Victorian Opera, Nixon in China

Reviews
Nixon in China, Photo by Martin Philbey
Nixon in China publicity, Photo by Martin Philbey

Nixon in China
Victorian Opera
Her Majesty’s Theatre
16–23 May

Natural minor scales rise ominously beneath a blood-red curtain. Slowly, a chorus in Zhongshan suits emerges from between the fiery drapes and intones Mao Tse-tung’s “Three Rules of Discipline and Eight Points for Attention,” the fundamental guidelines of the Chinese Red Army from 1928. Dropping subito piano and slowly approaching the audience, the chorus chants: “The people are the heroes now, Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow.”

The awesome serenity of this opening evokes the mythology that China projected both to itself and to the West during the purges of the Cultural Revolution. It was into the long aftermath of this slaughter that Richard Nixon descended in 1972 and introduced a new layer of mediatised, political heroism through the broadcasting of the presidential visit (as Nixon (Barry Ryan) sings, “News has a kind of mystery”). Victorian Opera’s production is faithful to a third layer of mythology—after China’s propaganda and Western mediatisation—that John Adams and Peter Sellars inaugurated in 1987 to reflect the larger-than life image of the figures shown on the receiving end of the television. Victorian Opera’s production achieves a high level of historical accuracy in design and performance, from Mao and Nixon’s covered arm-chairs by set designer Richard Roberts, to Mrs Nixon’s ’70s outfits by costume designer Esther Marie Hayes, to the general recreation at Her Majesty’s Theatre of the opera’s previous incarnations by director Roger Hodgman. Even coming from a generation that didn’t grow up in the shadow of Nixon and Mao, the opera appeared relevant in its presentation of the conflict of humanism and political principle and the mediatisation of politics.

The drama of the first act relies on the audience’s acceptance, through their own experience of the era, of the importance of Nixon’s visit. Today Nixon’s dramatic entry on Air Force One is trivialised somewhat by the knowledge that for many years China and America had been trading table tennis players in an initiative now referred to as “ping-pong diplomacy.” I could certainly have exchanged Nixon and Mao’s duet about government bonds for an operatic game of table tennis. Baritone Bradley Daley expertly embodies the ailing Mao, though his villainous entry to thundering timpani necessarily had to contrast with the footage of Nixon and Mao’s actual meeting, where the Chairman laughs and chatters excitedly and the President smiles and fidgets nervously.

But the opera breaks down its own myths soon enough. The monumental first act, focusing on Nixon and Mao, is juxtaposed with an irreverent, “feminine” second act dealing with the wives of the protagonists, Mrs Nixon and Chiang Ch’ing. Here the true heroine of the opera, Mrs Nixon, presents the fundamental opposition of the opera, which is not Democracy and Communism, but a sort of bleeding-heart humanism and the political principle of equality, an opposition that sees no easy resolution. Mrs Nixon is initially sympathetic to the communist principle of equality, while also upholding man’s liberties. Touring a factory she “forsees a time when luxury dissolves into the air like a perfume” while people are free to speculate on the economy. The casting of Kissinger as the slave driver in Chiang Ch’ing’s revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women quickly puts an end to this dream. Mrs Nixon asks “doesn’t that look like you know who?” as Kissinger (Andrew Collis) rises from his seat and enters the ballet. This leaves an empty seat next to Chiang Ch’ing and the Nixons, a reminder that the roles of oppressed and oppressor are so many places within larger economic and political structures waiting to be filled. The humanist Mrs Nixon does not realise this when she mistakes the play for reality and runs over to the beaten peasant girl. The Nixons exit as the peasant girl is armed and takes aim at the tyrant.

This unresolvable middle ground is also represented by Chinese Premier and peace-broking middleman Zhou Enlai, the only character to escape ridicule. Mao is portrayed as a mildly-expressed lecher, patting his female aide on the knee and referring to Madame Mao as “that tasty little starlet.” Nixon passes Kissinger small change for playing with the “backroom boys.” Tiffany Speight as Pat Nixon and Eva Jinhee Kong as Chiang Ch’ing give such stunning performances that you almost forgive Goodman their shallow characterization as soft-hearted ditz and fanatical harpy.

