Making a Scene

Live Electronic Music Beyond the Clubs

When you think of live music in Boston, it’s not likely that an image of a musician staring at a laptop or hunched over sundry electronic equipment springs immediately to mind. If there is a Boston "sound," it is more readily associated with stripped-down garage punk, ska and rock than it is with the synthetic sounds of electronic music; particularly if it falls outside of the trance and house that dominates the city’s dance clubs. While you wouldn’t know it from a cursory glance at the local club listings, Boston has a burgeoning live electronic music scene. One which has grown, not under the bright lights of area clubs, but rather in university halls, cafes, art galleries and elsewhere.

Finding spaces to perform and promoters willing to book electronic music has been a persistent concern for musicians in Boston. While electronic music may have become the signifier of technological sophistication and futuristic cool in the fantasy world of advertising, in the live context electronic music, perhaps because of its lack of overt spectacle, continues to have a relatively small audience in comparison with rock. While clubs such as Lilli’s, The Milky Way Lounge, the Phoenix Landing and The Middle East will occasionally book established local electronic musicians like Hrvatski, Electro Organic Sound System/DJ C and Tube, they are the exception rather than the rule. Even techno luminaries Fred Giannelli (a.k.a. The Kooky Scientist, x-Psychic TV) and Stewart Walker, who play large clubs in Europe and elsewhere in the U.S., rarely perform in Boston. The situation has prompted Keith Whitman (a.k.a. Hrvatski) – one of the area’s most oft-booked performers – to compare his life in Boston to retirement.

Nonetheless, there is currently a sense of optimism among musicians about the future of electronic music in the city. As events like the recent Boston Cyberarts festival have demonstrated, just below the surface there is an array of innovative local musicians working in a multiplicity of styles from techno and blistering breakbeat to electro-acoustic, musique concrète and noise. The scene is not altogether cohesive, but is instead a number of micro-scenes, divided not only along the lines of musical genre, but also along institutional and geographic lines. For, while local colleges and art schools foster both popular and academic forms of electronic music, they also tend to create pockets of discrete musical activity, which are often surprisingly isolated from one another, given Boston’s relatively small size. Recently, however, new events and spaces have emerged, offering not only opportunities for musicians to play out, but also new points of intersection for Boston’s many micro-scenes.

Until recently, a significant locus of activity for local electronic musicians was the Toneburst Collective, formed in 1996 by a group of students from Mass College of Art and Harvard University. From its inception, Toneburst attempted to create spaces for musical innovation outside the confines of Boston’s commercial clubs and its increasingly commodified rave scene. The group had a punk-inspired, DIY approach to events, organizing large anti-raves as well as smaller events in numerous unusual spaces around the city: transforming galleries, a church, college auditoriums, as well as larger institutions like the Children’s Museum and the Museum of Science into places for sonic exploration. Toneburst embraced an eclectic musical aesthetic, centering on the frenetic beats of jungle, but also including hip-hop, noise, breakbeat and dub.

In the last year and a half, however, Toneburst has fragmented as members finished school, left the city and/or embarked on individual projects. The group staged its last large event, Rewind, featuring all of the original members, at Mass Art last September. Since then, the group has been in a kind of state of suspended animation with its future unclear. The influence of Toneburst, however, is still significant, both in terms of their musical aesthetic and their approach to creating events. Indeed, Toneburst members continue to organize shows like last month’s "Schema" at the Oni Gallery, which featured live electronic music, DJs, video and interactive computer art. In some respects, even though many of the participants were different, the approach to the event was similar. As Toneburst co-founder Jake Trussell (a.k.a. Electro Organic Sound System, DJ C) who helped organize "Schema" explains: "Like so many Toneburst events, it seemed to straddle the lines separating music and art. We think of them as installations, but it’s still a party."

Along with Toneburst, one of the most active and well-established electronic music micro-scenes in Boston exists as part of the city’s vibrant free improv community. The fusion of electronic music and free improv has been an especially fruitful one. As James Coleman, a key member of the improv community and a theremin player in the Undr Quartet and Saturnalia notes, this combination has yielded a very particular Boston sound, one that has recently received considerable international acclaim. An important factor contributing to the cohesiveness of the electronic improv scene is the existence of local record labels like Sublingual and Intransitive Records that support and promote local artists. In addition, Twisted Village, a record store in Harvard Square, plays an equally important unifying role, which turntablist Jason Talbot notes, functions as a hub of sorts for the local free improv community.

