Tonight we review last Thursday’s concert at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco, part of Outsound Presents’ weekly series. I arrived to a darkened gallery with abstract bands and shapes of light being projected onto the wall, with Jan Pusina sitting in front controlling electronic musical sounds. The video was being controlled Bob Pacelli using analog video synthesizers.
The stripe patterns remained for a while with different combinations of colors and widths, before eventually changing to geometric shapes and even some curved forms. The music was primary long drones with complex timbres, but towards the last third of the set there were additional textures with shorter-length sounds. Overall it was a short performance, but I thought the duration worked well given the minimal nature of the visual and aural material and kept it interesting.
The second set featured Adobe, a duo of Caroline Pugh on voice and electronics with Paul Stapleton performing on his “Bonsai Sound Sculpture.” We have reviewed Stapleton performing with his creation before (see this article from last year). However, this was a more formal duo that has been performing together for a long time.
Stapleton’s electronic sounds blended well with Pugh’s vocals, which combined tradition Scottish folk singing with extended vocal techniques, feedback and cassette-player effects. I was impressed with her performance, both the range of sounds and techniques and the overall strength of her voice. Her sound ranged from long brilliant tones to rapid-fire sequences of phonemes that may or may not have been actual words. There was also an element of humor in her presentation and some of the text. Stapleton’s sounds ranged from DJ-like recordings played at variable speed to metallic noises and other scratchy bits of sound, and fill in the spaces in between the vocals. After the performance, I went to take a closer look at the Bonsai Sound Sculpture itself:
Overall, a strong performance with very contrasting sets, ranging from the more meditative opening to the more dynamic and virtuosic conclusion. I was quite happy I made the effort to come out on an exceptionally cold night in San Francisco to hear these sets.
After a few cold weeks in the city, I am looking back fondly at my trip to the desert this past summer. Today we look at the final leg of that trip, leaving Joshua Tree on Highway 247. I had been curious about this highway which heads north from Yucca Valley at a junction with Highway 62 out into the desert hills. There is actually quite a bit of residential development near the start of highway, with a great many dusty side streets with a diverse collection of homes. I acquired one of my sculptures at the home of an artist there several years ago. But on this occasion, I kept going north. One of first reassurance markers was, appropriately enough, next to a joshua tree.
Here, 247 turns north towards Barstow, so I switched onto Highway 18 heading east out of town. This odd highway winds around the mountains and valleys of San Bernardino county through a variety of geographies. The section that I traveled started with crumbly red-brown rock formations up against the sparse commercial development of the town. After an empty section, the road entered the town of Apple Valley where the landscape turned all of a sudden into suburban development and the highway became a multilane expressway known as the “Happy Trails Highway”. The sharp contrast was a little jarring, but not unexpected given the history of development in the deserts north and east of Los Angeles. But this was not the stark industrial development as I had seen in 
