Tag: Will Mullany

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Strange lot: The Bridge fills with curiosities in new exhibition

Throughout October, the “Gallery of Curiosities” at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative is the setting for a variety of events, such as experimental music performances, a horror film screening, a Halloween party, trick or treating, and more. Photo by Martyn Kyle

On a sultry First Fridays evening in early October, The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative gallery glows gold beneath the dark, overcast sky. People flock to the warmly lit building to see the “Gallery of Curiosities.” Outside, near the door, there’s a small table draped with a white cloth and adorned with candles, where Leslie M. Scott-Jones (a C-VILLE contributor) reads tarot cards for those who opt to sit across from her.

Inside the gallery, Elyse Smith spins fur from a visitor’s beloved pet into yarn, and all around her, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, hang hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of curiosities, oddities, and objects, each item begging more questions than it answers.

In a thick frame sprouting from the wall, the chalky, fragile white skeleton of a two-headed snake. On a table, an apocalyptic diorama; on another table, a pinhole camera. Sprouting from the floor, a mermaid tail. Stored in a cabinet are slender, corked glass vials of animal whiskers and porcupine quills. Human teeth. A loved one’s ashes.

There are planters made from grinning baby doll heads with all manner of cacti, succulents, and leafy greenery poking out the top. One wall holds nine lidded glass jars, each containing a red tomato in a different state of moldy, liquefying decay. Immediately above it are nine more jars containing chocolate Hostess cupcakes, each alarmingly well preserved.

Inspired by the cabinets of curiosities and wunderkammers of Renaissance and Baroque Europe, as well as contemporary museums like the Museum of Psychphonics in Indianapolis and the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is at The Bridge through the end of the month.

The show seeks to elicit a number of reactions from visitors, says Alan Goffinski, director of The Bridge. What is all this stuff? Where did this come from? Is it really from Charlottesville? Who are the people who collect these things?

“Curiosity is this force within us, this natural thing that we’re born with, that we take on as children, that points us toward the unknown and pulls us into a head space of authentic opportunity for learning and growth,” says Goffinski, and this exhibition is a place to exercise, or perhaps rediscover, that force.

The Bridge put out a call for submissions on its website, via email, social media accounts, and even Craigslist, urging folks to submit things they might have on display in their living rooms, attics, and cellars. More than 50 people from the Charlottesville area contributed items, ranging from Fraternal Order of Police memorabilia to Richard Nixon swag.

Tobiah Mundt contributed felted fantastical creations that she describes as a “sculptural representation of the creatures [found] in the place between asleep and awake.”

Hattie Eshleman’s pinkish-reddish-brownish bodily organ brooches, shiny and moist- looking, are a rumination on the inside turned out. “I would love for the viewer to imagine if they had extra organs other than the heart, liver, lungs, etc.,” says Eshleman. “What might those be? Fear? Intuition? An organ that stores forgotten memories?”

Visitors can test their telepathic connection with another person using the same experiment that Upton Sinclair (author of Mental Radio, a book on telepathy) and his second wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, used. Renee Reighart set up the experiment on a table with side-by-side stations, complete with instructions and suggestions for how to clear one’s mind and prepare to send or receive an image to the person on the other side of the divider. It’s “freaky” when it works, she says, but even when it doesn’t, it’s about the wondrous discovery of potential synchronicity and connection with another person.

In the gallery bathroom, there’s the Actuator, researched and developed by artist and musician Will Mullany, who describes his creation as a “proto-conscious mechanical being that guests are invited to interact with.” Mullany displays his research as well, hoping visitors will “set aside their base human inclination to filter their perceptions through logic and reason and accept the ultimate divine logic of the Actuator into their hearts.” And since it’s tucked away in the bathroom, he says, “it offers a sort of serenity and seclusion for these private revelations.”

In most cases, “you won’t be able to tell…what’s tongue-in-cheek and how much of it is fiction, or how much the truth dabbles in fiction along the way,” says Goffinski. For instance, did Ian Coyle’s belly button really produce that much lint—on display in an 8-inch by 10-inch oval frame—in two months’ time?

Coyle says yes; “even in a year’s long creative block, my tummy kept producing works of art.” But still, questions remain.

At its core, the “Gallery of Curiosities” is “an exhibit for Charlottesville, for the quirkiness that exists in our community,” says Goffinski. The show’s power lies in those who’ve curated it, he says, and it affords us a look into the character—both hidden and otherwise—of our friends and neighbors.