Over the years, the free improv scene has built a number of long-standing relationships with area venues and institutions. They have organized a long-running Playground New Music Series on Friday nights at the Zeitgeist Gallery near Central Square, which this last winter was guest curated by musicians Seth Cluett and Howard Stelzer of Intransitive and was devoted solely to experimental electronic music. In addition, there are frequent local improv shows at Mass Art, many of which are organized by Talbot. Perhaps most significantly, the free improv group has a focal point of sorts, the annual Autumn Uprising Festival, which is held at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and is one of the preeminent festivals of new and experimental music in the county. This past year’s festival, co-curated by James Coleman, featured an impressive array of local electronic improvisers.

Recently, the free improv community launched a series of monthly shows at the Tremont Theater in Boston. Coleman, who is one of five curators for the Tremont Music Series, is particularly excited about the new space, calling it and the series "the most positive development for the scene in quite some time." The International Society is providing the curators a rent-free, supportive venue for monthly shows, in which they are encouraged to program experimental music of all varieties and styles.

Beyond the successes of the free improv community and in the wake of the apparent demise of Toneburst, a number of new groups and individuals have stepped into the breach and begun organizing shows from larger events to more intimate weekly happenings. The larger events have often been held at local universities, revealing the breadth of the electronic music scene, as new constellations of musical activity have begun to take shape. From accessible styles of melodic techno to the somewhat more abstract and unfamiliar, university venues have witnessed several large, quality shows, including the C-FOM label’s Boston Not London show last May; the multimedia event, Collision, organized by MIT graduate students; most recently, Squash Finals 2001, held at a pair of old squash courts at Harvard.

In addition to these large, occasional events, one of the most significant indications of the wealth of electronic performers at work in Boston has been the emergence of three weekly events: Beat Research, Sync and Appliance of Science. While these shows have fostered new ties among electronic musicians working in a variety of genres, the organizers also encountered the vagaries of sustaining electronic music weeklies in commercial spaces.

Beat Research, launched last March by Jake Trussell and fellow Toneburster, DJ Flack (Antony Flackett), featured a mix of DJ sets and live performances by artists such as Hrvatski and Mr. Int Er Rupt. Notwithstanding the high quality of the performances, attendance was spotty at best, leading to Trussell and Flackett’s decision to dissolve the weekly in late April.

Frank Heiss (a.k.a. Tube) and Mike O’Connell (a.k.a. Cozmopolis) held their weekly, Sync, on Friday nights at Café de Michel, a small restaurant in Mission Hill early in 2001. Heiss explains he and O’Connell modeled the night at Café de Michel after the laid-back shows they’d experienced in Cologne, which has one of Germany’s best live electronic music scenes. "We were looking for unusual spaces, not really a dance space, not really a rock club, just a cool place to hang out, like an electronic music lounge." Over the next five months, Sync featured some of the area’s finest live electronic music, from the house stylings of Greg Shiff to the idiosyncratic idm [intelligent dance music] of Parallel (Greg Davis and Don Mennerich). Both Beat Research and Sync became places for musicians to meet and talk, as well as hear each other’s music. "It was a strange way to run a night," Heiss admits of Café de Michel, "but it came together really well. There was definitely a great scene developing there."

Despite the quality of the music at both Beat Research and Sync, the commercial spaces in which the events occurred ultimately proved untenable. And while finding appropriate spaces for weeklies in Boston can be a challenge, as Heiss sees it, "There are lots of venues for this kind of music out there, but good venues are found; they don’t exist already – that’s why they’re good venues."

The Cellar, a bar near Harvard Square, is one such unlikely venue, discovered by a group of DJs and musicians who had been involved in the Collision event at MIT. In March, they started a live music weekly there called Appliance of Science. According to one of the residents, Dan Paluska (a.k.a. Tek Fu), the night has been quite successful, although he says they expend a lot of energy promoting it. Through his experience running Appliance of Science and co-hosting the radio show Electronic Experiments on WMBR, which also features live performances by area musicians, Paluska has become aware of the depth and breadth of the electronic music being made in Boston. "Time after time," he explains, "with both the radio show and the night at the Cellar, I’ve been amazed at the quality of the music. It’s not just that there are a lot of people doing this kind of music. It’s that people are doing it really well, from really minimal stuff to crazy drum ‘n’ bass – I’ve been really impressed."

