Representing Sound in Image: Alex Callenberger presents Aural Canvas at the Harvest Gallery

Alex Callenberger is an area musician admired for his versatility; the California-born guitarist has offered his sensitive musicality and original playing to the Ann Kerstetter blues band, folk/ambient duo Black Marble, experimental trio Electric Volcano Experiment, rock band The Antique Babies, and a host of other projects whose music ranges from erudite jazz to abstract sound-collages. A uniquely artistic thinker, Callenberger does not limit himself only to music as he satisfies his compulsion to create, a trait evidenced by his current show at the Harvest Gallery and Print Shop on West 4th Street. Entitled "Aural Canvas", the gallery show includes a collection of paintings based on Callenberger's perception of sound and the relationship between sound and space, and includes an accompanying CD of ambient soundscapes and abstract compositions crafted through Callenberger's use of effects and atmospheric textures.
Callenberger describes his perception of sound as one of feeling rather than hearing; he says that after a brief time with scarlet fever as a child that left him with a forty percent hearing loss, his awareness of a door closing or a person entering a room is produced not by hearing the sound of the door but rather by feeling the vibrations, feeling the disturbance of air. A unique perception, yes, but one that Callenberger is quick to dismiss by emphasizing that all people experience sound differently, a paradox that intrigues Callenberger and shapes his understanding of music. The unnamed pieces included in the show's accompanying CD are rich with texture and atmosphere, but are engaging and evocative in a way that non-artistic ambiance is not. Callenberger employs broad washes of tone and substance crafted from layers of harmony and saturated guitar sounds, using these aural landscapes as backgrounds on which to place his unique, minimalist melodies, layering his parts and highlighting his melodies with a painter's care. When playing and composing, Callenberger thinks visually rather than narratively; he says that while some like to tell stories through their music, he prefers to paint pictures. On this recording, this approach leads to a set of music that can not only stand on its own as an artistic achievement but also seems an irremovable part of his exhibit so thoughtfully and brilliantly does he acomplish his immpossible task of representing the abstract concept of sound not only visually, but also through music, an aural medium.
The paintings on display at the Harvest Gallery are as evocative and intriguing as the dark, elegant music that accompanies them, displaying an abstract, minimalist aesthetic not dissimilar to Callenberger's understated guitar style, which relies on mood and musicality rather than flashiness or virtuosity. In his visual work, Callenberger employs a minimal use of color, crafting his images from simple blue and off-white on deep black backgrounds, managing to suggest the scientific iconography of sound without overtly employing it, transforming the familiar images of wave forms into powerful spirals and cascading curves that evoke a very real feeling of timbre and volume. Callenberger describes the process of creating his paintings as similar to the process of preparing his music for performance, a lifestyle of practice and self-preparation that slowly builds into the ability to navigate the relative chaos and randomness of spontaneous, real-time creation. Each painting was created not with the slow, meticulous strokes of a paintbrush but rather with the rapid, dizzying fragility of thin strands of paint falling from a stirrer held by a puppeteer's hand, Callenberger surrendering absolute control in favor of the excitement of controlling only the direction and concept of the work, responding to the details that emerge organically rather than planning and executing each brushstroke with a conductor's precision and severity. This act of real-time creation is of course similar to the musical task of improvisation, a skill that Callenberger has spent years cultivating. Callenberger paints like a musician, responding to the randomness of event and the influence of space and feeling in his work, relying on the preparation and practice of the improviser rather than the detailed planning of the architect. What emerges from this process are incredible works that are at once elegantly simple and impossibly complex, much like the abstract sound that Callenberger seeks to represent-- the tones that are experienced as simple and clear even as they dance and collide and navigate their environments with enormous complexity. One image in particular, of an off-white spiral on a black background that seems to diminish in intensity and volume as it travels from left to right (or, as Callenberger correctly points out, swell from quiet intersecting-circles to a triumphant, swirling climax if experienced oppositely), seems to represent the qualities of sound-- pure and pristine, but possessing a sense of movement and chaos experienced only subtly and perhaps never fully perceived by any but the waves that disrupt air and space to create tone and pitch and timbre. Representing this movement of sound, something that by nature exists only through the passage of time, in a static piece of visual art that exists not within time but within space, is a virtuosic act of both painting and music, an ability that speaks as much to Callenberger's innate understanding of sound as a musician as it does to his ability as a painter.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this project is the way in which Callenberger contrasts the chaos and randomness of sound as it interacts with time with the clear, precise nature of sound that allows it to be perceived, isolated, and identified so easily when it is experienced. This paradox is organically represented through the creative process employed by Callenberger in his music and his painting; it is represented in Callenberger's use of the spontaneous, drip-painting style that relies upon his reaction to the unexpected events of real time even as he achieves pure, clear images through his minimalist use of color, and is mirrored in his music as delay effects repeat his pure, simple phrases, layering musical statement upon statement to create a rising action of overlapping, repetitive sound, like the sonic collages of a city street or a nighttime forest. "Aural Canvas" is a tremendous artistic achievement both conceptually and aesthetically, and a rare opportunity to study the unique ways sound is perceived by a man who spends his artistic life feeling it, pursuing it, and shaping it.