Mystic Eyes

Lisa MacKinney (aka Mystic Eyes) creates music of incredible starkness and beauty. Her music is improvised, yet completely focused and considered. Each unfolding step of the lengthy piece of music MacKinney performed tonight was as delicately balanced and deliberate as a tightrope walker’s.

At the basis of the composition was the drone of an Acetone electric organ; an undulating, keening sound intrinsic to this kind of vintage instrument. Then a looped drum pattern was introduced, which might have sprung from the primitive experimentalism of the post-punk era, creating a hypnotic trance from bloody-minded repetition. Over this rhythmic bed, MacKinney gradually introduced floating notes from her electric guitar, bent out of shape by a wah-wah pedal.

But this was no rock music. There were no riffs. Rather, like contemporary composers Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, MacKinney toyed with shifting tonalities and the textures of sound over extended durations. One could almost hear the audience shut up and get drawn into the act of creation as she stretched time like a ball of Blu-Tack between her fingers.

Single chords or notes were suspended and drawn out until they faded out altogether. If the overall impression was of complexity, this was born of an extreme minimalism that focused the listeners’ attention on the details within the swirling and churning sound. Nothing much happened over the 35-odd minutes of the performance, but you got the feeling that people would have been happy to sit through it all again.

Without having reached an obvious peak, MacKinney gradually phased out the constituent elements of the sound again, until only the keyboard drone remained. It brought the piece to a neatly circular full stop. The end effect was monolithic in its simplicity, serious without being pretentious, and absolutely fascinating to watch and listen to.

by René Schaefer