Electronically aided improvisation and musical design is a direct threat to our assumptions about music. By combining centuries-old cellos and wind instruments with vintage half-century-old analogue synthesizers and the sliding bass pulse of programmed beats, the Freight Elevator Quartet juxtaposes previous generations' conception of the future of music with that of our own -- the future imagining the past imagining the future...
The Freight Elevator Quartet formed in late 1996, working out of the historic Electronic Music Center of Columbia University, and first performing (in the freight elevator) at Knuckles, a monthly visual-arts/multimedia/music event held on 125th st. These led to a series of performances in NY clubs and art openings, where FEQ was described by one newspaper as "weaving a tense matrix of moans, screeches, mumbles, and echoes, underscored by elusive beats. If their music were a painting, it would depict a futuristic underwater landscape."
In the summer of 1997 FEQ assembled their debut album from some 800 minutes of recorded performances. Capturing the spontaneity of the band improvising complex sonic textures and fleeting melodies, the album elicited responses such as, from electronic composer Scott Adams: "Amazing sounds and improv...I was not expecting it to be as noisy and avant-garde as it was. The density of it gives it a dark, ominous, menacing quality, one of the distinctive beauties of it...it's as forbodingly enchanting as the urban pollution of Blade Runner. FEQ's music has a potentially very wide appeal."
Filtering and recombining the-end-of-the-century information barrage, the Freight Elevator Quartet's sound is a startling celebration of the possibilities of digital culture. FEQ's jungle album is at the forefront of a new breed of electronic music that bridges genres and schools of thought seamlessly -- where jungle and downtempo beats, the electronic avant-garde, hip hop rhymes, improvisational melodies and ethereal vocals can all exist and interact in the same space.
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Events:
Concert 3
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