The Wake

Amidst an intricate network of cables, switches, laptops and blinking lights, VJ Neverwas leans over and picks up a very low-tech, half-empty Culligan water jug. The microphone captures the faintest taps and rattles as Neverwas delicately explores the clear plastic with his fingers, testing its percussive potential. What begins as curiously crisp and hesitant consideration of the container’s surface quality, seamlessly melds into an enchanting swell of deep tribal beats. Every slap and every slosh is then fed into a soundboard where electronic musician James Patrick recombines and loops them into a larger, shadowy sculpture of sound. It’s suddenly clear that every tap, every slosh, every accident, and every intention encountered during this performance was meant to be absorbed, experienced and appreciated.

This opening piece embodied everything unexpected and vulnerable that an improvised performance entails. The audience was adequately primed for Improvised Explosive Device’s very unique brand of real-time audio-visual experimentation. This Minneapolis collaboration of artists has been described as a “spontaneous visual and aural remix of microhouse grooves, surrealistic dream cinema, and virtuosic skronk funk that has not been seen or heard anywhere before.” Their groundbreaking approach redefines music by combining electronics with acoustics, found sounds and imagery in a strange brew of conventional rhythms and conceptual sound and video structures.

The collaboration showcases film artist and musician VJ Neverwas on laptop imagery and guitar, Electropolis’s Michael Ferrier on tenor sax and various electronic devices, James Patrick on laptop manipulations and live mix, improvisational video artist Mark Henrickson on Jitter (a very techy real-time editing software), Chris Bates on bass, and Greg Schutte on drums. Together they create an ebb and flow of beats and dreamscapes that teeter between tempo and ambience. Henrickson describes IED as an “opportunity to explore sound and image spaces that we otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to explore.”

Explorations at the Southern Theater performance included a recut of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, in which the film was remixed into a melodic frame-by-frame analysis of its hypnotically precise and electrifying choreography. Other, slightly more horrifying incarnations included a piece juxtaposing footage of American soldiers escorting a family from their home at gunpoint with an equally terrifying clip from TV’s Trading Spouses, in which “Mom” screams with murderous buck-toothed rage in the name of Jesus.

According to Neverwas, the fusion of live video and musical performance is not only progressive but necessary. “It is important not to separate them,” he says. A pattern of sound vibrations and a pattern of light photons both have the same power to evoke emotional reactions if executed in the right combinations. IED’s imagery and sound mixtures are engrossing and provocative, a loaded amalgamation in the vein of what Neverwas describes.

The name of the group has been subject to some controversy among individuals with a deep seated anger about the events of the last two to three years. To name your band Improvised Explosive Device, after a homemade bomb designed to cause death or injury, most certainly has many contemporary connotations that are genuinely upsetting. But the group’s performances are very much a plea for peace and understanding. Neverwas sees the public’s response to these three words as a sort of lingual acid test, and looks forward to a world in which the band’s title sounds outdated and irrelevant. “I’ll do anything I can to bring down the current situation in a peaceful way,” Neverwas says.

IED also performed at this year’s Spark festival. If you were not fortunate enough to catch them this month, keep an eye out for them at local gallery shows in April.