“It’s so damn interesting to learn about people in a show-and-tell sort of way,” says Goffinski.

Check out The Bridge’s calendar for a full listing of Halloween-y events related to the “Gallery of Curiosities” exhibit.

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Arts

Instrumental rejuvenation: Will Mullany builds a wall of sound at The Bridge

A small metal bucket. Segments of rough-hewn PVC and metal pipe. A coffee tin. A red British post box coin bank. A spool of piano wire. A tiny, wooden drawer. Light switches, control boards, dials, film cans, electrical sockets. Pliers. Wire cutters. Rings of tubing, spoons, forks, nails, springs. Motors, yarn, string. A matte silver Christmas tree cake pan, film cans. Speakers, a license plate. A nest of wires.

To most, these things would be trash, but to musician and artist Will Mullany, one of three artists in residence at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative this summer, it’s treasure—items found in dumpsters, in friends’ attics and under art studio tables are precious components for instruments that challenge how music is made.

There’s something satisfying about doing something with your body and having it come back into your ear, says Mullany, who wanted to create instruments that people can play without any formal training. You don’t have to finger a chord on a fretboard or bow a string to make music, to make pleasing and interesting sound, Mullany says.

“Tradition and culture are the boundaries [of sound]. The only thing keeping people from making different music is genre and our long-standing reliance on the tools that have been the default for hundreds and hundreds of years.” Will Mullany

When he first got into The Bridge studio, he looked around and thought: “What can I do with this space that I can’t do anywhere else? What’s the most transverse thing you can do with a wall in an art gallery?” Turn it into a musical instrument made from trash, that’s what.

One of the walls in the studio is essentially a soundboard and thus the perfect foundation for some kind of large-scale instrument. Inspired in part by a spool of piano wire, and using zither pins (tuning pegs) to anchor the strings and the bucket, coin bank, coffee tin and various sections of pipe as bridge elements, Mullany built a dulcimer straight onto the wall.

Strike one of the wall dulcimer’s strings with a piano hammer, and that string’s bridge element will transmit via a hidden contact mic, amplifying the vibrations of the soundboard.

It’s the kind of thing found in a children’s museum—the pieces of pipe, the coffee tin, etc. are all movable—and their placement between the piano wire strings and the wall affects the sound that comes out. Move the bucket up a few inches and the sound completely changes. The string supported by the ring of metal pipe has a sitar-like sound, like something off The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

And Mullany hasn’t stopped at the wall dulcimer. There are wooden boxes with nails and springs that make horror movie noises via a contact microphone adhered to the inside of the box; there’s a digital synthesizer that has been manipulated into making weirdo sounds (and sometimes picking up a radio signal) when a nail or a screw is pushed into the socket of an electrical outlet mounted to the top of its film can case. There are multiple wind chimes made from wire, washers and railroad spikes, and coaxed into noise by the air or drumsticks, whatever you choose.

These instruments and the music they make is left partly up to chance: Mullany learns as he goes—he’s not a carpenter, luthier or electrician by trade.

“Tradition and culture are the boundaries” of sound, he says. “The only thing keeping people from making different music is genre and our long-standing reliance on the tools that have been the default for hundreds and hundreds of years.”

As for his workspace, Mullany knows what it looks like—he says he has a little bit of hoarder in him. The instruments in The Bridge installation are open for everyone to play, but oftentimes, Mullany says homemade instruments pile up around him unplayed. Before he moves to Richmond this fall, he wants to play all the instruments on a record, a sort of hoarder’s redemption, where he finally puts all that trash to use.

“Domestic Alchemy” officially opens at The Bridge on September 1, and visitors can see, hear and play what Mullany’s made. “It’s pretty immersive,” he says of the installation.

Visitors should keep in mind that sound produced by these instruments is “secondary” to the form-—his experimental instrument-making is all about how the instrument is played.

“With a physical object, you’re limited in a way that’s very freeing,” Mullany says. “When you have infinite choice [like with a highly programmed synthesizer or a guitar with a bunch of effects pedals] you’re paralyzed from fear that you’re not going to make the right choice. But then when all you have around you is garbage,” imagination and creativity are inevitable.

