The Four Pillars

[ateolf]

Mary Beth and I did our Fresh Market run during my lunch break yesterday. Then at night we went out to a show. On the way, had a deflated tire and had to stop to put air in it. If.else was playing at this little space downtown (inside it felt like an art gallery but online it makes it seems like kind of an event rental space, but I know we only saw a small part of it). All the lights were off and there was a steady oscillator drone that was going the whole time (even before the show started when we arrived). Then Jenny and Philip came out and sat at opposite corners and there were four speakers around. They'd play sustained flute notes and then not play a while. There were also pre-recorded (I think) flute notes. And the notes would interact with the single oscillator drone. The whole thing lasted three hours. People were invited to bring blankets and pillow, etc. but they had chairs for people like us who didn't bring them. There were also projections on two walls of a bunch of single blue vertical lines very slowly moving around creating different patterns (they were projected meeting up at a corner and each wall was a mirror image of the other). It was very slow and minimal and droney. The flutes interacted with the oscillator in ways I didn't expect and their combinations brought some pretty deep modulations to the steady pitch. Also, if you moved your head around, different tones could be heard and if you moved it in some certain ways even the pitch of the tone shifted just a little bit. So at points I was moving my head around to hear the different sounds. At some point in the later part of it, someone lying on blankets in the floor fell asleep and was snoring. The snore blended pretty well with the music, slowly swelling and creating a kind of rhythm. But I found it funny and almost kept cracking up for a good while (I mean, it was pretty much invited, but sometimes your brain just finds things funny, I also almost cracked up at points imagining that after the three hours of drones they ended it by playing shave-and-a-haircut-two-bits, but that did not happen!). Anyway, it was very good and deep. It was hard to make out who anyone was in the dark, but we did see Karl and talked to him a little bit before it was over.