29 July 2022, Hanson Dyer Hall, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, 7:30–10pm

The percussionist sees music where others see only sound. More than this: the percussionist sees, hears, or intuits sound itself where others know only the silence of inert matter. Unlike most classical instrumental pedagogies, the percussionist trains in an art of absolute and unrestricted possibility. Their discipline is to be attuned to unimagined sound-futures in the paraphernalia of the physical world. This is one of the purest aspects of musicianship as such, an essential part of all musical educations: the preservation or caretaking of possible aesthetic experience. Every instrument has an infinite reservoir inside it, but percussion turns its musical gaze outwards and upon the world, substituting for a canonical repertoire stretching back 400 years an unfolding set of new rhythms and new rituals, new mistakes and new routines, new sounds and new histories.

WHACKollective opened their debut full-length concert with What Hath II, a section from Kate Neal’s Semaphore, from 2014. Oscar Tudge explained in an orally delivered program note that the title comes from the first sentence ever communicated in Morse code: ‘what hath God wrought?’ This tech-pessimistic internal referent grounds the complex textures of this challenging work. Two of the four performers are seated at their multi-percussion stations like hyper-competent telegraphers, sending messages out in all directions. Kate Neal adds to a familiar range of tapped and struck instruments a clickable box torch, one for each performer, shining into the audience, blinking away like a ship lost at sea. The historical power of Morse code is the way it communicates through pure rhythm, accommodating both audible and visual (even tactile) media. Neal’s piece blends them, cuing the silent but unmistakeable rhythm of the flashing light to a range of pitched and unpitched sounds. Bourne and Tudge also nod, tilt, and shake their heads in synch with each other, emitting wordless breath and speech sounds. They look like telegraphic automata, giving up human speech in favour of information-rich code, the skeletal outlines of pure communication. The semi-regular flashes take on audible qualities, while each woodblock burns itself into your retinas.

The percussionist is committed to remusicalising the world. It is not merely that our world, in capitalist postmodernity, consists of varied unmusical paraphernalia – it is that it consists of a great collection of commodities, through which nations reckon their wealth. The commodity is essentially soundless; you cannot percuss an exchange value. To train as a percussionist is to rediscover in every object the resistant thinghood that grounds its real use, that allows it to resonate in space rather than disappear into a quantity. WHACKollective have assembled and unearthed a unique palette of object-instruments for this concert, and their first piece overwhelms through multi-media harmony. The world premiere of Oscar Tudge’s When a Wave Breaks, by contrast, makes do with eight brake drums, which, as Tudge notes, used just to be made in cars. Since the early twentieth century, avant-garde percussionists have pilfered them from the debris of the automobile, exploring the subtle and unpredictable distinctions in resonance and timbre between individual metal drums. What’s particularly striking in Tudge’s composition, however, is the decision to open with a full-throated tutti: we get an intense, unmoving 8-part chord, effectively. The subtle differences between each drum are at first blended together, completely indistinct. Tudge’s title puns on the name of his instrument and the breaking of a wave, and we should ask ourselves what is distinctive about that sea-bound moment: it is the ocean’s becoming-audible. In a straightforward act of mimesis, or realistic imitation, Tudge dissolves the aural potentials locked in the sea into his 8-part chord, only slowly allowing it to precipitate into individual timbres, pitches, and volumes, just as a tense, rumbling wave eventually breaks into overtones and clashes and rolls and foam and air. I have described this as mimesis because what is truly avant-garde about this work, and WHACKollective’s other repertoire, is not any aesthetic manifesto rejecting convention or representation, but, rather, the percussionist’s commitment to recovering beautiful sounds from the world even when they have no place in the canon.

WHACKollective is not above the familiar majesty of the multi-timpani set-up, however, and Wüste Vergangenheit, or Desert Past (both words are nouns in the German, but there is a double meaning in English stemming from the potential to treat either more loosely as an adjective), treats us to a more orchestral sound, including pitched vocals, bowed vibraphone, and a truly indulgent number of slick timpani glissandi. Yiran Zhao draws our attention to the unique function of the mallet as the percussionist’s magically musicalizing tool. Justin Zheng first rolls his medium mallets on a temple block and then, in the swift motion of the well-practiced orchestral and bodywork artist, strikes the timpani. A low pitch rings out and swallows up the faint memory of the less-tuned block, but I retain the image of the performer whose mallet mediates between two different objects and their sounds, unifying them under the idea of the deliberate whack in search of a higher-order object, a sound structure. The mallet is the tool of a physical, aesthetic, and, in the final analysis, conceptual labour.

