Pictured: David Behrman

The Kitchen: famous for its experimental vibe among New York music-ites, it holds a reputation for openness to all music.  Avant-garde and ultramodern, The Kitchen’s roots come from the No-Wave scene from the 1970’s.  Unknown musicians (at the time), like Philip Glass, Elliot Sharpe, and Arthur Russell would come out of this project.

To this day, The Kitchen retains its air of an underground scene.  Slightly off-limits, The Kitchen seems a little shady to those who don’t know of its reputation.  The venue itself has an off-off-off-off Broadway feel to it.  Lacking a traditional raised stage and backstage, The Kitchen creates a feeling of equality between the performer and the audience.  The performer is no more well known than any single member of the audience, and they often sit in the front row looking on as audience members until it is their time to perform. 

On a Friday night in March, the audience included performers David Behrman, Okkyung Lee, Ben Vida, and Greg Davis.  Keeping in touch with the spirit of the venue, the acts were intensely avant-garde.  David Behrman and Okkyung Lee opened with a chilling collaboration of synthesizer and cello.  During the peak of their performance, if you were to have closed your eyes, you would no longer be able to tell the difference between what was the cello and the matching pitch of the synthesizer.  It seemed that the act was not about the music in a traditional sense.  If you didn’t pay attention to the performers, and focused on the sounds, there was a hauntingly beautiful quality about the way the synthesizer and the cello came together into a single sound.  Unfortunately, after that, the concert experience went downhill.

Ben Vida and Greg Davis followed up David Behrman and Okkyung Lee’s Cello with Melody-driven Electronics, with what can only be classified as noise music.  A genre of discordance and cacophony, noise music has its roots in the futurist art movement of Europe.  Vida and Davis took noise, and made it into “music.”  Definitely not a style for everyone, their performance felt like techies trying to prove that they could be artistic.  They didn’t.

Joining Vida and Davis, Behrman and Lee reemerged on stage to help in what I found to be one of the most insulting performances I’ve seen.  Vida and Behrman took to their computers and performed off them, while the other two, using light fixtures attached to chopsticks played around with cups.  In what seemed to be an attempt to convince the audience that the light fixtures controlled the music, the two tried to coordinate their movements with the music.  Yet, the performance wasn’t over.

Behrman came back for one last bit, where he overlapped recorded voices of how to handle policemen with synthesizers in one of the least Useful Information sessions ever.  His mantra of the night was “I do not consent.  I do not consent.”

My mantra for the night?  “Not coming back.”