“Travis Just” (Used 1 time)

Travis Just brought his ensemble Object Collection (in this performance: Devin Maxwell, James Moore, Jonatahn Marmor, Quentin Tolimieri, and Travis Just) to ISSUE back in March to play a collection of compositions for table-top guitars, piano, objects, and string. Travis Just will also be performing the music of Michael Pisaro this Wednesday with Barry Chabla (guitar) and Tucker Dulin (trombone).

It seems that a fundamental element of Object Collection's performance consists of play. And I don't mean play in some childish sense, nor in some postmodern linguistic sense (although both of these references are a little unavoidable when you set a guitar on a table and hit it with sticks). Rather, this play consists of a child-like sense of discovery and accident combined with a more linguistic misuse, or abuse, of the object (as in wordplay). For his guitar quartet, the guitars are set on the table and hit with sticks, strummed, or stopped with slides, their signals run through noisemakers and variously feeding back or droning via an eBow. Part of the idea seems to be to bring the guitar out of its traditional context; the other part seems to be to just elicit unpredictable sounds and destabilize the performance. Like John Cage's early experiments, this is tongue-in-cheek yet gravely serious. It is this Cagean element of play—the unpredictability, and the non-linearity—that paradoxically makes the compositions so worth listening to.

I've put up a solid hour of Object Collection's music from this concert—two works for tabletop guitar quartet, one for quintet, and another for piano, percussion, guitar and objects.