An Aural Arrival

Posted by Ash Haywood in Music, Santa Fe, Students

On the evening of March 26, Radical Abacus, a house-show loft space and the residence of SFUAD’s contributing faculty member and Santa Fe based artist Nicholas Chiarella, showcased the talents of electronic soundscape artists Geological Creep (Shannon Kerrigan), Gossimer (Jennifer Williams) and SFUAD’s own Angelo Harmsworth.

“I am very excited about the marriage of noise, harmony and contrast. [Gossimer and Geological Creep’s] music is incredibly and devastatingly delicate. They brought a really beautiful sense of life to the space,” says Harmsworth, who hadn’t met either of his co-performers before the show. The two stopped to play at Radical Abacus on their tour through the Southwest, continuing on to Tucson this week. “We were somewhat familiar with each other’s music through our mutual involvement with a record label, Holy Page” Harmsworth explains.

Gossimer looped sounds made from the Tremoloa.

Though it’s her first time on tour, Gossimer, hailing from Oakland, keeps her cool as the audience trickles into the loft space, illuminated by a single lamp on a deep red rug, beneath a recycled plastic structure reminiscent of slow and low hanging clouds. The excitable voices of twenty-something Santa Feans with edgy haircuts settle to receive her tranquil presence. The crowd gazes in curiosity as she lays her Tremoloa, a string instrument from the 1930s, like a sleeping baby on the rug.

Every now and then someone enters the loft and the wind catches the weight of the heavy metal door, slamming it shut, but no one seems to notice. Kneeling next to her Tremoloa wrapped in a black cape, Gossimer’s electro-acoustic music starts as hushing as a lullaby and flows into a haunting aural experience. At one point she brings her face close to the instrument’s resonance chamber, releasing a sweet stream of vocals, which she loops with the strings.“This is my first venture into an experimental ambient focus using tangible acoustic instruments. I just keep messing around. It’s not so theoretical. It’s just everyone going on a journey together”, she says.

Geological Creep adjusts her velvet trousers.

Imagine the form of a landslide—a slow, rolling cascade–and you will get close to the nature of Geological Creep’s performance.“You can probably tell by my name, but I’m really into landscape” she jokes. Using field recordings captured from areas of the Pacific Northwest, including Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula, Kerrigan’s improvisations reveal her fascination with the composition of found sounds.

“I just let myself listen to the crowd and the space we are in and interact with it. Sometimes I even mirror people in the crowd talking with tracks of people talking,” she says from behind long aqua locks. In the fall, Kerrigan hopes to study acoustic ecology at Evergreen College in Washington.

Swaying his body over a synthesizer in the darkness, the only light emanating from the white noise of an old television, Harmsworth takes the audience through an improvised soundscape that leaves chests feeling like warm soup dissolving saltines.

A visual component of Harmsworth’s performance.

“I usually have a set of sounds, a predetermined toolkit, along with a basic structure or shape of the performance vaguely visualized beforehand. The majority of the work I have been making involves taking a simple chord, or some other harmonious piece of sound and manipulating, collaging and deteriorating it,” Harmsworth says to describe his process. “A lot of the manipulations revolve around a couple pieces of equipment that starve the sound of energy.” His sharp frequencies and low reverberations mixed with the stunning white noise of the television situate the audience into a collective trance. Afterward, the audience quietly leaves Radical Abacus’ resonant womb, walking out into the night, every sound heightened against the howling wind.