Opportunities for electronic musicians to perform extend beyond university halls or the commercial spaces of restaurants, bars and clubs. Art spaces and galleries, such as the Zeitgeist, Mobius and the now-defunct Gallery Bershad, have long held electronic music performances of various sorts. In recent months, several new and reborn institutions, such as the resurgent Oni Gallery in Chinatown, the Berwick Research Institute in Roxbury and Lollygagger Studios in Dorchester have begun to sponsor such performances with greater frequency. According to the Oni Gallery’s David Goodman (of the band Lockgroove), given the recent success of Schema, which was the first such event in the Oni’s new space in Chinatown, Oni is enthusiastic about mounting similar electronic music events in the future. In addition to events such as Schema, they are also considering having informal lectures by local electronic musicians in which they demystify the processes by which they produce their work. In addition, Eric Masunaga, a member of the Oni Collective, is building a surround-sound studio at the gallery and, Goodman says, they are contemplating the possibility of collaborating with the MIT Media Lab.

The Berwick Research Institute, a non-commercial Gallery located near Dudley Square, is a relatively new space. As the Berwick’s David Webber explains, one of the goals of the Institute is to function as a space for events, performances, lectures and happenings. "Boston is a really weird place," he says. "There seem to be all these different pockets of musicians, doing very similar things. I think it’s a really interesting phenomenon that there are so many musicians doing all this over-the-top, really amazing work and yet none of them really know each other. One of the main things that we want the Berwick to be is a reference point for artists and musicians, providing a space and a time for the organization of events."

To this end, Webber is currently putting together a bi-weekly summer sound series that will take place on every other Sunday (the first takes place this Sunday June 10). Webber plans to program a wide variety of experimental music in order to bring together the many disparate elements of Boston’s experimental scene. He also organized the Berwick’s first exhibition, Quadraphonia, a sound exhibition focusing on works and performances that utilize multi-channel spatialization. The show featured a broad range of musical styles including drum ‘n’ bass, hip-hop, free jazz and all-out noise. "One of the things I really liked about doing the Quad show," Webber says, "was pulling in people from different areas all around Boston; that really excited me."

One of the most interesting and exciting recent developments has been the emergence of the Sessions shows at Lollygagger Studios (http://www.lollygagger.org). Despite the fact that they have done virtually no promotion--relying solely on their email list and word of mouth--over the last seven months or so, the monthly Sessions has evolved quite rapidly into a center for electronic music in Boston. When they held their first Sessions Party in October of last year, however, the Lollygaggers, Sam Brelsfoard (a.k.a. Soplerfo) and Stephen Martin (a.k.a. Mold) hardly envisioned that it would evolve into a regular event. They saw it simply as a means to introduce people to their new space by having a party with live electronic music, interesting visuals and various interactive elements. Fueled by the enthusiasm of those who attended that first show, particularly Mike Esposito (a.k.a. ESP) of Toneburst, they decided to make Sessions a monthly event.

In Brelsfoard’s estimation, Sessions is essentially "a place for experimental musicians to experiment." And the duo is receptive to any musician "who wants to do something different and original." For more established artists like Jake Trussell, who plays Sessions with almost religious devotion, Lollygagger’s, with its freeform structure and relaxed atmosphere, has become a place where he can try a new set-up or material without the pressure of a formal gig. For less experienced performers, it gives them a chance to play out and get valuable feedback from other musicians. "I get the most satisfaction," Martin says, "from drawing musicians out of the woodwork, musicians who might just stay the hermits that they are, and giving them an opportunity to perform."

With the success of the first six Sessions, both musically and in terms of the number of people they consistently draw, the Lollygaggers are contemplating producing a larger show in a commercial club big enough for the crowds they’ve proven they can attract. And to those who think there’s no audience for live electronic music in Boston, Lollygaggers is just one example of the potential of the Boston scene. As Brelsfoard puts it, "What Lollygaggers has become has indicated to us that there is a need and a desire for what we’re doing."

-Susanna Bolle

To find out more about Boston’s innovative collaborations of electronic musicians, multi-media artists and independent performance and art spaces, visit the following websites:

Appliance of Science: www.unlockedgroove.com/events/appliance/
Berwick Research Institute: www.berwickinstitute.org
Boston Improv Calendar: http://members.aol.com/tautology3/BossImpCal.html
C-FOM Records: www.c-fom.com
Intransitive Recordings: www.create-transmit.com/intransitive/
Lollygagger Studios: www.lollygagger.org
Mobius: http://world.std.com/~mobius/
Oni Gallery: www.onigallery.org
Sublingual Records: www.sublingual.com
Toneburst Collective: www.toneburst.com
Twisted Village: www.twistedvillage.com
Tremont Music Series: www.sublingual.com/tremont.html