Friday, 22 Aug


Non Sequitur 2008 happened last week, with the theme “Rejection: a series of slips and falls,” bringing five composers and five poets together to pair up and turn rejection into art.  Presented by ComposersCollaborative, inc. and The Flea Theater, and performed by the avant-garde and amplified ensemble Newspeak, the program for this year’s event was a collection of edgy and divergent works. 

Bookended by compositions from Sima Wolf, both of which drew aesthetically from jazz, the concert started off with “The Key,” whose bellicose music accompanied Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai’s rally-cry spoken word.  Wolf’s second piece and the concert’s finisher, “What Remains,” sultrily accompanied poet Regie Cabico’s “make you want to buy a stiff drink” brooding.  Jed Distler’s music for poet Cheryl Burke’s spoken word in “The First Two” matched the mix of gravity and humor in the poem, using a decidedly retro synth patch on the keyboard to help set the scene in the recent past.  “Let Us Sample Protection Together,” by composer David First and poet Anselm Berrigan, found female vocalist Melissa Hughes alone onstage with a pulsing and swooping electronic track, and correspondingly vivid lighting design, to accompany her.   

Chaotic and disquieting, “Morning Branch” by composer Kate Soper and poet Bakar Wilson followed, with Hughes joined by the rest of the ensemble in convulsive mutterings and outbursts as portions of Wilson’s own recorded reading of his poem boomed through the speakers at key moments in the music.  The fifth piece on the program, “In E,” involved not only Newspeak, but also four readers, who spoke Douglas A. Martin’s poem mostly simultaneously but at different intervals as Jennifer Griffith’s aloof but sensual music acted as sometime accompaniment, sometime interlude.

Rejection, accepted.