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Arts

Telemetry series at The Bridge takes off

Local musician and composer Paige Naylor performed at The Bridge PAI’s Telemetry experimental music series in April. The next show takes place on May 14. Photo by Travis Thatcher

Open-minded listeners looking for a new sound experience should head to The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Sunday night for the Telemetry series. Developed by programming committee members Peter Bussigel, a composer and intermedia artist and professor in UVA’s music department, and Travis Thatcher, technical director of composition and computer technologies in that same department, the regular series is a place for music that Thatcher says is “often electronic but not necessarily always.”

The last two events “have been really successful, with [more than] 50 attendees,” says Thatcher.

Telemetry
May 14
The Bridge PAI

On Sunday, three local acts from UVA and Charlottesville, plus Curved Light out of Austin, Texas, will deliver performances of sound that challenge typical notions of musicianship and instrumentation. Here is an idea of what’s to be experienced, according to the artists themselves.

Curved Light

“I’ve always been attracted to ambient sound, but not necessarily its function in the background,” says Peter Tran, who along with Deirdre Smith creates psychedelic synth sound and vision as Curved Light. “I wanted to recontextualize [ambient sound] in a live context where an audience would be forced to engage, utilizing more direct textures and immersive visuals to create an expansive, psychedelic environment.” Audience members can expect “both intense visual and aural stimuli that explore the limitless possibilities of the modular synthesizer” from a Curved Light set, says Tran. It’s not something that’s easily categorized, and for that reason, “each concert is absolutely a journey.”

Travis Thatcher

Thatcher will perform what he says is “an ambient pastoral Berlin School sort of set.” (The Berlin School was a movement in 1970s West Berlin that explored the creative potential of the synthesizer through ambient sound often combined with sequenced runs of notes—think Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Ash Ra Tempel.)

For the set, he’ll play an original Oberheim Two Voice synthesizer that he’s restored in the past year. This particular instrument is a “relic,” Thatcher says, explaining that when the Two Voice appeared in 1975, it was the first commercially available polyphonic synthesizer, in that it could play two notes at once. While technology has advanced since 1975, the Oberheim changed the electronic music landscape for good. Plus, Thatcher adds, “I think it just sounds cool.”

Ghost Fortune

Ghost Fortune’s Ron Geromy thinks that chaos sounds good. “People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live,” he says.

Ron Geromy, a UVA student, explores that space with noisy patterns of interference created between the soundwaves of rather fragile homemade synthesizers. He makes his own synths by printing a 3-D shell and soldering buttons, switches and knobs to a Schmitt trigger chip—it’s an easy circuit to make, Ron Geromy says, one that “produces a very pleasant square wave.”

On the edges of those systems, he has “discovered a lot of very beautiful, transient sounds produced by the feedback overloading [the] mixer and speakers, that once pursued further, disappear. These could be tones, or textures, or even just rhythmic patterns created by clipping,” he says. “But none of them can be sustained for too long.”

“People’s expectations of such sounds are very different than other genres of electronic music, so it creates an interesting space to explore live.” Ron Geromy

Molasses

Molasses, Will Mullany’s solo drum performance project, developed out of what Mullany says is “a dissatisfaction with the alienating and detached nature of a lot of live electronic music. To the uninitiated, a lot of electronic performances can be hard to relate to, merely because the mechanism of the sound production is hidden away in synths, effects boxes and computers.”

With a performance built around a drum kit that Mullany has augmented with sensors, microphones and digital elements that capture sound from the drum kit then “mess it up and spit it out anew,” Mullany aims to give more physicality to digital sound. He says he’ll likely use other sound-making gizmos he’s found or made, too.

Molasses is “a pretty transparent ploy to summate my formerly incompatible interests in digital and analog sound processing, DIY instrument building, avant-garde rock and free-improv,” says Mullany, adding that he won’t decide the exact setup until the night of the show. “I’m going to play drums and things are going to come out of the speakers and beyond that, I’m not sure what else is going to happen,” he says.

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Arts

Booking team Camp Ugly breaks through the velvet rope

Will Mullany and Judith Young formed the music booking group Camp Ugly to develop a representative scene beyond white dudes playing indie rock. Photo by Ron Paris

In May 2015, housemates Judith Young and Will Mullany went to the Paramount Theater for a screening of Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, D.C. (1980-90). In the cushy theater seats, they watched how the early D.C. DIY scene unfolded, how now-legendary bands such as Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Government Issue and Fugazi released their own records, booked their own shows and eschewed major record label and mainstream media in the process. They left inspired to start a venue of their own in support of independent music.

