Will Mayo – Washington Street Arts Center, Somerville – August 17

Mayo

 

Mayo’s stuff, on electronics, has the feel of oncoming traffic. Whether it’s an ice cream truck, or a fire engine, you don’t know, but slowly it fills up your ears, and you’re in a different place. It’s characterized by patterns, vaguely rhythmic, but glacially slow rhythms. You’re never sure what he’s doing in the moment; you just hear the phenomena. The tones are typically warm, like warm colors, with a bedrock of noise – fire over ash in a fireplace. This is static music. It really stays in one place, with the illusion of motion. Things build to crescendos, but then you’re in the same place again. It’s sort of the sonic equivalent of a camera increasing the focus of the zoom lens, so the piece has more volume as it develops, but it’s really the same whole that it was in the beginning. He raises questions of the nature of time. How do things progress and evolve around us? What is change? In a way, it’s like techno, with the patterns that build and intensify, then abate, so there’s the illusion of greater and greater magnitude, but it’s essentially vibrant repetition.

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