Bill
Horist, Eric Stewart/Jackie Stewart/Stan Wood, Atrophy
Paris Theatre 6
SW 3rd Ave., 224-8313
7:30 pm Tuesday, May 18
$4
If you talk to a lot of performers, you find out most evinced
a unique talent and interest in music at a young age. Experimental/improv
artist Bill Horist, however, isn't the average musician. Soylent
Radio, his album of seeping electronic landscapes, leaves
a guitar sounding like anything but a standard six-string:
supersonic jet-fighters swoop toward the ground, ancient tree
branches droop with melting snow, dirty factories rumble and
disconnected voices mumble. It's not surprising his background
doesn't fit the common mold.
"When I was a kid [in Michigan], I was forced to take piano
lessons. It totally sucked!" says the 27-year-old Seattle
transplant. And so vanishes the misty image of a boy dutifully
plugging away, practicing the instrument he loves and that
he will eventually make his life; in its place is a sharper
picture of a young man who feels constrained by parental
dreams of artistic glory. Horist wouldn't be one of those
prodigies whose parents prod him onward to fame. "I think
that I hated music until I was 12 due to that experience,"
he says.
When he met a peer who owned a sequencer, though, Horist
discovered the thrill of creating his own music. By his
senior year in high school he was learning guitar, and in
college he stumbled onto unconventional bands like Mahavishnu
Orchestra and John Zorn's alternately thrashy and ambient
Naked City.
"I don't really remember any instant in my life where I
thought, 'Wow! This is experimental music, and I like it!'"
Horist admits. But he'd always liked the alien soundscapes
buried between the verses of early '80s synth-pop, and he
says the bizarre instrumental slashes of groups such as
Naked City "clobbered me over the head" the first time he
heard them.
"This stuff drew me into a whole world peopled by musicians
actively seeking strange sounds," he says.
A "whole world" is just about right, for this is a man
whose refusal to confine his creativity has led him into
more alliances than Henry Kissinger ever forged. In Michigan,
he founded the avant-rock band Nobodaddy and free-improv
group the Tourniquet Trio. After moving to the Emerald City,
he began performing with jagged rockers Phineas Gage (later
to become Kung Pao Dickens), squawking improv quartet UnFolkUs,
the trip-hoppy trio Fin and guitar-plus-percussion duo Springtrap
Hum, among many others. And in March, he flew to Switzerland
to collaborate with guitarists Luigi Archetti and Uchihashi
Kazuhisa as part of the Taktlos '99 avant-garde music festival.
Still, his most compelling moments come from his solo efforts.
Soylent Radio offers a fully satisfying array of
experimental guitar constructions, with Horist displaying
an innate ability to manipulate a prepared guitar with objects
such as rods, nails and clothespins inserted between the
strings.
Horist's concert at the Paris Theatre in late '97 also
proved his ability to translate the album's surreal atmosphere
into a vivid live performance, culminating when he slid
a long metal slat into the strings and set it seesawing
up and down. The result was a scraping, oscillating noise
that was both visually and aurally hypnotic. Unlike some
intellectualized artmusik, it provided a visceral thrill
that was more palpable than pretentious.
"I was once told that my solo work is very emotional,"
he says. "I thought, 'Gee, that's odd....' For me, the music
is more sensual. Sometimes I feel like I'm making aural
finger puppets that are transmitted as textures that people
can feel under their fingers. It's primarily tactile."
That doesn't mean that his music doesn't stimulate the
brain, however. In fact, he wants his sonic work to have
a cinematic aspect as well. "I think that film most directly
influences my music," says Horist. "Not necessarily a
film, but rather the methods of making a film, the techniques
through which one can take disparate symbols and create
new meanings and ideas that resonate with people. The sounds
I create conjure images in my head, and I hope they do that
to others as well."
But before you go running for the thesaurus to describe
his psycho-acoustic manifestations of asymmetrical sonic
emanations, remember this: Horist is still a young man who
wants to keep open as many options as possible. Grafting
some hyper-theoretical nonsense onto his music would simply
serve to label and limit him. When offered the opportunity
to make an all-encompassing statement explaining the purpose
of his experiments--as Cage, Stockhausen and Partch did
decades before--Horist responds jokingly, "This is the kind
of question people spend years preparing for, and I had
to blow it by forgetting my No. 2 pencil. Is a marker OK?"
Sure. Horist probably would've gotten an A anyway.
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 12, 1999
|
