GROUPSHOW

Would seriously kick your ass in Tetris

By ADA HUTCHINSON

del.ico.us | digg it! | reddit!

print | email | 0 Comments

Ambient and avant-garde electronic music gets a bad rap for the following reasons: 1) it's usually some dude sitting and staring at a laptop; 2) the audience must remain rapt in attention as said dude just looks at a computer screen and; 3) what if this guy is just playing Tetris?

That's always been the joke. This guy is just playing Tetris. Though if this brainiac is playing Tetris, he is probably scoring very well, and in an entertaining way—Groupshow will change how you feel about the performance of serious-minded electronic musicians. And that isn't to say Groupshow is just three clowns on unicycles.

Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann are each officially trained, avant-garde superstars. Jelinek, for his part, wrote a masterpiece of dub ambient music in 2001's Loop Finding Jazz Records LP, Pekler continually makes mountains out of sonic molehills (see Kranky's release of 2007's Cue) and Leichtmann has played with guys like John Zorn. They do, however, recognize the challenges of making the music in a live setting.

"We all love rhythm, repetition, addition and subtraction," Pekler says via email between gigs in Berlin. To that end, their performance is an improvised and live production of these elements via a very physical interaction with the audience. They never perform onstage and prefer to perform with the audience surrounding them. From there, real-time video records each member of Groupshow adding and subtracting from the sound, whether it's plugging and unplugging, turning a dial or other actions within their mess of wires, computers and modulators.

All of this is improvised, which leads the audience to wonder how they communicate, how they interact. "There probably are interactions. But since no one is singing, these connections remain a mystery, even to us," says Pekler. "Although sometimes we often imagine that we hear a kind of swamp landscape with insects, water and animals in our music."

Groupshow also doesn't want us to sit in quiet, but would prefer the audience to move around, chat and, at times, not even pay attention if we so desire. Because there is no human element that needs quiet, they play regardless of the sound in the room. "Machines react to humans, humans react to machines," he says. "This process can reach a certain level [of] complexity at which we aren't sure where certain sounds are coming from."

Curious as to what they do when not embodying the avant-garde, I ask them if they ever go out drinking together. "I have a part-time job as an insect exterminator," Pekler says. "Hanno is a junior lecturer in hydro-engineering and Jan takes care of his pet shop at the base of a TV tower in the center of Berlin. Sometimes, when the end of our extermination/lecturing/pet-selling shifts coincide, we will go out for champagne-Aperol spritzers." Maybe there is a bit of clown in them after all.

GROUPSHOW
SUNDAY 2.7.10
GOETHE-INSTITUT BOSTON
170 BEACON ST.
BOSTON
617.262.6050
8PM/ALL AGES/$10
GOETHE.DE
MYSPACE.COM/THEGROUPSHOW