Moments before hurling his guitar over his audience's heads, Lee Ranaldo swept its headstock along the floor, thrummed the backside of its body with a drum mallet, and lifted it high in the air as if for all to worship at its simple physicality. He didn't even lift a guitar pick.Then he strung the guitar from an overhanging noose and drummed it with a mallet in each hand, clipped a capo on and went at it from every direction with a cello bow before sending the crowd ducking as he released the instrument and let it swing beyond the stage like a jagged pendulum.
A collaborative project with multimedia artist Leah Singer, Contre Jour is a clinic in extended technique for guitar that's bolstered by Ranaldo's clever intuition to suspend his instrument from the ceiling, simultaneously freeing him to attack it from new angles and distances while allowing the guitar to resonate free of the muting necessitated by the cradling support of a human body.
In some form or another, the project has been around as long as the couple's been working together, dating back to 1991 when it was called Drift. It's taken on different names as elements have evolved, originally involving special 16mm film projectors that allowed Singer to manipulate the speed, direction and duration of the film, and eventually incorporating the projector screen as a mirror for the audience, then called Sight Unseen.
Contre Jour exchanges analog film for fixed digital recordings and stills, often projected in split screen. While Ranaldo and his projector-cast shadow improvised amongst a resulting landscape that felt like an ambient collage, representations from the past were distorted by biological presence and the erasive negative space it casts with it, inscribing the present on the past and vice-versa. It all permeated a daydream-like between-place, the hypnotic atmosphere reinforced by the sounds Ranaldo's guitar made as it swung and spun, further enhanced by amplifiers, an array of pedals, and its own feedback.
It didn't even phase you when Ranaldo abandoned his guitar and started ringing Tibetan bells from outstretched arms, eventually ushering in another part in the show that was more peculiar still. At this point, Ranaldo produced a homemade contraption that condensed the qualities of an electric guitar into a handheld box. Instead of strings, two long metal rods extended from either side, clamped in place over a set of pickups.
As Ranaldo plucked, plonked and pulled at the tines, it responded with alien sounds belonging to something between a prepared guitar jammed with screwdrivers and drumsticks and a spring reverb device. Eventually, he jammed a phone speaker into it, using the pickups to carry the signal of an old recording.
Contre Jour doesn't simply juxtapose past and present, it weaves them together to forge a new road ahead.