Sunday, 8 March



“Either the string or my hand is going to break,” exhaled Josel as he simultaneously tightened and plucked the third string on his guitar.  Mercifully, an audience member came to Seth Josel’s aid, sitting down next to him and twisting the tuning peg as Josel continued to pluck the ever-tightening string on his acoustic guitar.  Having already plucked and tuned two strings until they snapped off the guitar’s neck, Josel was halfway through Peter Ablinger’s “Exercitium 1-6,” when the third string refused to break.  Far more exciting than listening to each of the guitar's six strings produce gradually higher and higher notes one after another, was the tension that gradually pulled Josel and his audience tighter and tighter, getting red in the face, waiting for the snap to happen.

Thus began the show at Brooklyn’s intimate Diapason on Sunday night, a CD release concert from Mode Records featuring Josel on solo guitar, the audience seated on couches and floor cushions.  Following this first harrowing piece was “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar” by the super-chill composer Morton Feldman, Josel playing an electric guitar from above as it lay on the floor, in a replication of a recording made by Christian Wolff back in 1966.  The piece, like so many Feldman pieces, drew the audience into its quasi-ambient, nicely proportioned world.

Another work by Ablinger, called “63-99,” came next, and the tension felt in the first piece of the set began to build again.  A series of 36 approximately one-minute pieces flowing from one to the next, each movement, from #63 to #99 (with the exception of one of them) began at the bridge-end of the guitar neck with a high, descending scale before being abruptly interrupted by frenetic picking at the middle of the neck while speakers blasted out samples of Berlin city-sounds; then, just as abruptly, the city went away and Josel continued downward to the low end of the neck.  Surprising was the one piece out of the 36 in which the city did not blast its way in, leaving Josel to play uninterrupted down the neck. 

The set ended with Seth Josel’s slightly altered version (based on some sketches of Feldman’s) of the Morton Feldman piece, in which he held the guitar in the normal position and used a pedal to create some effective swells.  No completed copy of the score for this piece exists, so the performance was a welcome and rare one. 


photo taken from Josel's myspace page