Not only is the conflict between humanism and political principle a perennial issue, Nixon in China remains relevant because it witnesses the birth of the sort of mediatised politics smothering political debate in Australia today. As Nixon’s speech at the state dinner was transmitted via satellite around the world, so every movement of a leader today is scrutinised and blown out of proportion, leading to the exaggeration of the trivial and the banalisation of the grandiose. As one audience member remarked on leaving the theatre: “Can you imagine someone doing that with Gillard or Abbott?” Actually, after watching the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship, I think I can.

Australia Council recognises scary music

News

Three proponents of New Music are recipients of this year’s Australia Council for the Arts Creative Fellowships. Percussionist and composer Eugene Ughetti, composer and multimedia artist Robin Fox and composer Amanda Cole feature among the eleven awards of $60,000–$100,000 each.

The awards are notable as recognition by the Australia Council of the situation on the musical ground where ever-increasing audiences have been exposed to and enjoyed “difficult” New and experimental music over the past ten years. This has been thanks to the efforts of a generation of agitators like Ughetti and Fox; ensembles like Ensemble Offspring, Synergy Percussion, Clocked Out and Speak Percussion and festivals like the Totally Huge New Music Festival, Liquid Architecture, Aurora and MONA FOMA. Most importantly, it has only been possible because of the quality and energy of the teachers of all these New Musicians and the composers they have championed—some of the very scariest Darmstadt pedigree and who have not been so lauded—including Keith Humble, Warren Burt, Chris Dench, Lawrence Whiffin, Fritz Hauser, Liza Lim, John McCaughey, Thomas Meadowcroft and Andrian Pertout.

Concert guide: 15–21 May

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Wednesday 15 May. Composer Leah Barclay leads a musical investigation into water security in India tonight at 6pm with The Dam(n) Project at Ian Hanger Recital Hall, Griffith Conservatorium of Music, QLD. Part of the Encounters: India series.

There will be a cross-cultural exploration of the static and shifting textures of drones at the Conservatorium Theatre, Griffith Conservatorium of Music, QLD. I love this write up on the AMC calendar: “Beginning with the oldest known drone in the world, the didgeridoo, this program is a celebration of string playing, with that prince of cellists, Rohan de Saram, presiding over a veritable palace of cellists. An Indian first half showcases music especially written for Rohan. It is balanced by an Australian second half in which the raw energy of Richard Vella is calmed by the erotic meditations of Peter Schaefer.” Part of the Encounters: India series.

Thursday 16 May. Victorian Opera’s production of one of the twentieth century’s most well-known operas Nixon in China opens tomorrow. They have put together a wonderful and informative web page for the show, which runs until 23 May.

Friday 17 May. As part of a collaboration between UTAS and Stephen F. Austin State University, Nathan Nabb and Christopher Ayer present an evening featuring pieces by UTAS composer Maria Grenfell and SFA’s Stephen Lias. 7:30pm, Hobart Conservatorium Recital Hall, TAS.

Larry Sitsky’s Peal will be performed on the National Carillon around 12pm–3pm in Canberra, ACT. The Canberra International Music Festival is offering a boat cruise with lunch but I suppose you could also just ride one of those covered bicycle carts around Lake Burley Griffin and listen out.

Saturday 18 May. ReFlux: A concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of George Maciunas’ Fluxus Manifesto featuring performance scores by George Brecht, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Emmett Williams, as well as new scores by Scott Comanzo (US), Cameron Kennedy, Kim Tan and Matthew Horsley. 2pm at the Rotunda, Queen Victoria Gardens, Southbank, VIC, by donation. BYO chairs, food, pets and whatever. Come prepared to perform …

The Elder Conservatorium’s music ensemble in residence Soundstream Collective will perform Australian composer Cat Hope’s new composition Stella Degradation at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, SA.

Kupka’s Piano, Giants Behind Us: German Music and its Discontents

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Kupka’s Piano
Giants Behind Us: German Music and its Discontents
10 May
Review by Jocelyn Wolfe

On Friday night Kupka’s Piano’s series of expeditions seeking innovative works from different countries led them back to the ‘spirit realm’, the place of geniuses, the land in which the great colonisation of western classical music originated—Germany. The title “Giants Behind Us” of course echoes Brahms’ trembling in the shoes of Beethoven. All the composers in Kupka’s “Giants” program are touched in one way or another by this history in presenting new works (including Australian and world premieres) in a new century, which, in Lilienstern’s words, has them all living in an internationalised, individualised world, learning from each other, trusting in their own musical ideas and perception. There was no trembling in the air in this concert. These were strong, confident statements of musical futures for all concerned, composers and performers alike. But there was nonetheless a sense of the long arm of tradition no matter what disaffection may reside in the creators. Flenady, in the program notes, describes this as a diverse expression unified in integrity and intent. For Rosenberger, it’s the “connective tissue” of events, actions, and people; and for von Lilienstern, it’s the connective tissue of Constructivism.

