It was easy to imagine Maggie Parkins and Jeff Gauthier communicating their shopping lists and opinions about Godard films by way of their cello and violin, so precisely and fluidly did these Smudges rip improvisational interactions from their strings. No, though, Gauthier said afterward, they didn't think words when they were playing; music was the only language, which of course extended to the composed aspect of their performance, such as "The Gigue Is Up," the surging, melodic, harmonically mutating hit single with which they closed. The Smudges also effectively combined composition and improvisation, notably on friend William Roper's "Choofa" (smudge pot), which laid out a grid where they could trade sharp contrapuntal bowings and take off into hummingbird duo spirals. Electronic echoes occasionally bounced around the 2220's sound field, opening up a lysergic dimension. Individually on the scene in many different contexts for a long time but as the Smudges for a few years, Parkins and Gauthier have become a prime attraction -- they keep an audience in a state of engagement and surprise.
Gauthier and Parkins also guested as melodic improvisers in one segment each for Bill Alves' American Gamelan, which consisted of veteran composer-author Alves and two other gentlemen squatting behind just-tuned metallaphones, plus one gongster in the rear. The slow, arpeggiated flow shared an indirect commonality with the Javanese/Balinese music you might have heard (the instruments were from Java), carrying a peaceful, breatheable quality and avoiding much of what Westerners think of as dissonance. If you drifted off to the Land of Nod, that was perhaps not discouraged. The most involving moments arrived when the sound settled into a drone, the lights drew down and the video screen displayed Alves' mutating abstract images, which could be dots, swirls, circles, whatever, in deliberately non-psychedelic hues from the blue side of the spectrum. Parkins finished the proceedings with a wonderful high tingling cello tone that, she said later, she had chosen to fit "right in between."
The next day, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News.