Nuit Blanche 2010
Saturday, October 2, 2010.
My account of the earlier part of the nuit can be found here.
Heading over to Yonge Street, it was interesting to see the other side of Nuit Blanche. For better or worse, the event has become our city's Mardi Gras, and the street — closed to cars south of Bloor — was packed full of people. Many of whom weren't out for the art so much as their own little spectacle. Teenagers got stoned and skateboarded, groups of smashed twentysomethings lurched along, holding each other up. Part of what Nuit Blanche is now is totally untethered from its artsy origins, but the other part, the idea of an "all night thing" is alive and well. And while I have no love of having to step nimbly around the vomit or much patience for drunken louts, there's something fabulous about seeing the streets so alive.1
c. 1:30 a.m. — Day for Night, Dave Dyment
And so, I made my way south, through increasingly thick crowds, pausing to look at the giant bonfire in Yonge-Dundas Square and a few other items right on the street, then ducked around Eaton Centre to head in to The Church of the Holy Trinity to check out Day for Night.
On one level, the concept here sounded like something scrawled down on a napkin after a few drinks — what if you took The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night and stretched it out so that its ninety-minute runtime lasted the whole night from sundown to sunup? The three-frames-per-second result was being projected on a large screen above the pulpit, looking like kin to Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (or, perhaps, Warhol's Empire). For me, however, the real coup was the musical accompaniment, which did the same trick with the film's iconic soundtrack album, slowing it down so it stretched the length of the night and arranging the result for a string quartet.2
And so I took a pew and settled in for some slow, slow music. So slow that it required some adjusting to even try and get to its level — it took me about ten minutes just to relax and get into this. But once I was there, this was really quite fabulous. What at first just seemed like undifferentiated drones opened up, revealing more subtle overtones. It's hard to tell when my mind was doing a sort of autocomplete and filling in the giant blank spaces of the music, but after a while I felt like I could hear the rising variations in tone leading up to the changes.
Added to that was the chatter of people coming and going. At a guess, at least half of the people who entered from the back of the sanctuary basically made their way straight up the centre aisle and out the exit without stopping. Some stood at the back and took it in for a minute or two, and then there were the ones who sat down and listened. As I lingered for an increasingly extended time, I saw a few people around me who were also staying put. A middle-aged guy who was with his teenaged son sat next to me for about ten minutes. "It's like Gavin Bryars," he commented, and I nodded sagely, waiting until he slipped away to scrawl the name down in my notebook to look him up.3 And after that, I just leaned back and zoned out a little.
It must have been an unusual — if not hand-cramping — experience for the musicians. They would be playing some notes for so long that they could keep playing without reference to the score, and lean over and chat to their neighbours and so forth. I also got to see a "shift change", as one-by-one the musicians were relieved by a fresh cohort, each slipping quite seamlessly into the slow flow. Behind me, there were occasional bursts of guys Q107ing up the place, shouting "Rock and Roll!" or bursting into applause at chord changes. Even with that, this was so fully absorbing that it was hard to leave, acting like a venus flytrap for the attention span. I was there for about an hour, and I realized I'd have to either move along or stay all night.
Listen to an excerpt from this performance here.
c. 2:45 a.m. — sight unseen, Lee Ranaldo & Leah Singer
I didn't have far to go from there to the inner courtyard of Old City Hall, for another music/film installation. This featured three giant screens of found footage montage by Singer set to a soundscape by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo. Apparently there had been a live performance element earlier in the evening, including Ranaldo himself as well as drummers with giant gongs on raised platforms, but I missed that. The dominant element here was an electric guitar dangling from a bungee cord. With amps set up flanking the movie screens, anyone swinging the guitar from the cord would create a moving feedback hum that would be added to the pleasing droney guitar glide in the background. A conceptually interesting idea in a sound-sculpting sense, though here there was a bit of a vibe that this was just an excuse for people to fling the guitar with abandon — or get audacious enough to take a running dropkick at it. Rock'n'roll!
