Recording: Nidus

Artist: Nidus

Songs: Abductive Transduction [three excerpts]

Recorded at Ratio (Abductive Transduction), January 28, 2017.

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [edited excerpt 1]

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [excerpt 2]

Nidus - Abductive Transduction [excerpt 3]

Taking over all of Ratio's performance space, even the customary artwork was temporarily removed to showcase a series of collage works by Franco Berti. They were overlooking the venue's owls, who were guarding a table of talismanic bones and artifacts. The deconstructed piano plate and strings that normally stay in a back corner was brought out to the middle of the room and laid on its side. All around it, resonators rattled pellets and other metal objects — even the speaker connected to a reel-to-reel player was tinfoil wrapped for some extra whispered vibrational sibilance.

The installation that felt like the apotheosis of the trio's endeavours, removing the humans from the loop to create a long-form lo-fi installation with a variety of devices (in several formats) playing back recordings of Nidus' performances and rehearsals. This pushed the abstract/durational aspect of the group's work even further out than their previous six-hour live set as, in theory, this one could go on forever, so long as there was someone to flip the tapes and restart the MP3 players.

The evening would continue with some overlapping abstract projections and the recorded installation work would eventually segue into a live set. I wasn't able to stick around for that, but this recording of recordings somehow seems conceptually up to the task of representing the event.

Here's a brief video that totally fails to convey how the room as a whole was set up: