[In 1991 three good friends scurried into one of 18 grapeseed silos on the northwest corner of 17th and Damen. On a somewhat precarious plywood platform we'd cobbled inside one of the 150-foot high silos, we discovered the most ethereal sounds imaginable. One thing led to another, which led to the recording of Last Cringe - a primal scream sitting atop what well could be an Arvo Part composition. Plus horns. It's a lot, it's not easy, it changed our lives. Late in 2021,we decided to restage it in Santarcangelo di Romagna as a new performance in the Santarcangelo Festival. Though it didn't happen due to no fault of our own, the proposal we created, "Primal Treasure," suggests what happens over 30 years.
In December of 2021, the revered Ribess Records in Santarchangelo released a limited edition cassette of that 1991 Last Cringe recording, which can be streamed at https://ribessrecords.bandcamp.com/album/last-cringe-2].
Primal Treasure
Silos’ Performance Proposal to Santarchangelo Festival, July 2022
1. Abstract.
Pandemic in a barrel. Plague in a bottle. Haunting silence in the midst of chaos, distress in a teacup.
The soul’s silo.
Where does release come from.
Primal Treasure explores ideas steeped in spontaneity and social consensus, an opportunity to collectively juggle looming social and climate issues in the microcosm of an artistic space with barely a backdrop save for the haunting minimalism and increasing intensity of a recording made in 1991 in an abandoned grapeseed silo on the southside of Chicago.
Exasperating and exacerbating private lives, COVID has exposed social fetters we've been hindered by from far before the pandemic. Primal Treasure seeks to draw out the angst caused by our current malaise, release it in a consensual, collective rite.
As audience arrive, we find three performers in oil barrels, only heads above the rim; a fourth barrel, empty upon a small plywood platform. There are fifty oil barrels randomly scattered around the dimmed location. The performers casually engage the audience about expectations, and audience are invited to place themselves in the barrels. The performers will then vocalize thoughts or feelings related to this now current experience listening to a joint effort of transformation that is now thirty years past, the Silos' recording (available at RibessRecords.bandcamp.com/album/last-cringe-2).
Socially distanced, isolated, alone, audience members are invited to vocalize. The question within the performance is, will a breakthrough be made as the spirit moves audience members and will that amplify? Who will take the initiative in that moment to break out of our myriad real and imagined private and social constructs? As sound modulates towards intensity, the experiment ceases to be that or, we predict, much more. A collective rite of catharsis and solidarity, externalizing inner pain so that we may heal the desolation and trauma of the age.
2. Development
No borders, no fourth walls. No preassigned roles. Audience and performers mixed up, barrels randomly scattered upright on the floor. Soft, dim lights. Occasionally a spotlight.
Do we remain barreled and isolated, siloed? The performers merely provide backdrop, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of global disarray. What will be done? Where are we now as humans facing multiple catastrophes. How do we break.
Samuel Beckett wrote "Play" in the early 1960s. Three performers in large funeral urns onstage utter references and tangents to the unusual relationship between the three. Gibberish, it seems. A spotlight in an otherwise dark space alternates between the three, highlighting one at a time; they aren't super-talkative.
At another point in the spectrum of thinking about theater sits Antonin Artaud. Breaking away from text and verbiage as primary mode of communication, the focus becomes physical movement, gesture, glossolalia expressing pain and agony within a work titled "The Theater and the Plague" (1933). Intensely loud, agonized, soft and falling apart - acting out the physical experience of the plague. In some distant sense, the bubonic plague; in another, the more recent influenza of 1919, and the rising tide of fascism at the point of his writing.
In 1991, three young waifs, performers all, made a pilgrimage deep inside the desolate space of an abandoned grapeseed silo on Chicago's South Side, building a plywood platform inside the hollow. A hulking remnant of the deindustrialization of much of Middle America late last century, a vertical sound stage of steel and concrete, these youth proceeded to fill the platform in the 100-foot-tall silo with chains, old lead pipes, a 55-gallon barrel, and their instruments, trombones and trumpets and drums. And sound.
The sonic backdrop for Silos' 2022 performance Primal Treasure is the recording made in that silo, Last Cringe. This 40-minute mélange of the haunting quiet of a monastery slowly gives way to a crescendo, an insistent pounding of a bass drum. Shortly thereafter, a startling primal vocalization
emerges, slowly at first. That recording, recently released by Ribess Records in Santarchangelo, provides spark for a performance dripping with the past yet able to reference our current situation/s. We hope to bring some semblance of that collective, primal release and the catharsis it opens the door to, with this performance. Many of the same factors that led the performers to explore the unusual site of the silo – desolation, war, deindustrialization – curiosity too - are still with us in new forms, and compounded by over two years of pandemic.
We see the location of Primal Treasure as dim to dark with performers in brief contact with the audience as they arrive. A chat with the participants, an interaction as mood preparation to fuel audience involvement as Last Cringe begins to echo throughout the space.
For the Silos performers, that delving in 1991 remains extremely intense, an unpredicted and previously unimaginable experience, an emotional and conceptual upheaval. The ethereal sound and intense drum and metal-blowing, the vocalization, took place on a precarious plywood platform. We were not sure if it was going to collapse. Our common refrain was, "don't jump around on the middle, it might not hold." The center might not hold, which would have caused collapse under a rubble of plywood, chains, lead pipes, barrels, detritus of our music-making.
With Primal Treasure we imagine audience members will begin to take the totality of the intense music and the confinement of a barrel, and begin to emote, utter, moan, shriek, whatever it is that people do under duress and art.
At what point in the performance do people start not only resenting the reality of Covid, the social construction of anxiety and the constriction of modern societies, of rising fascism, but start toppling their barrels, burst out of the silos we and they themselves have been put into by conditions, and which we now must navigate daily as to how much we ought to silo ourselves. This is the question within the performance. We imagine this obviously improvised scenario evolving into what geist is there amongst the people. A dramatic containment of our angst and virtual ethereality, we ask ourselves and the audience, what are we to make of things.
3. Sketch of Performance Space (as if drawn by a 6-year-old}
4. Technical Requests
Larger space capable of housing fifty oil barrels set six feet apart
Fifty clean oil barrels
Chains and other industrial detritus
4' x 4' plywood platform on wooden scaffolding
Sound system
Lighting
Two turntables and a microphone
5. Silos Biographies
What follows on the next and last three pages are the biographies of the three performers in creating Primal Treasure as well as in the creation and recording of Last Cringe in 1991.
Patrick Kadyk
Self-taught and multidisciplinary. Poet, songwriter, musician, artist, luthier, explorer, producer. I build and play my own banjos and guitars. Eight studio albums, six European tours. Cofounded cult classic Leonard Cohen choir, “Conspiracy of Beards.” Owned and ran independent record label Out of Round Records in San Francisco for 10 years. Owned and ran an underground art space, “The Lost Door”, in San Francisco for 10 years.
Currently residing in the redwoods outside Guerneville, CA
Discography:
Hazy Loper: Wander On, 2003, Out of Round Records (OORR); High in the Murk, 2004, OTRR; The Ballad of Lucy Gray, 2006, OORR; Ghosts of Barbary, 2014, Ribess Records
The Darklings: Desert Ship, 2004, OORR
Ruby Howl: The Wind and the Tiger, 2008, OORR; Heaven Hides There Too, 2010, OTRR; Swallows Take Flight, 2017, Voodoo Donuts Records
Silos: Last Cringe, 1991, released 2021, Ribess Records.
Michael Smith
Chicago IL
www.encroach.net
I have been making music and art since I arrived in Chicago, over 20 years. I have performed on drums with Latin and North African percussion groups in Chicago. I have played trombone and sang with hip-hop, blues and brass bands as well. I like to make art and zines too.
I like to explore, as evidenced by the Silos' recordings, and other media and art created or performed at Chicago's abandoned industrial 'caves.' These were roots of taking art to extreme places for experience, and a goal of a group I co-founded in 1991, Environmental Encroachment. Shows were gatherings to get adults to 'play' in unfamiliar areas, mental and physical. Environmental Encroachment (EE) has always been inclusive and experimental, is now mostly a brass band mixed with costumes, dancers and themes, mobile if needed, and funky. Music, Art, Dance and Play.
David Meyers
I began playing trumpet at age ten and have performed extensively throughout the Midwest in diverse bands ranging from funk to afrobeat to the punk marching band Environmental Encroachment. While teaching English as a Second Language and writing investigative journalism and arts and music pieces for Chicago-area publications in the '90s, I also performed at some of the most respected arts and music venues in Chicago, including HotHouse, Phyllis' Musical Inn, and Lower Links. I was prime motivator putting together teams of performers for single shows, one of which won the annual Bad Band Contest at Lower Links in 1992. Bad Band Contest featured some of the biggest names in Chicago indie and alt-rock striving to be as bad as possible. The success of that endeavor became clear when our team were finally hounded off the stage with audience throwing their take-out food leftovers at us, so incensed were they at the spectacle they had been presented with.
Additonal Photos
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