Composers Adam Reese and Matt Marble offered up two recent projects for our delectation Sunday evening, the 9^th of March, at Gallery Homeland in Portland’s Ford Building. Both used the same basic setup, a drummer in the center of the room surrounded by other musicians, but they couldn’t have been more different otherwise. Adam’s set featured a handful of harmonicas, each modified to play only one tone in a microtonal scale of Adam’s own devising, seated around a drummer (inspired by Banda Linda horn polyphony). Like his melodica set from several weeks before, this was excellent theatrical minimalism.

Matt’s set was a little more elaborate, consisting of several circles around the central drummer, with woodwinds and laptops and guitars and other drums and aluminum foil and metal bowls with gravel. The central drummer supplied the material for everyone else’s contributions, so that one could hear and see the licks move through the circles from center to perimeter. The most intriguing sound for me was the sleigh bells slammed against the concrete floor. Very nice use of space for both our eyes and our ears.