things with a combustible beauty and mystery. His recombinant approach suggests, that like Andrei Tarkovsky’s definition of cinema, music and sound are where we go to “receive time.”
Rose has commented that, “Every sound happens in an environment: it has a context and a history. Capturing this can be as important as choosing the sound itself…This approach should apply to anything. . .Say you’re recording a bird–know why it’s singing, and you’ll know what to record next.”
He can’t help himself, shards of fragmented melody or compositional reanimation of music-boxes or player pianos seem filmic and ready-made for viewing— imagined sonic film treatments, like Cornell’s text/image piece “Monsieur Phot (Seen Through the Stereoscope), no. 5″ from 1933 that embody, “The rippling music of the harp sounds like a fountain playing into water.” Or one could see Rose mind-warping update of Jesuit Father Louis-Bertrand Castel’s “ocular harpsichord,” an 18th-century instrument that simultaneously produced sound and an associated color for each note of the scale (e.g. C# =pale green).
It becomes, at a certain point, about more than just doing the next gig.
Which is why it makes perfect sense that Tilt Gallery (625 NW Everett, #106 in the Everett Station Lofts) would invite Ethan Rose to create an automatonica sound installation featuring a Player Piano “performing” notes from manipulated paper piano-rolls (reams of Morse code-like dots and lines resembling Sperry punch cards) which are then electronically altered before establishing the scene of the crime through a speaker system in the gallery space.
When asked the best way to experience his work, Rose (who’s released something appropriately titled “Ceiling Songs”) replied: “Laying down and looking up. Or live. Or both.”
Sure to be the highlight of the month—and one more reason Tilt is consistently one of most rewarding visual art venues in Portland.
Opening reception is this Thursday, March 6, 6-9 PM.
–Tim DuRoche
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