Before the concert, I was reminded in a conversation of the play currently showing in Brisbane—Red. It’s all about Rothko. Yes, Kupka is the painterly inspiration for the ensemble, but it’s to Rothko that I look for what the connective tissue was all about in this concert. His rectangular fields of colour—predominantly one colour—and the play of light open up to inquiring eyes. Just look—so much detail in fragments, layers, and textures within; and yet, after all, you can say that the painting is red. Across the pieces heard in this concert, there is this kind of canvas. Even gestures in the playing bespoke brush strokes of a painter, Rothko not Pollock—decisive, disciplined, and vigorous.

The opening piece by Wolfram Shurig (2005), a trio for piano (Alex Raineri), sax (Samantha Mason) and percussion (Angus Wilson), is a vibrant layering of relations between instruments, embedded in a rhythmic flux held firm in the hands of Wilson’s skillful mallets. It moves to a slow moving, pared down piano solo conveyed by Raineri with gossamer precision, until the return of the sax in a new guise—a melodic fragment ever so poetic. And the music simply breathes a few last breaths and is gone.

Brisbane-based Peter Clark, forging a future in composition and conducting with scholarships in conducting at Lucerne Academy under his belt, offers a piece for flute (Hannah Reardon-Smith), clarinet (Macarthur Clough), violin (Alethea Coombe), cello (Danielle Bentley) and vibraphone (Wilson), in what the composer calls version I of In Lines, in Time (2013). We are invited by Clark, who also conducts the piece, to consider whether the 5 instrumental lines, each rendered in a different meter, intersect or are heard each in their own right in a layering of sound. I find a weaving line, usually led by one of the five with its different timbres, melodic fragments, and rhythmic positioning, making a whole—sometimes broken, sometimes sparse, and at times rich and dense, but utterly coherent. The different underlying meters seem not to intrude in the sense of wholeness and there are definitive moments of absolute metric unity in the score, nicely articulated.

Before we hear version II, Isabel Mundry’s piece (1999) simply called Composition for Flute and Percussion, comes as a kind of intimate interlude. This is clever—nice programming. Its timbres of flute, (its percussive qualities are astutely teased out by Reardon-Smith) and various percussion, under the bandaged mallets of the inventive Wilson (yes, he found bandages to provide the best timbral qualities for the percussion palette of this piece) takes us into the surface textures of our canvas. This is a beautifully articulated interplay between the two, a lacy infrastructure with suspended moments and motivic patterns, attended by the ‘ching’ of a triangle.

And now the return of In Lines, in Time, this time version II, again conducted by Clark. This is more expansive, bringing back the piano, and has the quixotic vertical definition of harmony without harmonic definition. There’s a great balance in the ensemble, so many finely tuned ears and eyes focused on Clark’s brush strokes.

Soprano, (Tabatha McFayden, in splendid red), clarinet (Clough) and triangle (Clark) take to the stage in vehement conversation with Gerald Resch’s Splitter (2002). The composer’s note, hoping that the listener will not perceive the strict skeleton underlying the structure of the piece, which is based on a text by Austrian avant-garde poet Waltraud Seidlhofer, but will simply feel that “the musical things that happen have a certain logical alliance” is barely needed. The ear is completely tuned to the conversation—the clarinet resounds emphatically in short bursts and the soprano’s vocalisation shimmers, shouts, and whispers in retaliation. Clark’s scintillating triangle almost steals the show.

Katharina Rosenberger describes her solo for saxophone Phragmocone (2006/10) as having contours of melodic lines and overarching rhythmic incidents closely following the “logarithmic spirals” of a nautilus shell”. The effect is introspective of those spaces and lines, feeling the raw surface of unprocessed acoustic sound, thanks to Mason’s sensitive interpretation. But this is not the only time that I need to close my eyes for the full effect, as new music notations tend to require a great presence of paper and stands on stage.

