“To call it an instrument is, in a sense, utopian, a fantastic thing,” says Eli Keszler, describing the massive outdoor installation he was creating in Katonah, New York, for the Caramoor Center for Music and Arts’s sound-art festival this summer. A fragment of one of these outsize works-in-progress that was in his Gowanus, Brooklyn, studio is an austere-looking contraption: a series of mechanical metal beaters mounted atop black platforms that anchor taut lengths of piano wire reaching to the ceiling. When powered up, the beaters activate according to a preprogrammed score, producing a clattering array of rich, industrial tones as they make contact with the wire.
The final work for Caramoor involves similar mechanisms mounted on trees, the wire reaching, Keszler claims, perhaps as far as a mile. “The idea of pushing something so far that it turns into something else is interesting to me,” he says. The Caramoor installation, which opened last month, is his largest undertaking yet—no small feat, considering that a project last summer involved 850-foot stretches of wire affixed to the Manhattan Bridge. These installations perform autonomously but also serve as sites at which Keszler and fellow musicians can perform, their strange mechanized syncopation adding another live voice to the ensemble.
Keszler trained as a percussionist at the New England Conservatory. Driven in part by exposure to the noise and experimental scene in Boston, he found himself pulling away from a more conservative, composition-based approach to music. “I wanted to push away from that temporal world, turn to something more energy-oriented, and something that had this internal clash with its own timing,” he says. “Initially, I thought that installation would frame the composition and add this antisocial element to the music. If you try to craft a narrative or a structure that has a satisfying musical feeling, sometimes the installation just destroys what you’re trying to do. It’s a difficult experience to perform, but you end up breaking away from patterns.”
Keszler’s own drumming toes a thin line between the tightly controlled and the entropic. (In addition to performances within his installations, he’s played extensively as a solo artist and in collaboration with the likes of Ashley Paul, C. Spencer Yeh, Loren Connors, and the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra, and has released recordings with labels including Berlin’s PAN, Burlington, Vermont’s NNA Tapes, and his own REL records). On the 2010 composition Oxtirn, for example, he plays quickly, creating a frenetic wash of clattering sound that’s contrasted with an overlaid metallic drone, stretching the energy of the composition in another direction altogether. “In my drumming, the constant thing has been the idea of layering so many hits, so many sounds, that it turns into a mess,” Keszler explains. “Oftentimes, musically I find myself attracted to things that are so slow they seem fast and so fast they seem slow—when you have so many hits that they eventually turn into a long tone.” This sense of percussive density provides a point of entry to the third part of Keszler’s practice: his drawings, which, he says, are “really intuitive—they come from this compulsive space, from energy and a need to release.”
Reproductions of a handful of these works on paper were published in the artist book Neum, to accompany an installation of the same name at the South London Gallery in June 2013. L-Set, an ink, acrylic, and enamel on paper work, is an abstract mass of light lines, organic in their interlaced sprawl. Shading gives the mass dimension as well as a topographical feel; atop the wild density formed by these lines are inelegant, opaque strikes of black and yellow, recalling the tension in Oxtirn between Keszler’s lightning-fast drumming and the singular drones. Other drawings have the appearance of warped blueprints or musical scores, two-dimensional renderings, it seems, of the physical and sonic architecture Keszler employs elsewhere in his practice.
But while he does draw from the aerial blueprints of spaces in which he’s constructing sound installations, he’s quick to dispel the notion that his ink drawings serve as preliminary sketches for performances. Rather, he describes a sort of triangulation of conflicts, among installation, drawing, and music, between the visual and the aural. “The idea is not to center my practice around the installation but to go through different worlds,” he says. “The drawing, in a way, is solving the conflict I have with installation and music—not just thinking about sound.” Still, it demonstrates a step in how Keszler considers space, which is certainly significant to his practice, on both a practical and a conceptual level. His installations respond to architecture in a specific way, incorporating the acoustics and unique interior structure of a space, whether it’s the interior of a gallery like South London or Eyebeam or, more ambitiously, a construction like the Manhattan Bridge. His project for Caramoor is the first time he actually builds his own architectural framework in an otherwise open space. “I’ve always used buildings, and this piece is going to be in a very pristine natural environment,” he says. “I’ve had to think about it in different terms, but that contrast is really interesting to me: how you build these structures in an environment, and how they accent parts of the environment that maybe we just take for granted, or treat as a given. You don’t think about how industrial these materials are until they’re placed on top of outdoor land.”
What Keszler proposes is, maybe, a different kind of architecture—one that’s “less conceptual than psychological,” by his description: “The installation turns into something that has to do more with people than ideas—it’s really difficult to re-create chaos with a sort of theoretical detachment. Musically, I’m inspired by construction sites and the chaos of cities, as well as nature. To try and directly re-create that through sound is almost always a real failure, but I’m inspired by those structures.” What results is a social space not locked fully into the codes and practices of the often insular art or experimental music worlds, one whose sounds can be harsh but, through their dissonance, open up something new. His recollection of reactions to his brief Manhattan Bridge project brings to mind Richard Serra’s disruptive (and ultimately dismantled) 1981 public sculpture Tilted Arc: “You have random people walking by, and you’re basically intruding in their space,” Keszler surmises. “Especially with sound—it’s cathartic, and the sounds I make are really intense. People are confused, and they don’t know what’s going on. Maybe they’re just trying to go to work. That’s really exciting to me—even if they hate it—because you’re breaking up the rhythm of people’s lives. That’s a healthy thing to do.”
A version of this article appears in the May 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
