Night falls at the crossroads. The last of the sunset reflects off the windows of the old one-room schoolhouse, glowing red and blue in the growing darkness. Leaves crunch underfoot; a tractor harvesting late-season corn groans through the field across the dirt road. Other sounds escape the building: someone drumming on a hollow log, a sharp note from a cello, shrill electronic feedback, a sustained low drone.
The scene isn’t the opening of a Halloween thriller. It’s what visitors might experience at “Mictlan Overdrive,” Glenn Weyant’s sound installation at the historic Four Corners Schoolhouse in East Montpelier on Saturday, November 2 — the Day of the Dead.
Weyant, who moved to East Montpelier from Tucson, Ariz., in 2018, gained international attention from press outlets including NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the Guardian 10 years ago for turning the U.S.-Mexico border fence into a musical instrument by playing its metal slats with a bow. A trio of Seven Days music editors past and present puzzled over his 2021 album MOWED MUSIC, which features a Toro lawn mower as its only instrument. It’s safe to say that Weyant’s works are “not going to be everybody’s cup of tea,” as he put it during a recent visit to his attic sound studio. But they are intriguing and a welcome reminder that rural places can be fantastically weird.
Weyant is fascinated by the acoustic architecture of historic buildings such as the schoolhouse, whose single classroom offers a mountain view through large windows. For “Mictlan Overdrive,” he plans to set up a circle of five amplifiers, likely pointing outward from the center to bounce sound off different walls and surfaces. Instruments include a cello, guitar, oscillator, an amplified log and an “electric Ferris box,” which he made from a bicycle wheel, springs and barbed wire from an old Mexican border fence.
Demonstrating for a reporter, Weyant played his instruments with a bow, sampling the sounds and leaving them to loop. He propped the guitar against its amplifier, creating a feedback hum. An oscillator produced wobbling tones that evoked metal springs.
The layered noise functions more as sculpture than as music. Listeners moving around the room will hear the sounds change as the high and low frequencies probe chalkboards and rebound from the floor and ceiling. It’s a way of highlighting spatial dimension, allowing visitors to locate themselves acoustically, like bats.
The installation incorporates drones — long, sustained sounds — which Weyant associates with traditions such as Halloween and the Day of the Dead. This is a time of year when “the space between life and death, birth and rebirth” is thinner, Weyant said. “I think a drone bridges those gaps.”
The composition will be somewhat improvisational, and Weyant is even inviting musicians to bring instruments to add during the second half. More than aiming for a harmonic composition, he’s setting up an experiment in a place that has “a lot of mojo,” he said, at a time he feels is liminal — and not only as it relates to the spirit world.
The “Mictlan” referred to in the installation’s title is the Aztec underworld through which the dead travel before reaching their final resting place. Their journey, like a presidential term, lasts for four years. On the eve of a historically fraught election, Weyant’s piece heralds an epic shift.
“The whole country is about to change … one way or the other,” he said. “I think there’s a lot about to happen.”
“Mictlan Overdrive” by Glenn Weyant, Saturday, November 2, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Four Corners Schoolhouse in East Montpelier. Free. sonicanta.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Schoolhouse Rocked: ‘Mictlan Overdrive’ in East Montpelier”
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.
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