On to the end–von Lilienstern’s The Severed Garden (2009) brings the core group of Kupka’s Piano together along with the fine bow of Danielle Bentley. This piece prompts me to wonder what Schoenberg, rather than Beethoven, would make of all of this now. I recall Alex Ross’s comments in The Rest is Noise: “Schoenberg’s atonal music is not all sound and fury. Periodically, it discloses worlds that are like hidden valleys between mountains, a hush descends, the sun glimmers in fog, shapes hover …” . While this piece is not a legacy of Schoenberg, it at the same times evokes things hidden and heard, there and not there, things that expand and shrink. It’s all there in the red canvas. So Lilienstern’s initial fury gets mellowed, the bass clarinet is genuinely grounding and the music takes on, as the composer describes, a more singing, symbolic quality. There is an unmistakable funereal finish, prescient with the sound of the bass drum.

Canvas complete. Context painted. Six composers writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century sharing to some extent a pedigreed genealogy that is fundamentally German—a genealogy not lost even on Australian Peter Clark. How does their canvas differ yet resonate with something implicitly German? Rosenberger has her finger on it saying:

I realised that for many years I was trying to run away from a Germanic contemporary approach to composition, which I perceived as overly rigid and kopflastig (‘top-heavy, overly intellectual’). I wanted to involve the body more, the senses, the physicality of sound … but I also recognise that I never shook off an obsession over details and how these relate to the entirety of a piece, and passing out the inner logic of a composition. (From Interview with Katharina Rosenberger)

Kupka’s Piano, still in their youthful twenties, bring a discerning maturity to their program and performance.

Manteia, Marionette

Reviews, , ,
П.O. reads at Conduit Arts.
П.O. reads at Conduit Arts. Photo by Mandy Kitchener.

“marionette”
Manteia
П.O.
ROBA
Conduit Arts
9 May

The communication and corruption of biography and autobiography was an accidental theme of Simon Charles’ curated music night at Conduit Arts. When Charles contacted П.O. to read at Melbourne’s newest hybrid arts venue, he didn’t need to give directions. П.O. grew up just across the road, in the few blocks of Fitzroy that eventually made way for the Atherton Gardens housing estate. The audience at Conduit on Thursday night were lucky to hear some of П.O.’s seldom-performed “Fitzroy poems” from 24 Hours, a 740-page poetic record of the neighbourhood in the nineties. In a steady half-shout, П.O. described a walk around the pre-gentrification working class suburb with its cafés, grocery stores and “derros,” relating snatches of dialogue between shopkeepers and passers-by. My favourite moment: On board a tram an old man repeatedly wishes the conductor luck with his 6% pay claim, despite the conductor’s repeated assertion that he isn’t in the Union.

П.O.’s frank delivery and autobiographical psychogeography of Fitzroy couldn’t have contrasted more with Charles’ musical setting of Jessica Wilkinson’s “marionette.” Spanning 100 pages of layered, fragmented and eroded writing and pictures, “marionette” is an obscured biography of the already-obscured life of Hollywood starlet Marion Davies. Through the twisting, fading and cutting of text and images, the book amplifies the themes of decay and silencing inherent in historical materials, as well as the very deliberate manipulation of Davies’ image by the media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Charles’ setting for sampler, tape and saxophone (Charles) percussion (Matthew Horsely) and two voices (Jessica Wilkinson and Jenny Barnes) adds a new layer to the palimpsest of Davies’ story, drawing inspiration from both the content of Wilkinson’s book and its typographic manipulation.

Jessica Wilkinson and Jenny Barnes perform marionette. Photo by Mandy Kitchener.
Jessica Wilkinson and Jenny Barnes perform marionette. Photo by Mandy Kitchener.

A high, wavering tone rose suspended in the narrow white shopfront. With barely enough room for them all, Manteia conjured a much larger space with a soundscape of scraped gongs and sparse vocal clicks. Suddenly the room became closer with the introduction of live and pre-recorded phrases of text overlapping, synchronising and then drawing apart again. Imitating the degraded reels of Davies’ films at the UCLA film archive, Charles hand-manipulated a tape recording of Wilkinson’s poem by slowing, speeding up and stopping the statements that introduced the underlying message of the concert: “We are the puzzle-solvers.”

