By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK
Some improvisers warm up, take a reading or two at the start of a set, check their bearings. Others plunge into fathomless depths, react and respond more than think as they plummet, pulling all bystanders, innocent or otherwise, in with them. Daniel Levin (cello) and Juan Pablo Carletti (percussion) have clearly chosen the latter.
Levin thumps his fist on the body of his cello, then saws away, excavates intensely satisfying, reedy sounds. How does the wood withstand such pummeling, not splinter? Carletti’s mallets roll like thunder across his floor and rack toms. I need a chance to breathe but Levin and Carletti will have nothing of it. The surface world is quickly fading from view and with it so many of the elements we usually use to guide ourselves. We’re sealed in for a delightfully disorienting ride.
***
Comic book artists use the term “gutters” when referencing the white space between panels. I’d never given them a second thought before reading Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. He details howgutters give greater definition to the panels that precede as well those that follow. They also call on the reader to do some of the lifting. “The gutter is where the fun happens…readers get to fill in the lapse in time.”
***
Every time I look at Carletti he’s moving something different across the top of his snare drum—bells and chimes and cymbals. He even leans back and puts his foot up there to mute the drum before bending out of sight to uncork something that I mistake for a harmonica. When he pops up, still on high alert, he’s back to the brushes. Meanwhile, Levin bear hugs his cello, and shakes his head from side to side as he wildly pursues rich, dark sounds. He and Carletti push each other downward, past the point where sunlight reaches, down near the hydrothermal vents where water gushes out at 850 degrees.
***
Maine, part one: One of my first record buying experiences was in Bangor, visiting my fraternal grandparents. We went to a department store, and I found a bin of $3.99 albums. I bought two. The Genesis record, …and Then There Were Three, was clogged with gobs of syrupy keyboards; I couldn’t find the songs. The E.L.O. record, an early best-of, was full of Roy Wood’s mad man cello antics; I couldn’t escape the songs—those woofer-punishing frequencies glued themselves to my psyche.
***
The duo pulls back. Levin plays it lullaby sweet and soothing, then delicately plucks. Carletti rotates his sticks, holds them vertically, and stirs the perimeter of his floor tom, then trades for a mallet to gently tap the top hi-hat cymbal. Calm at the center of the storm, a gutter.
***
Maine, part two: My friend Mike lives in Orono. He had friends visiting from New York and they went into a gas station convenience store (ironically called The Big Apple). The friend, accustomed to city-sized delis and bodegas, was blown away by the amount of unused space in the store, the vast acres between and at the end of aisles. He felt like he’d landed on another planet.
***
I used to have an aversion to white space. In music, on the screen or on the page, blank space amounted to wasted opportunities. I sought out music that was full throttle, full time. When friends and I worked on fanzines every square inch was crammed with material—clip art, lists, captions, random minutia. I loved zines like Rev. Norb’s Sic Teen, hand-stapled pages buzzing with squint-till-it-aches four-point fonts and impenetrable layers of clip art, marathon sentences and parenthetical clauses that were like funhouse mirrors. I disliked, maybe even resented, the abundance of empty space often employed in fancier, bound magazines like Punk Planet. The choice seemed egregious, almost boastful—We’ve got space—and by extension, money—to burn. I didn’t recognize the thought and expression in their aesthetic, nor did I see my opportunity to slow down and absorb.
***
Carletti removes the top hi hat cymbal, strikes it as it hovers like a slow motion flying saucer and sets it on the floor tom. Levin reaches down and pinches a string near the bridge. A moment later he lifts his cello on to his lap and pushes his bow across the leg that usually supports the cello. Now he’s holding two bows, playing above and beneath the strings. The duo’s first set is comprised of three pieces. The second, so far, just one. Fewer gutters. Quicker pace. More time beneath the surface.
***
Jacques Cousteau once tried, in the early-to-mid sixties, to develop an underwater colony. The first of these continental shelf stations, Conshelf I, was set ten meters below the surface off the coast of France. The goal was to allow small crews—aquanauts—to live and work there for weeks at a time.
***
The way Levin and Carletti exchange ideas so fluidly, so often without pause, sounds like two parts of the same instrument. Talking with Levin he says, “it’s like I think (Juan Pablo) is playing cello.” Or at least I think that’s what I hear. Later I follow up with Levin. “I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it is more to do with navigating our improvisation using a common language of rhythmic ideas and gestures rather than cello vs. drums like a traditional tenor sax vs. drums scenario. Much more like I use the cello percussively. Juan Pablo provides a backdrop landscape and I paint over it in large brush strokes.”
Their collaborations feel like a very long, very wide panel, a panel continuously drawn on paper as it comes off the roll. Or maybe a Wes Anderson scene where the camera leads a character across the horizon, allows us to move with them. Or perhaps the inverse, a Spike Lee dolly shot, the character stationary and the camera back pedaling toward us, allowing us to see their world as it passes by.
***
Costeau’s underwater experiments were largely successful. The researchers were active and content as they conducted experiments within and beyond their underwater dwelling. But they learned that they were unable to remain submerged indefinitely because they couldn’t live without sunlight.
Tonight Levin and Carletti have built the latest version of Conshelf: Quinn’s, and even now, as the show comes to end and we hang out and run post-game analysis, it seems sustainable. I see Eric for the first time in weeks, finally pass along the book I’ve been keeping in my car. Steve gives an update on his house renovations and introduces me to Dan who knows the same pool of Central and Western New York punk bands that I came up with in the nineties. The night moves on and we’re content in the cozy confines Conshelf: Quinn’s. Then this:
“Every shing-a-ling-a-ling
That they’re starting to sing’s so fine”
Damn it. Someone’s playing the Carpenters. Sincerely and loudly. We’ve sprung a leak. The bubble’s going to burst, and there’s no choice but to resurface.