Bridget Bourne’s Chrysalis is an unabashedly postmodern gem. Two sets of crotales – tuned collections of delicate metal disks, about the size of a palm – flank a completely, utterly regular electric fan, which stares out at the audience in all its glorious, garish appliance white. In the first part of the piece, the four performers bless the fan by striking and holding their crotales out before it, moving them through the air, letting us recognise conventional resonances. A minute or so passes before, with the appropriate grandeur, one of those plastic buttons on the neck is pushed, (setting number 2, I think), filling the auditorium with what we can now only describe as an amazingly soft and low pedal tone – somehow the perfect accompaniment to the delicate bell-notes of the crotales. Having been transposed into the concert hall, the fan – which is at one point, of course, set into its oscillating mode – is allowed to modify the tones of our more standard instruments, subtly inflecting and distributing their resonance in a parodic but faithful repetition of the vibraphone’s electric motors. Just as the percussionist discloses the sounds hidden in inert matter, they study the physicality of sound as the movement of air, which has been captured and domesticated by the electric fan industry, but which here is turned into fantastically unfamiliar vibrato.

Every immanent possibility of the captured commodity – Bourne’s self-conscious ‘quotation’ from the sonic repertoire of everyday life – is explored and aestheticised. In a strangely taboo moment of physical touch (literal contagion of high culture by low) a crotale is sometimes dragged in one smooth motion around the circumference of the fan’s protective metal cage, which itself rings out, a pale halo of harmony sheathing the smaller and brighter crotale. The electric fan is a visual spectacle that threatens at every moment to become merely comic, too easily a mish-mash collage, or the depthless quotation of Andy Warhol’s postmodernism, but it is rescued by the technical discipline of the performers and the sheer beauty of the sounds coaxed out of the everyday, preserved from Kmart domesticity.

There are two more world premieres after the interval. In Cerita Buat Dien Tamaela, one of our performers, Aditya Ryan Bhat, pushes the concert into the realm of linguistic signification, using four elaborate multi-percussion set-ups to surround and enclose Jeffry Liando as on-stage narrator. His dramatic recitation of the mythic Indonesian poetry of Chairil Anwar is intensely physical: Liando braces himself before stanzas, bending his knees and extending his arms into a wide stance. It is as if every line of the poem is a physical effort comparable to beating the drum he carries with him. With this on-stage arrangement, the multi-percussion functions like the externalised psyche of the narrator, sometimes in contrapuntal contrast with the lines of the poem and sometimes in collaboration or rhythmic unison, reinforcing and harmonising the speech. The performers instrumentalise leafy tree branches and strings of seashells, creating rolls that sound straight from the natural world. We wonder whether the narrator’s speech incorporates the earth within it, or whether he speaks out above and against his multi-textural surrounding.

The natural world ties together all four of the pieces in the second half. Cerita Buat Dien Tamaela is the most multi-media piece after What Hath II, separating two more minimally orchestrated works: Where Butterflies Sleep, which is a hypnotic and tranquil 2018 work by Mark Pollard for four players with crotales, and the final world premiere of the evening, Anne Hsuyin’s The Mantis and the Moth. Hsuyin joined the performers on stage to note for us her interest in ‘movement for the sake of movement,’ and the punning two-‘movement’ structure of her work, which contrasts two insects both for their musical style and their typical gestures and motions. This is a kind of virtuosic 8-hand vibraphone piece: the four performers crowd around the pitched percussion instrument and hand off melodies and ostinati to each other in a beautiful webwork of largely tonal lines and chords, alternating between jazzy, lullaby, and intricate New Tonality. Performers take turns stepping away from the instrument to outline the ritual dances of the eponymous insects, arching their mallets in the air like the insectoid appendages of the graceful-but-deadly mantis, kneeling and tapping on the floor like moths in search of rest. Finally, WHACKollective enact the ritual of the earth spirit, or TSI-SHIN-KUT, a work from 1991 by Younghi Pagh-Paan, which draws on the peasant traditions and ancient shamanistic rituals of Korea in order to bless the house and its ground. It ends particularly beautifully, with two of the performers proceeding from the edge to the centre of the stage with handheld temple blocks. As the lights dim to total darkness, they gently knock them against each other, allowing the infinitesimal and earthy reverberations to carry the audience and the space out into the night.

That is why the group is called WHACKollective: there is a phoneme held in common between the onomatopoeia that stands in for the art of percussion and the word that denotes the social world where contexts and crises are struggled through. The ensemble calls itself this because it knows that the docile silence of the world is a thin veil for its absurdity: the world is whacky. The percussionist who remusicalises the world, who rescues sound from inertness, does so in a way that is social precisely because it is now suddenly sensory, auditory, resonant, and unexchangeable.