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From the Raleigh News & Observer, By Takaaki Iwabu, Staff Writer - 4/3/09:
In a museum rotunda where 15th century Japanese scrolls are displayed, the members of Invisible set up a musical contraption partly made from industrial junk and found objects.
The machine is anchored by a sprawling mechanical drum machine called Rhythm 1001, which is "basically a percussion sequencer that works not unlike a lot of old music boxes from hundreds of years ago," band leader Mark Dixon said of his invention while setting up for a performance at the Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill last month.
Dixon controls the pattern of percussion by placing pegs -- cut-up bamboo skewers -- in a spinning metal wheel. Each peg produces a sound from one of the 12 musical instruments that are connected.
Improvised melodies and noise are added by the other members -- Bart Trotman and Jonathan Henderson -- on top of that rhythm. The results are sound collages that defy musical genre.
"We are trying to make art in which things that have been tossed out or neglected get a spotlight for a minute and see what they can say," Dixon says.
Invisible, based in Greensboro, recently performed with an old typewriter that was mechanically connected to a piano. Each time a band member typed a letter, it produced a note.
The band's MySpace profile sums up its approach: "We are seeking to birth new sounds and give life to strange or impossible ideas."
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From the Charlottesville Hook, By Laura Parsons, Art Writer
Recycled sound: Invisible gets beat up
A dinged-up, mustard-colored dryer. A salmon-red electric typewriter. Black and red vinyl LPs. A portable TV. You might expect to find such things at a secondhand store— or the dump— but probably not assembled at Second Street Gallery, where the musical group Invisible gives new meaning to “garage band” with its installation, “Rhythm 1001.”
At May’s First Friday opening, Mark Dixon, the green t-shirted impresario behind the plugged-in everything-but-the-kitchen-sink collection, slouched in a straight-back chair and talked about his background in sculpture as well as avant-garde composer John Cage’s influence on his approach to music. His collaborators, Bart Trotman and Jonathan Henderson, sat in identical chairs on either side of him, listening and nodding.
After explaining he finds meaning in “an instrument of tasks turning into an instrument of music,” Dixon and Trotman stood up, turned their chairs around, and began playing the seat slats with small mallets. Hidden beneath the seemingly mundane chairs, organ-like pipes provided resonance. Meanwhile, Henderson jammed on a bass-like instrument incorporating trashcan lids.
The trio eventually shifted to the hodgepodge of wires, keyboards, vises, monitors, cylinders, and unlikely percussive items (think service bells, think TV antennae, think plastic picnic cups) arranged on the east side of the gallery.
Trotman sat down at the “Selectric Piano,” a Dixon invention that enables typewriter keys to play notes on a partially deconstructed piano. As Trotman tapped out sardonic reflections on the state of the world, a tiny video camera affixed to the carriage projected the words in real time onto the wall, flashing insights like “If someone’s fashion offends you, doesn’t that make you a fashionist?” or the hilarious, “No typoes. No typos. No typos.”
Nearby, Dixon, looking like a mad scientist in safety goggles, manned a large metal wheel drilled with concentric circles of tiny holes, in which he arranged and re-arranged hundreds of bamboo pegs (made from barbecue skewers). As the wheel turned, the pegs triggered instruments made from plywood, bright blue electrical tape, screws, and repurposed junk to beat out orchestrated rhythms, all powered by salvaged hard drive motors.
Henderson, for his part, played mostly straightforward bass guitar and keyboards, but he initiated and responded deftly to the ever-changing loops of layered sound. By the end of the performance, the three musician-artists stood triangulated in the middle of the visually dizzying installation, building beats to a frenetic, crowd-grooving climax.
A must-see, Invisible is out of sight!
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