The latest event in musician/artist Benjamin G. Scott’s guerrilla curatorial series Blind Spot ended up being one of the most memorable gigs I’ve attended in the city. Though ordinarily focused on visual art openings in unassuming public spaces such as subway stations, bathrooms, and parks, Scott’s project provided the perfect platform for this evening of outdoor programming that blurred the already shaky boundary between performance and sound art. As dusk settled in, a modest crowd gathered on Weehawken, a street known for its bygone buildings and its place in waterfront gay culture as well as being the shortest in Manhattan (it comprises a single block bounded by Christopher to the south and W 10th to the north). 
BENJAMIN G. SCOTT knelt over a large cardboard sheet in the middle of the sidewalk with a boxcutter and tape measure, marking and cutting the material into squares at a scrambling yet deliberate pace. Adding an extra layer was the playback via small bluetooth speaker of what was ostensibly the audio of a previous instance of the same action. The two timelines, past and present, unfolded in tandem, sometimes clashing and other times syncing up in a satisfying way. It eventually became clear that the objective was to build a cubic box out of individual panels and packing tape, inside of which Scott placed the speaker before sealing it in. It seems that practice indeed makes perfect, because this time the assembly was completed more quickly; the last few minutes were spent listening to the rest of the recording, slightly muffled from within its new container. Though I do love the raw simplicity of cardboard sounds (Partly Zombish’s August Cake and the Cardboard Sessions tape comes to mind) and the immediacy of manual process, this awkward coda was my favorite part.
SHOTS were joined by the legendary YAN JUN for the second time, following a set at Providence’s Apartment 13 gallery back in 2023. The pairing is a no-brainer based on their respective bodies of work, and if their first collaboration was proof of concept, the remarkable synergy on display on this cool, cloudy night was a realization of full potential. Daniel DiMaggio and John Friberg, two-thirds of the trio, extended their usual location-spanning setup to every nook and cranny of the block: a small speaker affixed to the awning of the historic Market House remnant at 6 Weehawken squawked out birdsong and emergency sirens, Nakajima-esque gadgets whirred under trees and between parked cars, mystery feedback sliced through the air this way and that. Friberg posted up with a pile of electronics behind a beached carriage bicycle, while DiMaggio was more mobile, at one point rounding the corner onto Christopher to tug at the gate chain of an abandoned storefront. 
Yan was also always on the move, setting up his chair at various places on the opposite end of the street to vocalize and make hand gestures. It was a joy to amble around the haphazard network of miniature events. A highlight was seeing a small crowd crouched around something on the ground and wandering over to reveal an upside-down coffee cup vibrating on a motor—and then it was over, and we were on to the next wonder. The decentralization ensured that no two attendees had the same experience, even though everyone witnessed the same performance. Beyond the superficial similarities of Shots’ and Yan’s approaches, the unifying essence that also served as bedrock for this open-ended meeting is their shared intentionality. No matter how random and/or inscrutable an incident might appear, it was meant to be so. Such purposefulness produces a fascinating energy, an energy that joined disparate parts into a single web of sound, etc. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time.
Noise Not Music 