https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9578-2276
I am conflictingly grateful my life was lived during times of insufficient infrastructure. This inadequacy yielded powerful moments of subjectivation for me that now exist as cherished memories. Allow me to explain … I come from a city in Northern Ontario, Canada that was, during my childhood, connected to every other nearby city via undivided, mostly two-lane highways that cut through that vast famous Canadian wilderness for seemingly interminable stretches before those other cities were reached. The subjectivating moments did not emerge from movement on these highways, but, rather, from moments where the roads became blocked, traffic came to a standstill for miles, and, winter or summer, nearly everyone got out of their cars. As a young person I perceived these moments as the chance formation of a community, one birthed by disruption, united by a reframing of the highway as a place to wander on foot between cars while conversing with strangers and misusing their automobiles as objects to sit on rather than in. Those automobiles became in those moments a single tile in a grand mosaic of shining metal as far as the eye could see, set against the backdrop of dense swaths of great pines that became all the more imposing when suddenly we were no longer rocketing past them in our Dodges, Fords, Mazdas, and Chevys.
I was strongly enlivened by these moments wherein this community, this metal tableau, and these charged new human energies, alternatingly bewildered and resigned, suddenly appeared. One moment you were doing your rocketing, and the next you were, often for hours, part of this unexpected gathering, this new stillness. I was young. I was never anxious I would not reach a destination on time and I was never very cognisant that the reason for this new conglomeration was possibly a collision, the type that were often, on those roads, fatal. Perhaps because of my limited perspective or perhaps because of something actual about the attitudes of life in the 1980s in Northern Ontario, Canada, I never perceived these as moments of frustration, anxiety, worry, dread, or even desire to change our situation. To me they felt like a gift. They may have been caused by tragedy or by routine highway construction, but the heightened energy that emerged was at a remove from the cause and was something distinct and real in itself.
It has been a long time since I’ve experienced anything similar to these moments. When travel disruptions occur in my life now, I’m in different scenarios and I dwell mostly in anxiety that I’ll be too late to speak on my scheduled conference panel or that I’ll miss a travel connection and/or cherished time with my wife. If new wonderful energies are afforded by these disruptions, I’m closed off to them. Canadian infrastructure has improved and many of the highways are safer now; they’re mostly divided and construction seems to impact traffic flow less often. And, on top of that, I’m rarely there these days; I live in The Netherlands now and I travel nearly exclusively by bicycle and train. However, I did feel a similar energy again in Utrecht on November 13th, 2021, an emergent sense of community, a charged togetherness amidst disruption.
I felt it at a concert, a duo show by Sainkho Namtchylak and Slumberland. I’d seen Namtchylak before. She’s a powerful vocalist born and raised in Tuva who I wrote a bit about in my book: Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing.Footnote1 Slumberland is both the pseudonym of Belgian artist Jochem Baelus, a builder of “home-made mechanical instruments”,Footnote2 and the name of a band he performs with that combines his manipulation of those instruments with the sounds of two drummers. In this case Slumberland meant Baelus alone giving life to programmed grooves and often drone-like and/or dream-like harmonic backdrops as well as live layers of both electronic sound and processed acoustic sounds from lengths of struck or bowed metal that were displayed prominently on the performatively self-constructed frankeninstrument he was playing.
One key factor that made the concert feel like those miles-long standstills on the asphalt between the pines was the container the concert was in and the affordances of that container. The night before the concert the Dutch government put a lockdown in place that was to start the next day, the day of the concert. The concert was programmed on a Saturday, the third day of the four-day-long festival Le Guess Who?. My respect for the programmers and managers of this festival has been high since I first discovered it – the festival’s programming is unique, challenging, and diverse. The odd multilinguistic name of the festival is devoid of common festival name phrases/genre-containers like “jazz festival”, “festival of world music”, or “rock festival” and the programming spans a vast array of genres, geographical origins, and levels of hipness. My respect for the team that runs the festival grew even more when, hours after the lockdown announcement, the management notified festival goers that though all events must cease at 18:00, they would be working to move most of the evening programming to the afternoon on the final two days of the festival. Some might argue this was contrary to the public health aim of the lockdown, but I felt able during the festival to keep socially distant and the event required a vaccination QR code for entry. It was a decision that fell within the boundaries of the changing pandemic measures and provided the container for the unique effect I felt that night.
