F'loom's vocal noises create a 'verbal tapestry'; Poetry band uses voice as a musical instrument in

By BRENT CUNNINGHAM
Reporter Staff

Robert Kulik is describing how to assemble a Model-T.

Rick Scott is telling a story about firing a shotgun at a Model-T.

Michael Ives is making vocal noises that might (or might not) represent the noises a Model-T makes.

If you can imagine all of this going on simultaneously, you can get a sense of what happened when F'loom, the Rochester-based poetry band, came to the Center for the Arts on Nov. 19. Mixing humor and satirical wit and using only microphones and their impressive vocal abilities, Kulik, Scott and Ives created a "verbal tapestry" from threads of speech, chant, text, musical rhythm and mouth noise.

Ives, who has a remarkable verbal range and a frenetic stage presence, was able to perfectly mimic the smooth, commercialized "radio" voice commonly used by disc jockeys and television announcers. He used it to great effect during the first piece, in which verbal "clicks" suggested the sound of a television changing channels, with Ives changing his delivery at each click. In another piece Ives repeated the television phrase "Watch, as..." in his announcer voice, following the "as" with ever stranger and more troubling images of what the viewer is commanded to watch.

In addition to pieces they wrote themselves, the trio culled material from a wide range of sources, including e.e. cummings, W.B. Yeats, Paul Metcalf, American history, medical literature, television, radio, and numerous dialects and languages. The Metcalf piece began with a liturgy of places that still have their Native-American name and ended with a medley of quack remedies for migraine headaches.

This sort of range is one reason F'loom is so hard to classify. The group's publicity literature describes what they do as "language music and polyrhythmic mouth percussion." But is it music? Spoken literature? Performance? Some mixture of these?

On the one hand, since they use the voice as a musical instrument rather than as a tool for speaking or singing, F'loom is working in a tradition influenced by both Bobby McFerrin and the jazz tradition of "scat." Carefully orchestrated, minutely scored and heavily rehearsed, F'loom's pieces reflect their deep involvement with music composition and performance: Ives is a jazz musician, Kulik a jazz guitarist, and Scott a former student of composition at a German music conservatory.

On the other hand, unlike McFerrin and scat, F'loom's "music" remains, for the most part, the music of language and literature. In this sense, F'loom is closer to the traditions of composers like John Cage, who set a James Joyce novel to voice and music, or to the Buffalo-based poetry band EBMA, led by "sound poet" Michael Basinski.

"We're all voracious readers," Kulik pointed out, "...and we are all interested in languages and linguistics." Ives, who spent some time attending UB in the early 1980s, is a student of classical literature and has worked as a bookseller. Kulik is an avid amateur Sanskrit scholar and, along with Scott, works part time as a technical writer.

The group's close involvement with books and writing showed up in their more serious pieces, all of which were adaptations of literary works. An incantatory recitation of Yeats' well-known "The Second Coming" dramatized the apocalyptic themes in that poem, and a suite of fragmentary e.e. cummings poems became even more fragmentary as all three voices crossed and recrossed each other.

Whether F'loom is literary-musical band, a musical-literary band, or something else, interest in their work has been growing. They have been performing at colleges around the country, have opened up for Lily Tomlin and will soon begin a tour of selected New York State public schools.

After the UB performance, audience members and the F'loomians were already talking about a return engagement next year. "Rochester is close," said Kulik. "And we love coming here."