REVIEW: Alessandro Cortini with Rachika Nayar
Photos by Tom Miller
“It was a meditative experience, lulling listeners into a state of melodic calm, then rustling them out with a quickening of pace or change of pattern.”
“Are we ready for a mind expanding evening?” Diane Eber, Executive Director at The Egg, coyly asked the crowd as they filed into the Swyer Theatre on Thursday night.
Rachika Nayar, an experimental musician based in Brooklyn, and Alessandro Cortini, of Nine Inch Nails fame, were there to kick off The Egg’s new “Mind Expansion” series: an array of shows designed to push our boundaries sonically, allowing us to examine artistry and music from all sides. “There are no straight lines here at The Egg,” Eber joked, making this series the perfect opportunity to breathe new life into the venue.
The lights dimmed and Nayar took her place behind the booth, adjusting the imaging on the projector screen hanging behind her. As eerie, haunting synths began to fill the room, an equally unsettling clip began to roll. Through the lens of a night vision camera, a female figure fled through the woods, occasionally stopping to turn back to the camera, never quite coming into focus as the reel played over and over. Nayar’s music swelled and dipped, brimming with the harsh edges of processed guitar tracks, then grounded down with forceful, deep bass strokes.
New to this genre of ambient-trance-atmospheric music, as it appeared much of the crowd was, questions swam within me with each note and change of the screen. As the beats grew faster and the tones higher, I began to wonder what exactly about a sound makes us feel emotional. Are we conditioned to associate certain ranges and instruments with feelings? A low drone for impending doom and a fast, light tune for happiness? Or do these sounds just happen to naturally represent those emotions?
Nayar seemed intent to draw these thought experiments across her set as she played with our minds, ears, and eyes. The woman in the woods became hands clasping and unclasping, became sand slipping through fingers, became a shadowy crowd approaching the viewer. Once again I was swept away with possibility: was I supposed to be creating my own story out of these sounds and clips? Was I supposed to be resisting that innately human urge to make seemingly disparate elements connect due to proximity? Was this show designed specifically for people under the influence? (For the sake of my day job, I would like to be clear here that I was not). While I found no answers to my questions, I was enraptured by the sounds of melancholy, horror, hope, and romance all within a 40-minute span thanks to Nayar at the helm.
After a brief intermission, we shuffled back to our seats and settled in for the main event, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Alessandro Cortini. Once again, lights dimmed and the projector screen glowed, this time with an indiscernible close up—either sheets of ice or an object under a microscope. As Cortini began his set, the atmosphere was immediately different from Nayar. His beats were steadier, a constant through line at the upper and lower ranges of arrangement in the form of two uninterrupted tones. Instead of playing with range, Cortini experimented with texture and rhythm, almost as if he was harnessing the static at the outer edges of the notes.
It was a meditative experience, lulling listeners into a state of melodic calm, then rustling them out with a quickening of pace or change of pattern. The continuous, white-gray visuals gave even more indication that the set was meant to relax and calm the listener. Then, with a rise and a fall of volume, leading into one final click of a cord being ended, it was done. Cortini waved to the audience graciously as he took his applause, then exited the stage.
While many concert goers took their leave, several stayed seated, appearing a bit confused. Now I was lost. This didn’t seem like the kind of show where you called for an encore. However, after asking around, new details came to light: Cortini’s set ended about 20 minutes earlier than anticipated, perhaps because a piece of equipment he required was never delivered. Had he really completed the entire show without an integral piece of his set up? Was this off the cuff or an artist’s improvisation of their own music? Or did it truly all go to plan and the timing was simply miscommunicated? Maybe in the true spirit of the mind expansion series, we’ll never quite know these answers. All I know is that I left with a lot more questions than I brought and a newfound appreciation for the smallest of elements that make music the complex beauty it is.