June 12–19, 1997
critic pick|music
When David Forlano performs an evening of improvised music, some of what he does can sound like a kid playing with pots and pans. He clinks, clanks, zips, zaps, zithers and bangs in apparently random fashion; untrained ears might say it's all so much cacaphonous noise. But Forlano says there's a method followed here.
"The problem with calling it just noise is there's an immediate connection people make with that. It's like, 'OK anybody can get all this stuff together and call it noise.' I think there's a real intelligence to it. There's a sense of time that's absolutely crucial to this kind of construction. Because otherwise it could sound very nonsensical and anything-goes."
He's after a particular kind of organized chaos. "I'm interested in the idea of in control and out of control and flip-flopping of those two extremes," he explains. "I feel in that transition there's some very rich material."
Forlano is familiar on the local performance scene for his work with dancers, including Roko Kawai (his significant other), Leslie Dworkin and Leah Stein. He plays a slew of instruments. Some are conventional, such as keyboards and guitar. Others are "found" percussion, objects that aren't intended as musical instruments, but Forlano uses them as such.
For an upcoming show at Susan Hess titled Paper, Light, Sound, Forlano plays the piano and guitar (the latter in both electric and acoustic models). As he builds his spontaneous compositions, a video (also a product of Forlano's fertile mind) shows images of water, fish and stop-action flashes of human appendages. "What I do with the video imagery is to create an active light source, the idea being the light is coming from natural things," the artist elaborates.
The following week Forlano plays along with like-minded music makers at the Lionfish Cafe, for an evening of what he calls ambient gadget clusters. "It's an ongoing series where I work with musicians who are experimenting with sound in different ways," he says.
David Forlano, Sat.-Sun., June 14-15, 8 p.m., Susan Hess Studio, 2030 Sansom St., 665-9060.
Ambient Gadget Clusters, Sat., June 21, 7:30 p.m., Lionfish Cafe, 614 N. Second St., 829-9103.