See Shutterspeed Duo's 'rock band approach to writing classical music' at Phoenix festival

Friday marks the kick-off of the Oh My Ears Festival, which will feature a wide range of what’s often referred to as “new music.” It’s a loosely-defined genre that refers broadly to innovative approaches to classical music instrumentation and composition.

Many of the groups invited to the festival seek to challenge audience expectations of what a classical performance looks and sounds like — including the Shutterspeed Duo.

Erich Barganier and Ford Fourqurean are both composers and multi-instrumentalists. But when they work together under the Shutterspeed banner, they add a third layer to their work: video projection.

Their shows combine moody, tonally adventurous electric guitar, clarinet and synthesizer music with film footage. They’re performing at the festival on Sunday, and they spoke with The Show.

Full conversation

ERICH BARGANIER: The big driving factor for our group is that we want there to be a visual component when you go to our show. We want you to feel engrossed in the environment. We want there to be these experimental visuals that we make that are playing behind us that either reflect the music or sometimes we're actually playing to the video.

At least for me, it feels more like a rock band approach to writing classical music essentially. Yeah, it's a weird combination of instruments with electric guitar and electronics and clarinet and all these other things.

SAM DINGMAN: Yes, yes. Well, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because that was, I mean, I have to say one of the first things that drew me to your music was this combination of electric guitar and electrified clarinet.

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Was that a sound that you guys kind of made your way to as the partnership kind of grew, or was it something that kind of clicked in for you both right away? Ford, what's your side of that story?

FOUR FOURQUREAN: We are both people who are interested in post-minimal music, but we're also interested in ambient and rock music. And there's a lot of opportunity with electric guitar to sort of dive into that world, but it's not really explored super well on the clarinet. So being able to process the clarinet using different types of electronic effects, different types of EQing, reverb, different types of delay, we can sort of dive into this new sound world.

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And when you blend and amplify everything, you have this ability to match what is an inherently loud instrument, electric guitar, with clarinet, which can be loud at points, but when you amplify it, they're on equal playing field. So you can really create a more punchy aesthetic that is bridging into non-classical worlds.

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I think we're drawn to it as classical musicians because some of the most important composers of our generation are writing in this style. Think about composers that you might have heard of, like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. But there's a lot of crossover with things that we just grew up listening to. I used to listen to, like, punk bands when I was in, like, high school and college.

And there's a lot of potential to cross genres there.

DINGMAN: Yeah. So let me ask you both. I'm glad you brought up Philip Glass and other composers in of that era. I had a conversation on the show a while back with some folks who were playing some Philip Glass compositions. And one of the things that they talked about trying to induce in their performance is this idea that by playing these repeated melodies over and over again, the audience starts to hear things that aren't necessarily there, quote, unquote, "on the page."

But that because of the combination of sounds and the repetition of them, it induces this kind of trance state. I don't know if that's something you guys are going for specifically, but since you cited that as an influence and since we've talked about the visual layer of the music, is that related to what's interesting to you about having a visual component to your work?

FOURQUREAN: With a lot of our tracks, the visual component is diving into this sort of, like, parallel space or negative space. My piece, "Water Triptych," is based off of three different images of water that, all found video footage, that's manipulated. One's Riis beach in Queens. One is the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. And the other is Inisheer off the coast of Ireland.

And all of these images, if you look at them as found footage, are very bright, colorful and vibrant. But what I end up doing with the image is actually just flipping them into the negative process thing and doing some pixelation to create what is possibly described as, like, psychedelic, I guess. But it's a different way of looking at, like, the color and the motion and sort of taking away that primary element of the source material and looking at it as just color, shape and sound.

DINGMAN: Erich, what about you? What's intriguing to you about the visual layer of all this?

BARGANIER: One thing that I really liked about a lot of the concerts that I went to from, like, the age of 16 to 22 in central Florida, you would see these bands, like Of Montreal or like, when Radiohead came through, they all had basically stage shows. They had these visual projections. They had a lot of things going on.

And it also goes into how bands would have lighting and fog machines and stuff like that. And I really like that kind of Gesamtkunstwerk element of it that all encompassing.

DINGMAN: Wait, what was that word?

BARGANIER: It's the Gesamtkunstwerk of a thing. It's like you have this all encompassing art idea.

DINGMAN: Gesamtkunstwerk. Am I saying that right?

FOURQUREAN: That's such a bougie term, Erich. Don't use that term.

BARGANIER: I'm sorry, I just came from school.

DINGMAN: No, listen, it's OK. I think people are going to be into this. I just want to make sure I'm saying it correctly.

BARGANIER: Yeah, yeah, that's right.

DINGMAN: Gesamtkunstwerk.

BARGANIER: Yeah. So it's like all encompassing art and it's something that comes from like opera in like the 19th century is where people start talking about it a lot. But it's like having all elements of your experience controlled and curated. And it feels like it's this encompassing event.

DINGMAN: What does the current version of writing together look like? Because I have the sense of watching you that there's a lot of really close listening to each other that's happening and a lot of improvising it. It seems like there's a really organically evolving quality to the music.

BARGANIER: It's very organic in the way that we put it together. So there are pieces that are forwards, there are pieces that are mind, but we are interpreting them simultaneously. So you do, no matter what, you'll always have a touch of the other person. And then in terms of improvisation, on one hand, there is a decent amount just based on like, if it's a graphic score, it's really hard to literally play a picture. So those kind of things. Yeah.

DINGMAN: I have to ask, Ford, can you give me an example of what a graphic score would look like?

FOURQUREAN: If you've ever seen something like a Jackson Pollock work or a Mondrian, it could be any one of those two extremes. Could be very strict straight lines, very splattered, maximal all over the page and everything in between. And the way we're interpreting these things is we're making these decisions in what for the two of us is like a shared language.

If we see something that's more dense on the page, we might play something more aggressive or something punchier. If it's bigger on the page, it might be a larger cluster of sound. If it's smaller, it might be a more subtle whisper.

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