As yet another form of silencing, Davies suffered from a stutter her whole life. Wilkinson’s textualisation of this stutter in her fragmented and halting text is tranformed into the short, scattered vocal sounds of Charles’ composition. Most of the time this percussive polyphony rises above a shifting bed of more sustained tones produced by the scraped glass and bells of Horsley’s battery, and Charles’ sampler. Like the three-dimensional effect of Wilkinson’s overlapping and untangling text, this distant, transparent texture is then brilliantly juxtaposed with a closer, denser texture where Horsely’s percussive interjections, the text of Charles’ tape and the speakers all brilliantly collide at the same dynamic.

With the instruments dying away or stopping still, the last word of each episode is given to Wilkinson, who delivers punctual cadences like “now you’ve certainly spilled the apple cart” or “you know, the silly stuff.” The text closes the musical movement of each poem while opening up a field of interpretive ambiguity, highlighting the creative friction between textual and musical “openness”. A musical work can be formally closed (it has reached a point of resolution or symmetry, or its development appears exhausted), while its text may remain open, inviting expansion and development. The openness introduced by each of Wilkinson’s closing lines threads the nine poems of “marionette” together into a meandering, stammering, whispering song cycle.

After the juxtaposition of П.O.’s autobiography and the biography of “marionette” I am again inclined to question the role of the artist-provocateur, as I have in relation to Matthew Herbert‘s End of Silence. The problem is that if there is no new historical material, judgement or conclusion in “marionette,” then it just repeats the silencing that it addresses. The tension of “marionette” lies in the audience’s paparazzi-like hunt for glimpses of Davies amongst the flow of corrupted text. As in the gossip columns of the day, only the promise of the “authentic,” unsilenced Davies lures one through the dross, even if it is now a purposely open, fragmented image. Does Wilkinson and Charles’ added noise in the message tell us anything new about Davies or the nature of history? If a certain degree of silencing is inherent in history, then what value can we attribute to the further, creative silencing of historical texts? There is in fact a critique in “marionette.” It is introduced through theoretical terms like “postmodernity” and “sexual politics” scattered through the text. However, left undeveloped as they are (the case would be different if we had the opportunity to read Wilkinson’s exegesis as well, or even had a pre-concert talk), the critical power of these terms is silenced through their aestheticisation.

Concert guide: 8–14 May

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Thursday 9 May. Manteia will perform Simon Charles’ new work “Marionette” based on poems by Jessica Wilkinson at 8pm at Conduit Arts, Fitzroy, Vic.

Friday 10 May. Brisbane-based New Music ensemble Kupka’s Piano will perform works by contemporary Austrian and German composers as part of their “Giants Behind Us” programme at the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, QLD, 7:30pm.

Saturday 11 May. Ida Duelund Hansen offers the second showing of her new works for voice and double bass as support for the Jon Crompton Collective at Conduit Arts, Fitzroy, Vic, 8:3opm.

Mid-week concert guide: 1–7 May

News

A curated list of upcoming concerts. See also the Australian Music Centre concert calendar and the New Music Network concert series.

Wednesday 1 May. If you have the ability to go back in time, see Clocked Out perform Erik Griswold and Eugene Gilfedder’s concert based on the life and work of Australian painter Ian Fairweather at Griffith Conservatorium, QLD, yesterday. I hope it travels (in space, if not time)!

Friday 3 May. Queen of the pianistic avant-garde Lisa Moore performs Lang, Adams, Harris, Bresnick, Mazzoli and Reich as part of her recital at ABC Studio 520, Collinswood, SA.

Sunday 5 May. Cello and piano duo Yiannis Maxwell and Krista Low perform contemporary works by Mark Isaacs and Lukas Foss at St. George’s College, WA.

Sunday 5 May. The Astra Chamber Music Society present a tribute to the Australian composer Lawrence Whiffin at the Richmond Uniting Church, VIC.

Zephyr Quartet, A Rain from the Shadows

Reviews
Zephyr Quartet. Photo by Sam Oster
Zephyr Quartet. Photo by Sam Oster

Zephyr Quartet
A Rain from the Shadows (album launch)
Melbourne Recital Centre
26 April

More at home with a viola in his hand, Jason Thomas shakily grips the booklet of Zephyr Quartet’s new album A Rain from the Shadows. Glancing around the Melbourne Recital Centre Salon, he recites Mike Ladd’s “Dirt” in his best Radio National baritone. The quartet now seems to evoke the growing termite mounds of the Plenty Highway with rhythmic double-stops, looping violin motifs and ever more dramatic melodic interjections. Dirt is just one of the poetic responses to existing Zephyr Quartet compositions commissioned for A Rain from the Shadows. The album also includes works composed in response to poems by Iraqi-Australian poet Yahia Al Samawy, Australian Rob Walker and Mexican-American poet Gary Soto.