Young and Mullany, both recent UVA grads and former WXTJ 100.1 FM student DJs, began hosting shows in their house on Gordon Avenue for the station. They called the effort Camp Ugly. High school and college students packed into their living room and kitchen, spilling out onto the porch, to hear local bands like Cream Dream and New Boss.

But they wanted to do something that would meld the student music scene with the city music scene. While sitting at Milli Coffee Roasters on Preston Avenue one afternoon, Young looked up at the ceiling and noticed stage lights hanging from the ceiling; she thought it would make a cool place for a show.

Young e-mailed Milli owner Nick Leichentritt and asked: “Can I book shows here?”

Leichentritt responded almost immediately: “Yes.”

And thus began Charlottesville’s latest DIY music initiative: Camp Ugly shows at Milli.

Every Friday night, bring $5 to Milli and get a red ink Camp Ugly heart stamped on your hand and hear a handful—sometimes three, sometimes two or four—of local and touring independent bands.

Camp Ugly has one major principle: Book talented, diverse musicians who play good, diverse music, and pay them for their art.

But that’s easier said than done. It’s a challenge to find bands that aren’t full of white dudes playing indie rock, they say. And while both admit that they love plenty of bands full of white dudes playing indie rock, they don’t want to perpetuate the status quo.

“What purpose are we serving by maintaining the only thing that there is?” asks Mullany.

They’ve booked Those Manic Seas, an alt-rock band whose lead singer has recorded a DVD of his performance played through an old TV propped up on the neck of a mannequin. They’ve hosted Charlottesville ex-pats Left & Right (an all-white, all-dude rock band). They have a hip-hop show planned for September 16 and a free computer-music and jazz improv night booked for October 7. “You come in with the expectation that what you see might be totally off the dome,” says Mullany. They envision all-female bills, electronic and bluegrass acts and maybe even an all-Jewish klezmer show.

“The philosophical debates that we have about music don’t show well in our calendar,” says Young. At least not entirely, not yet. They’re still trying to seek out diversity in race, gender and sound—and for good reason.

“Women, non-binary folk and people of color have different perspectives in their music,” Young says. “They are detailing different narratives that people really need to hear.”

It’s important that everyone have a musical platform, Mullany says. “When it becomes apparent in music, as it has, that certain types of people or backgrounds aren’t getting the same sort of treatment or presence in the community that others are, it’s time to take a hard look at why this is, and what you can do to help.”

Leichentritt says these intentions are what led him to agree to a Camp Ugly/Milli partnership in the first place, along with Young and Mullany’s promise and ability to come through on their word. “I’ve been happy to work with them,” he says, noting that both Young and Mullany know what they’re talking about. “They do a good job.”

All of the door money goes to the bands; Camp Ugly doesn’t take a cut, and neither does Leichentritt, though he profits from coffee, beverage and food sales made during the show. Bands are paid on a weighted scale that considers the number of band members and distance traveled, and Young says she tries to pay them as fairly as possible for their time and their art.

“Women, non-binary folk and people of color have different perspectives in their music,” Judith Young says. “They are detailing different narratives that people really need to hear.”

Camp Ugly joins the ranks of more established DIY venues like Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and Magnolia House, but Young and Mullany are quick to note that they’re not looking to compete for bookings. At first, they say they worried about whether Camp Ugly would be a detriment to the local DIY scene by diluting it. “But I don’t think so,” Mullany says. “I think there’s more room to get people into it.”

When Magnolia House booked three of Charlottesville’s most popular bands, New Boss, Night Idea and Second Date, for September 9, Camp Ugly decided to take the night off rather than compete for the audience. They still might put on a show, but it’ll be for a different crowd—bluegrass, or jazz, instead of indie rock. “Magnolia is not an enemy,” says Young. “We’re trying to achieve the same goal.” And that is getting more ears tuned in to live music.

Mullany hopes that having yet another DIY venue will inspire more people to play music—and more diverse music at that—around town. “Sometimes bands will form when there’s an opportunity to play that isn’t being filled,” he says. “I hope that more places to play means more people playing music. I don’t know how true that will be, but I would like there to be more people performing in Charlottesville.”