Supersense: Maximal and Minimal ★★★ 1/2
Melbourne Arts Centre
August 23 & 24
Here we are for the third time, four storeys deep under St Kilda Road, and we still don't know which way is up. Like kindly carers in a weird art hospital, the Supersense staff dispense the same directions 10,000 times a night.
Except they keep changing. Don’t they?
Down one baffling series of corridors, past the neon tubes and frogs singing in the walls, dressed in black on the round centre podium of the cavernous Stage 1, Mohammad Reza Mortazavi taps out a trance code of impossible rhythms on hand drums.
He's a Persian tombak drummer, though you can't tell from the cursory festival grid in your hand. And Google is dead to you now. Disorientation and deprivation are key down here. Expectation is cancelled.
From Philadelphia, Moor Mother arrives seething: pacing and pointing in our faces, raking up prison island history and growling about the end of the world as her dark electronic tempest wills it nearer.
A seething Moor Mother growls about the end of the world.
A thousand random steps away in the pitch black box of Stage 2, NZ's Purple Pilgrims make like ravishing valkyries in a reverb avalanche of electro-madrigal bliss. Pity the floor is so hard (chairs are cancelled this year too).
Stage 3 – stairs and stairs, but we get to sit on carpet – is local and raw. CS + Kreme do chunky bass and signal processing. The Native Cats crack welcome gags about being "effortlessly cool queer punk".
Back on 1, American John Maus jackknifes his body with terrifying violence and bellows at nuclear pitch about "Rights For Gays" and the sad fate of "Pets" over a pushbutton soundtrack redolent of '80s Euro-metal. If you met him four storeys up, you'd call 000. Down here he's a legend.
Saturday's Minimal program is not initially far removed from Friday's Maximal. Jessica Aszodi reprises her roaring operatic read of a Julius Eastman piece starring Joan of Arc. Volcanic Indonesian vocalist Rully Shabara reappears sans last night's knife-wielding drums/ martial arts group Setabuhan, improvising with cellist Judith Hamann and the Necks' Tony Buck.
Roscoe Mitchell from the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Tearing paper and squeaking balloons in a cross-legged row, Graham Lambkin, James Rushford and Crys Cole approach a more intimate kind of ecstasy. As does the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Roscoe Mitchell, when he puts down his free-noodling saxes to tinkle with his table of bells.
Roscoe Mitchell from the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
What remains consistent, from there to the visceral entanglement of Kimberly Bartosik's dance troupe to the chase-scene techno of Black Cab, is a rather forbidding sobriety. Is it them? Is it us? Whether drums are hellishly pounding or water gently dripping, the atmosphere we conjure together is more sombrely curious than ecstatic.
When Lambkin returns to scrape bricks on a table and read a newspaper slightly off-mic, the sense of absurdity that's lurked in the shadows for all the preceding hours breaks at last.
The most telling moment might be during James Rushford's set: suitably ecclesiastical repertoire on a delightful mini-replica of a medieval pipe organ. When a toddler starts loudly interjecting in the darkness, a ripple of laughter lightens the mood like a parting of the skies. "That's better," he says.