On Monday, Feb. 17, NYU Abu Dhabi hosted an evening of musical performances and presentations under the title “Underground Experimental.” We had the opportunity to dip our falafels in some quality hummus as we immersed ourselves in a series of experimental pieces curated by Professor Carlos Guedes. It was a small, dimly lit room with a dozen artists and perhaps a dozen more listeners. The sounds of the evening were emancipated: liberated from social, cultural and political conventions of music.

Seldom have we had the opportunity to interview artists performing pieces that they themselves find “absurd.” Why would anyone play such music?

Turntablist, composer, record cutter and DJ, James Kelly joined us for the evening from Northampton, United Kingdom. He presented a work called Trios by Tristram Carey, introducing us to the sounds of the English experimental electronic scene in the early 1970s. His setup was one of a kind: two turntables holding vinyl records with 16 tracks on one side, a mixer, three dice to his left and a cup of tea to his right. His presentation involved playing a track on deck A, rolling the dice to get a sum of a number, mixing in that track on deck B and then continuing the whole process using the dice as the arbiter of our fate. The sounds squelched, screamed and scratched, distinctive of the VCS 3 synthesizer that Carey used to power the sounds etched on Kelly’s vinyl.

Kelly found Carey’s piece at the intersection of his research. He focused on building a repertoire for experimental music for turntables and also learning the history of the Electronic Music Studios, which pioneered the development of synthesizer into community music in England. He described the piece as “a very obscure piece of music.” However, his definition of obscurity did not refer to the character of the sound but rather he described it as unheard of. Lost in the histories of electronic music. If you look at the history of electronic music, it used to mostly focus on the development of electronic music in the US and Europe, but mostly like France and Germany.” For Kelly, obscurity is woven into a sociopolitical framework within which the piece was conceived. He embodies a tide of resistance to such systematic negligence of unorthodox musical works through performance. He says “I basically want to visit myself as a performer and get a repertoire together.”

However, Amanda Gutierrez, a visiting Visual Arts professor, defines the concept of obscurity through her work with radios. “Radio changes and varies, but the possibility of listening to jammed radio is amazing because it’s people emitting signals constantly in a very obscure [way]. Some of them are in one single band and some of them jump, depending on the transmitters and receiver. So I really find that it is a potential tool of creation.” She co-performed an audio-visual piece with Tuomo Tiisala, recorded literally underground in the graffiti tunnel just outside campus. Gutierrez used a 360 degree camera and playback of recordings in the tunnel with the raw sound recording of the space to create an overlapping acoustic space — an experiment in both live and pre-recorded sounds.

Photo courtesy of Aravind Kumar and Safeya Alblooshi

Professor Carlos Guedes, the curator of the event, rightly contextualized the meaning of the evening for us. Guedes’ motivation for this event comes from the same vein of passion that he feels about music. “[With experimental music] you get this kind of thing that is constantly evolving, but it's evolving very slowly so you get into this state of mind. So we can define different time levels,” quoting philosopher Suzanne Langer. The quality of experimental music is highlighted in music’s ability to make time audible. The metaphor rings true to the listener; the evening felt like years, with time standing still after being caught in nets of confusing, trance-like thought loops induced by improvised jams combining Hindustani vocals with modular synths alongside wet Oud riffs.

Photo courtesy of Aravind Kumar and Safeya Alblooshi

When combining such diverse artists, there is always an air of uncertainty. Would they harmonize? Guedes explained that the key is to trust the artistic process. “It’s an improvised part.” Most artists had not met each other before they stepped on stage. Guedes knew each of their sound palettes and trusted that they would find their way. He claimed that this artistic process is at the core of experimental music — “the reason it's called experimental is that you don't know what the results are going to be. Otherwise, it's not experimental. And when you make an experiment, you're always trying to see the degrees into being the indeterminacy.”

Guedes also gave us some insight into how such experimental spaces fit into the narrative created by the new wave of massive techno festivals and club nights. Partly, it’s a quality over quantity argument. “That's a thing that you have to get used to as a musician, right? If you have an audience, that's brilliant, that's fantastic. If you don't, that's also great because you learn a lot from doing these things on yourself.” Guedes further stated that such spaces are fundamental to realizing the mission of the Emirates in its times of celebrating tolerance. Brilliantly drawing parallels between racism and music, he said, “you don't have to like experimental music, but you just need to have a relationship with it.” Creating opportunities to comfortably expose oneself to difference is key for reducing intergroup prejudices based on a lack of first-hand knowledge. In that capacity, values of tolerance in music can increase cultural sensitivity.

Once you “learn the possibilities of the medium,” Guedes is confident that relationships of this form can alleviate many of today’s cultural chokeholds. As Guiterrez shared, the idea of “playing” with sound is possible through such spaces in academic institutions where one is not being “stipulated by doing something.” The safety she finds in her art is reflected in her creative space as well. “I can breathe in there and I can explore and take a camera and I find a place [to] play around with creation and I can see why students also find that space of creation.”

This is a resounding sentiment shared by all the artists interviewed — university spaces seem to be the beacon of experimental music in the 21st century. They are also the spaces where walls are broken, political discourse is originated and social progress is encouraged. The growing experimental scene in C3-006 might just be the soundtrack of this shift to tolerance.