At Watermill’s Summer Fete, EYE’s Noise Performance Induced Transcendence

Art World At Watermill’s Summer Fete, EYE’s Noise Performance Induced Transcendence The experimental Japanese musician of Boredoms fame closed this year's Summer Festival with a 200-cymbal jam session. Earplugs were needed. It’s all I could ever ask for as a party reporter: To be at a gala in the Hamptons watching the Japanese musician EYE conduct a 200-cymbal noise performance while the noted Russian-German con artist Anna Delvey frolicked in a nearby wooded area. Only at Watermill Center’s much-lauded Summer Festival could such impromptu cultural collisions happen. This year’s event, titled “Limitless Time,” was held Saturday in celebration of the institution’s founder Robert Wilson, who died last year. As always, there was no shortage of art on offer: a comprehensive exhibition of Wilson’s designed and found objects; a collaboration between Laurie Anderson, Shane Weeks, and members of the Shinnecock Nation; a reading of Maya Angelou poems by French actress Isabelle Huppert—and that’s only the start. But I primarily made the trip to see new work from the unconventional artist whose full name is Yamantaka Eye. The legendary experimental musician’s most celebrated project, the Osaka band Boredoms, has been around since 1986 and is known for an extreme body of work that combines psychedelic, punk, and electronic styles to singular effect. EYE has also made album covers for Beck and gone on tour with Nirvana. His guttural vocals split the difference between pre-historic and post-metallic. One recent performance that I clocked on Instagram saw him suspended above a small waterway on a crane. When I got to the sprawling woodsy campus, I was told his show would consist of performers playing one cymbal each, along with electronic accompaniment from the artist. The piece is a spiritual descendant of a handful of performances staged in 2007–08 by Boredoms. The first one consisted of 77 drummers performing in a large circle in Brooklyn Bridge Park; two follow-up shows added 11 more drummers to the mix and took place in New York and Los Angeles. It seemed like half of the Brooklyn underground music scene had made the trip up to play in the cymbal orchestra. (I assumed that I was one of the few Boredoms fans in the audience that wasn’t directly participating in the concert.) The sheer volume of them in attendance skewed the demographic makeup of the event and made it feel like some strange combination of noise festival and high-society function, crisp white suits mingling with black band t-shirts, musicians taking advantage of the complimentary drinks and barbecue served in white tents. Matt Stephenson, a member of the acclaimed digital hardcore trio Machine Girl, hails from Long Island and wanted his parents, who live 30 minutes away from Watermill, to come check out the gig. The only problem was that tickets were several hundred dollars. The solution? Dad played a cymbal, too. “My mom almost did it, but backed out,” Stephenson told me, adding that it was his first time ever jamming with his father. “I think right now he’s in a ukulele band with 60-something year-olds, maybe this will inspire him to add another 190 people to that band.” Stephenson and his father weren’t the only multigenerational duo. Before the show, I spotted the musician and artist Hisham Bharoocha, who worked directly with EYE to help with the organization of the drummers and execution of the event, giving instruction to a young person nearby that I assumed was his child. The amount of performance art on offer that night was frankly overwhelming. It was often either whimsical or severe in tone, the kind of work that might read as “performance art” to someone who isn’t very interested in performance art. Combined with the torches that lit the paths through the wooded area where a portion of the action took place, it wasn’t hard to pretend that I was part of an episode of a prestige television show about the intersection of extreme wealth and nefarious cult-like activity, a sentiment shared by a few people I spoke to. It also sort of felt like a wedding, so take that for what it’s worth. I was having a very nice time. As the evening progressed, I became more and more curious about how EYE’s performance would play in this context. Its density, both musical and spatial, would make it harder to gloss over than other less bombastic works on the premises. As the cymbalists set up, I found Performa founder Roselee Goldberg sitting in a chair at the perimeter of the circle. “I’ve never heard this performer before, and here they are in the most amazingly orchestrated landscape that Bob Wilson left for all of us to enjoy,” she said excitedly, although she wasn’t exactly resolute about enduring the piercing onslaught to come. “I’m ready to rush back from the centerpiece,” Goldberg said, when asked about the volume. A little while after that, Watermill employees started passing out earplugs. They were needed. The 200 cymbal players were arranged in a circular formation around a circular stage, most of them seated on wooden stumps. In the center of that stage, on a riser, was a lighted conical sculpture. As the performance started, it became clear that the movement of blue-ish light emitting from the cone, and the deep bass sounds that corresponded to it, were acting as a conductor of sorts for the cymbalists, who played a variety of hi-hats and crashes. If it pulsed rhythmically, the players responded in part; if it moved slowly, the cymbalists swelled. There was no sign of EYE yet. The cone was the solitary object on stage, at once sci-fi and deity-like. When it turned red, a voice came through, muffled and slathered in delay. After a series of compositional starts and stops, the group finally landed on a steady beat, and EYE appeared on the stage, at which point he started “playing” the cone: holding it up, rocking it, displaying the microchips at its base. Then he started swinging it, the lights emitting red-white-and-blue signals, like a bomb pop from an ice cream truck. A second cone appeared; he started swinging both and spinning in a circle, working himself into a full-on shamanic flow, spinning forever. I heard a few people make Burning Man comparisons. I get it: In its synthesis of pre-modern ritual aesthetics and contemporary electronic music, EYE’s whole deal somewhat overlaps with certain concerns of the tech-hippie elite. But his creative coordinates—strobeadelic rave, harsh noise, punk (never forget that, early in his career, he once drove a bulldozer through the back wall of a club)—interject his performances with an intensity and clarity that is lacking from anything that happens during that desert weekend. In short: it was transcendent. Midway through the set, I checked in with Irina Alimanestianu, an artist who splits time between New York City and Southampton whom I challenged before the show to stay for the entire thing. For whatever reason, she declined the earplugs offer and was using her fingers instead. “I loved it, but he’s going too long,” she said. “I feel like it could stop now.” I disagreed. I could see this man spin for hours. But my time at the Watermill was sadly not limitless: the bus that served as my ride home was leaving, and EYE was going over his set length, so I exited down some steps, along with other tuckered-out Hamptonites, and began the long journey back to Bay Ridge.