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Natural electricity
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Electronic music is by its very nature a technological artifact — you need circuit boards and wires to create it, after all. Yet on Saturday night at the Cambridge Family YMCA in Central Square, the music by Japanese turntablist/guitarist Otomo Yoshihide and the Boston-based electro-acoustic octet BSC called to mind the forces of nature as often as those of electricity. Yoshihide, who’s the founder of the influential high-intensity rock-noise band Ground Zero, began his opening solo set with the sound of plucked guitar strings over hissing white noise. Hunched over like a watchmaker, his hands moving deliberately from turntable to turntable and knob to knob, he gradually raised the volume and the density of the music. He filled the air with the high-pitched slicing of knife blades, the low-pitched whomp of helicopter blades, chest-rattling bass notes, and distant cracklings and pings. Then he tamed the menacing forces he’d set loose and the sounds subsided into a low-volume hum and static pops as soothing as the crackling of a log in a fireplace. In Yoshihide’s music, motifs don’t develop and evolve — rather, sonic events accrue in layers. There’s a sense of letting individual sounds be themselves and of discovering ways to order them. His fascination with even the smallest sonic detail produced by his table full of gear was palpable. Yet at its most assaultive, there was something majestic and even serene about the music, as if it were a mountain or a canyon. When he joined the BSC for the second set, the music turned from sublime power to bucolic quietude. Formed in 2000 by soprano-saxophonist Bhob Rainey, the BSC has developed a subtle but powerful group music. Most of its gestures are small — a puff of air from Rainey’s sax, the scrape of a metal sheet against the bell of Greg Kelley’s trumpet, a sharp crack of sound from Howard Steltzer’s cassette tapes, a hushed warble from vocalist Liz Tonne. It’s like sitting in a field listening to insects buzz and birds sing and the breeze blow. But the individual parts fall into sequence until something larger is produced. The music expires into silence often, and individuals remain mute for minutes on end. Yoshihide fit in without disrupting the delicate balance.
BY ED HAZELL
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