“634 Minutes Inside a Volcano” was an improvisational site-specific performance on the Greek island Nisyros. Credit Pinelopi Gerasimou
NISYROS, Greece — The otherworldly landscape of central Nisyros, a jumble of looming caldera ridges and shimmering craters where fumaroles spit hot, sulfurous gases from the earth’s crust, is usually visited only by volcanologists and curious tourists.
But last Thursday at dusk, 15 musicians gathered at an active volcanic crater on this small island in the southern Aegean Sea for an experiment in improvisational site-specific performance. Lit by a glowing August full moon, they played for 10½ hours, asked only to take inspiration from their surroundings.
Titled “634 Minutes Inside a Volcano,” the event was organized by six d.o.g.s, an Athens arts space, and the Onassis Cultural Center. The musicians, mostly Greek and in their 20s and 30s, came from improvisational backgrounds, including jazz, classical, avant-garde and electronic, and many met for the first time at the sound check. Their instruments included electric guitar, piano, clarinet and synthesizer, as well as sample loops, and traditional eastern Mediterranean instruments like the oud and the kanonaki.
For the performance, they were spaced around a large circle within the Stefanos Crater, which at nearly 1,000 feet in diameter is one of the largest active hydrothermal craters in the world. Each musician was hooked up to a center-facing amplifier, which fed into a 16-channel mixing board, all powered by a generator. In-ear monitors let each musician hear the others, as well as an engineered mix.
The result was an immersive layering of experimental, otherworldly soundscapes, evocative one minute of Sun Ra, the next of Aphex Twin or Autechre. Glitch and drone melded with desert-blown free jazz. Mournful loops of electrified cello overlaid throbbing synthesizer, the music constantly spinning apart and reassembling into a whole.
The organizers documented the event with photographs and an audio recording, which they plan to release in coming months. No artificial lighting was used inside the crater, so aside from the very beginning and end, when there was sunlight, the performance could not be captured by cellphone cameras.
“I wanted it to be such a raw and primitive experience that no documentation can capture it,” said Konstantinos Dagritzikos, the event’s 34-year-old artistic director and mastermind, who owns and runs six d.o.g.s, in Athens.
Read the rest of the article here, and catch the video, too:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/arts/music/15-musicians-spent-the-night-in-an-active-volcano-listen-to-what-happened.html?
By Charly Wilderaug