REFUGE AND REST

(with Matteah Baim) Live performance with video projection, spinning wheel, and sound; Judson Memorial Church (New York, NY).

Text by Natalie Bell

Performed live in the stained-glass hall of New York’s Judson Memorial Church by Peter Fankhauser and Matteah Baim, “Refuge: Rest” took the form of a borrowed ritual. The rite enacted on stage—two artists engaging a Mormon cantata once part of a commemorative pageant performed for Midwestern families—occasioned a peculiar sort of observance and solemnity. At the same time, it also alluded to the more hypnotic effects of liturgies, rituals, and ceremonies driven by history, faith, and creeds. The cantata itself, originally written by Peter’s mother and now in its cassette tape-recorded afterlife, meanders through a cycle of movements, more or less compromised by medium’s unyielding insistence on disintegrating over time. 

After a choral prelude, a voice recording is played early on—a female, steadfast and guileless, recites a set of tempered words—the wagon-trail journey of pioneering Mormons who fled religious persecution, and praising the virtues that earned them “peace, prosperity, refuge, and rest” in the Zion known as the Great Salt Lake Valley. Joining in with the subsequent chorale, Matteah’s trudging psychedelic guitar tones follow the rise and fall of the choristers voices, the intensity of which seems to drain itself at the same time as it is repeatedly refilled: a dynamism that at once doubts and perpetuates itself.  I think of a line of Frank O’Hara’s: “Like a locomotive on the march, the season of distress and clarity.”

The sonic textures that follow are acutely atmospheric, at times almost disappearing and then returning in a haunting, ambient haze like a dust cloud looking for a place to settle. But unlike ambient music, there seem to be very specific moods to these occasionally drone-like compositions—choral moods fade in and out of exaltation and lamentation. The vocals in the original recording oscillate between resounding bellows and faint hallucinations of a faraway wail. At some moments, an empty cask envelops your head, at others, you hear what might be a stethoscope monitoring a beehive. For enduring sequences, a deviant noise distends itself with only the hint of ringing sopranos illuminating the edges of this sound before we return to the muddled, melodic canticles. It’s hard to know how much these original recordings were processed, or even if they were processed at all. The echoes and reverb have a gossamer quality, to the point that one can almost imagine the tape of the original recording as itself woven from natural fibers. 

There’s also a faint but regular pulse that persists throughout as wispy sonic threads find their analog in the spun wool produced during the performance’s duration. This gentle ticking cadence is the palpitation of the spinning wheel Peter operated as he ushered along a slender, thread from the mound of fleece at the base of the stage. A video of the spinning wheel and its spokes, prodded along by the jabs of the footman, was projected above the performers, and superimposed on an image of the moon, reminding us of the orbs and cycles that surround us and, in some sense, circumscribe our existence. Like the sun stilled at high noon and the whirr of a clock marking time on a seemingly arbitrary dial, this image suggested as a constant that touched on the cosmic, but also on mortality. And while the lugubrious mood of the canonical hymns has, at times, an almost funereal quality, the associated images and repetitive task reference draws on the cantata’s themes of birth, death, and regeneration—and the limitlessness of transcendental experiences. As Emerson once reflected, “Permanence is a word of degrees. Every thing is medial. Moons are no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls.”