There were some nice moments of fuzzy drone, but it was getting a little cold to stand around. Plus, after awhile it looked like the films had looped back to where they were in I came in, so I went to the next stop.
c. 3:00 a.m. — Later That Night At The Drive-In, Daniel Lanois
Went across the street to Nathan Phillips Square to check out of the night's marquee events, Daniel Lanois' mammoth sound installation. There was a visual element here, too, mostly involving little stations where one could lay back on a platform and watch movies being projected overhead. But the main element was the live sound mix from Lanois and his crew in a spaceship-like booth in the middle of the square. Even at this hour, there was enough of a crowd on hand that it was difficult to get right up to where he was working, though in a nifty twist, the mirrored ceiling meant you could tilt for head back and get a decent idea of what they were doing. Which was mostly twiddling with knobs on giant mixing boards, controlling the elements of a seething dub mix.
The music was being piped out through giant speaker columns spread throughout the square, each playing something different in a sort of ultrasurround sound. So, the best part was walking around and finding weird stereo pockets, where a clatter would be coming from one direction, a cymbal from another and a bassline oozing out underneath it all. I was glad to have got there at this hour, and not, like, four-five hours before when the square was packed. With little clumps of people huddled together, this had more of a post-apocalyptic vibe, and there was elbow room to drift around create your own mix.
c. 3:45 a.m. — Erik Satie's Vexations (1893), Martin Arnold / Micah Lexier
And then one more short walk down to the Galleria in Brookfield Place for another let's-make-this-last-all-night musical project. Satie's Vexations have a most curious history — unpublished during his lifetime, the one-page composition came with a cryptic instruction: "Pour se jouer 840 fois de suite ce motif, il sera bon de se préparer au préalable, et dans le plus grand silence, par des immobilités sérieuses".4 This has been taken to mean that the piece should be played 840 times in a row — a marathon feat that would take more than twenty hours, depending on how "très lent" the player went. In order to squeeze 840 repetitions in the course of the night, here it was being doubled up, with players at two pianos playing it simultaneously 420 times.
And so, on the illuminated floor under the high, arched ceiling there were two grand pianos facing each other, each working roughly in sync to the jagged, broken rhythms of the piece. With its lurching timing and musical stagger-steps, it's a slightly disconcerting ("vexing") bit of music as it is, but hearing the two players sliding in and out of sync added a deliciously disconcerting frisson. Sometimes if sounded like it was a bit of a battle of wills between the two players, as if one would suddenly slow down or speed up a little to try and psych their opposite number out.
For the final conceptual coup in this presentation, the music was printed on sheets on origami paper, and as the player finished each repetition, a volunteer would take away the page to a long table further down, where, again, a pair of facing paper-folders would turn each one into a paper sculpture, their number growing as the night went on.
And also, once again, it was rewarding to find a place to sit at the midway point between the pianos, lean back and enjoy the weird stereo effects being generated, combined with the clattery tap of shoes on the tile floor. It's un-pretty music, but very beautiful, and I hung out for about a half hour of this, long enough again to see a shift change as new players took over at each of the pianos. Now I was starting to feel the effects of the late hour and after going over to check out the origami table, I headed out.
Listen to a Vexation from this performance here.
I did pause out on Yonge Street to check out Sandra Rechico's light sculpture 1850 — it was very blue — but I had hit that point where I mostly wanted to get along home. I strolled down to Union Station and grabbed the special late-night subway and made my way out. All in all, I enjoyed the stuff I went to. There's a general propensity among the more-cultured art lovers to shake their heads at Nuit Blanche — at the crassness, the crowds, the inadequacy of the works on offer — but I went about the night on my own terms and it all worked out pretty well.
1 And also, perhaps, good to demonstrate that ignoring the open liquor ban will not lead to complete and utter chaos. On a cold October night, even the least-shouty aesthete is better off with some fortifying brandy on hand.
2 Wondering if I could reverse-engineer this process, I did some back-of-the-envelope ratios and sped up the tempo on my recordings to see if a half hour of this would sound like three minutes of The Beatles, but I couldn't pick out too much of a tune.
3 In fact, I realized after the fact that I vaguely did know who Gavin Bryars is, being passingly familiar with his brush with "crossover" pop success on the Tom Waits re-recording of "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet", though I had never explored his work much otherwise. Closer to my heart, he also was involved with Brian Eno's Discreet Music album as conductor and co-arranger.
4 "In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities".
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