Belinda Gehlert’s compositions express a wide-eyed wonder at the natural world, drawing inspiration from snorkeling in freshwater sinkholes near Mt. Gambier in South Australia and expanses of dunes near the ocean. In Dunes, based on a poem by Rob Walker, the wind eternally blows millions of tiny boulders of sand over each other, eroding mountains and bones along the way. The loping, Sisyphean ostinato of the viola is contrasted with a lyrical slow section, as though we have taken a step back from Sisyphus’ microscopic work to view the shifting landscape.

Hilary Kleinig composes transformation in From Darkness to Day, drawing upon a similar line from Al Samawy’s poem Four Loaves from the Heart’s Oven. Sending a message of hope, the piece is a variation on a breath, from its first meditative inhalations to its final jubilant shouts.

Contrasting with Gehlert and Kleinig’s episodic impressionism, Emily Tulloch’s two compositions Skyroads and Air drew (unconsciously or not) on the contrasting worlds of nineties computer game music and twentieth-century timbral experimentation. Skyroads is so named because, after composing the piece, Tulloch realised it resembled the soundtrack to the eponymous 1993 shareware game. Having spent some time with the game over the weekend—purely in the interests of good journalism—I can critically and objectively verify this similarity. Tulloch’s sustained and polymetric violin lines recall a time in sound card manufacturing when timbral variation came at a premium and polyphony was an exciting new possibility. In contrast, Air develops a floating texture of string harmonics and the convoluted overtones of flautando bowing. The piece concludes with some masterful whistling over the quartet’s sustained notes.

With its vivid imagery and dramatic string writing, A Rain from the Shadows could be dramaturged and presented more theatrically. Some interest was lost in the absence of the texts from the performance (with the exception of Thomas’ recitation). The presence of the texts could encourage the quartet to further accentuate the gestural, expressive aspect of their original compositions.

Read Chris Reid’s review of A Rain from the Shadows over at RealTime.

James Rushford and Joe Talia, Manhunter

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Manhunter by James Rushford and Joe Talia, cover art by Michael Salerno
Manhunter by James Rushford and Joe Talia, cover art by Michael Salerno

James Rushford and Joe Talia
Manhunter album launch (Kye Records)
Northcote Uniting Church
25 April

Breath and wind united the four acts of James Rushford and Joe Talia’s album launch beneath the pipe organ of the Northcote Uniting Church. Robert McDougall and JK Fuller contrasted mouth organs and harmonica clusters with rumbling electronic ground-basses, percussive metallic articulations and a broad chroma of static interference and distortion effects in their ambient, minimalist electronic sets.

Armed with only her own voice, an accordion, brushes, a mouth organ and a sheet of aluminium foil, Carolyn Connors proves she needs no electronics to transition from a clear vocal tone to inhuman white noise, gibbering and squeaking. Variously bounced on her knee and played with brushes, the accordion becomes yet another wind instrument motivated by Connors’ nervous agitation. The perpetuum mobile is broken only as Connors wraps a sheet of aluminium foil around her head to project her powerful (and apparently indestructible) voice buzzily through the metallic veil.

Cloaked in a red half-light, Joe Talia and James Rushford open their set with several minutes of soothing, cycling chords on a Twin-Peaks-era synth. Sublime video footage by Michael Salerno of tornadoes graces the front of their desk. Those hoping that the tension between the awesome power of nature and the keening tonal salve will continue are sorely disappointed, plunged into an hour of mumbles and crackles over a pulsing, bassy hum.

Part of the fun of a Talia/Rushford show is trying to guess what they are doing. We know not to question someone’s apparent inactivity in front of a mixing desk, but what exactly is Rushford doing as he somnambulantly manipulates a stick on a tabletop, blows into what looks like a duct-taped syrinx, or sticks some sort of barbecue tongs in his mouth?

The show ends with a slowed-down recording of Auld Lang Syne on piano and strings. Rushford sips something out of a church-hall mug and Talia stares vacantly at his mixer. Saddest New Year’s Eve Ever.