I’d definitely recommend checking out the installation artist and musician Eli Keszler — I enjoyed the opening of his new piece “L-Carrier” at Eyebeam in Chelsea on Thursday. Keszler’s installation practice seems to be based on mechanically controlling dense tangles of piano wires, strung around the gallery space; the viewer encounters indeterminist clusters of buzzing, interacting frequencies.
The real draw, though, was the short set Keszler et al played to accompany the installation’s sounds. Accompanied by Farfisa organ, prepared guitar, winds, and strings (including Burning Star Core’s C. Spencer Yeh), the music was as free and fascinating as an improvisation but had the coordinated impulse of a composition. The attached excerpt from his piece “Catching Net” shows some of this fascinating construction, though it’s missing the critical ingredient of Keszler’s drum work.
Keszler is a mind-blowing percussionist — using a minimal drum kit and crotales, which he manipulated while laying on his drum skins, he achieved a wild array of sounds and dynamics. It was a wild and complex experience which the NYT, not entirely unreasonably, likened to magic.