Namtchylak and Baelus were supposed to perform after 18:00, but the programmers moved the concert to an earlier slot – 17:30, the slot leading up to this fresh cessation of evening events for weeks or, it is becoming clear as I write this, months. Le Guess Who usually features ten to twenty simultaneous stages/events, so it’s a festival where most festival-goers hop constantly from venue to venue (Utrecht is a lovely city for this, containing TivoliVredenburg, a concert venue with eight concert halls in the same building, and many other charming venues, from churches, to state theatres, to galleries, to black box clubs, in close walking distance). The audience that pre-selected this concert piled into the cavernous church early and chose a pew. Like I was, others must have been partly focused on the fact that we’d been robbed of our evening plans and this was the last chance to savour a musical performance before the timespace of pandemic isolation descended upon us again. When the concert began, about sixty percent of the pews were full; a sizeable audience for this kind of “adventurous” music. A simple and persistent mid-tempo four bar groove began to repeat. It was composed of a diverse body of percussion timbres, the most prominent of which sounded to me less familiar from past musical experiences than from non-musical environments like construction sites or factories. Namtchylak, who often performs full concerts of wordless improvised vocal music, blends into this project sung and spoken texts. On this night she began with a text that was polysemic (as all texts are) but seemed plainly to me to be about life under the pandemic. In a virtuosic multivocal sprechstimme wherein each line of text was delivered in its own unique timbre, from shockingly low multiphonic growls to high, tense nasal timbres that can feel like an aural razor slicing into your ears, Namtchylak sang about what it feels like to have to step outside her door to face another day in an environment where leaving the safety of your home feels a bit like playing Russian roulette. The unsettling, timbrally inventive, persistently pulsing soundscapes of Slumberland and the voice of Namtchylak, which alluded sonically to our capacity for transformation, our multiplicity, our vulnerability and the extent to which we are shaped by the containers we step or are forced into, combined with the awareness that this was the hour before isolation was returning, the hour before an unknowable but darkening next phase of life under plague. But that lament co-existed with a palpable sense that we were still here, still able to sit and listen to this gorgeous array of sounds, still able to be in the presence of two performing bodies in the thick of a ritual that allowed them to be in the world and with us in ways no other ritual allows.
But I wasn’t in the elevated space of the transfigured highway yet. It wasn’t until midway through Slumberland and Namtchylak’s relentless, dark and lucious set that I looked back from my front row seat and realised that venue hopping festival-goers had filled the church, that they were standing in the aisles, piled in and savouring these last shared energies before the next isolation, open to taking in a voice that violates the norms of vocal coherence and grateful for the chance to be there and then. It was with this realisation that I was back and outside of my parents’ car, wandering through the standstill and looking into the faces of an agglomeration of strangers, together, present to the uniqueness of the moment, resigned to be going nowhere.
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Chris Tonelli
Chris Tonelli is Assistant Professor of Popular Music Studies in the Popular Music, Sound and Media Cultures specialization of the Arts, Culture and Media program at the University of Groningen where he teaches global and transnational popular music studies, arts criticism, critical musicology, ethnographic methodology, sonic technology studies, urban ethnomusicology, and popular music analysis and history. His book Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing (2020 Routledge) examines the history of improvisational soundsinging and theorizes the social effects of human vocal sounds audiences hear as non-human. Other recent work includes articles on video game music and identity (for the Cambridge Companion of Video Game Music) and reception of scat singing (for a forthcoming edited volume also on Cambridge UP). Dr. Tonelli is also active as a community music practitioner and researcher through his conducting and organization of improvising choirs, like his virtual Transnational Vocal Exploration Choir project.
Notes
1. Tonelli, Chris. 2019. Voices Found: Free Jazz and Singing. New York: Routledge.