Sushi rolls on with ‘challenging’ art song series

By Charlene Baldridge

SDUN Columnist

Long before developers coined phrases to describe areas east of downtown, there was Sushi, an avant-garde gathering place for performance and visual art that eventually moved to the old Carnation Milk building at the corner of 11th and J streets, then a wilderness presided over by the building’s eye mural that looked to the north and was one’s beacon to finding the place. Through two renovations and redevelopments and a number of managements, Sushi survived, both yon and thither, sometimes as the gypsy “Take-Out.” Miraculously, it reopened at 11th and J last year as Sushi: A Center for the Urban Arts.

The eye is gone and the neighborhood, cheek by jowl with the Padres ballpark, is dominated by high-rise condos. The Corner, a favorite burger joint, exists a block away and there is plenty of street and garage parking nearby. All good. With the reopening came a new series, “Fresh Sound,” curated by Bonnie Wright, who has connections in San Diego, New York and the world – especially the world of new music, hence the “fresh” in “Fresh Sound.” Wright was proprietor of the late, great Spruce St. Forum.

Wright’s programming is fresh as in different and in your face just like Sushi’s regular programming (www.sushiart.org). The Fresh Sound heard Tues., Jan. 4, was the “end of the arc” that Wright dubbed the inaugural “Illuminating” series. The artists were sound artist Margaret Noble, who teaches at High Tech High, and vocalist Susan Narucki, a professor at University of California, San Diego. The occasion marked the first time this writer has heard Narucki perform “new” music, in this case a piece from John Cage’s Songbook, and two pieces of her own devising, the first with text by poet Peter Hutchinson and the second her own text and setting.

Narucki’s paraphrase of Cage’s remarks about musical structure was of great help in understanding one’s feelings after the experience of Noble’s work based on the milieu of George Orwell’s “1984,” in which Orwell outlined the rise of the totalitarian state. Armed with an array of extant and presumably made instruments and exotic electronics that ruminated and reprocessed, Noble presented the sounds of the 1940s era, broadcast and bent. The aural experience ranged from sounds digestive to percussive, using distortions of the artist reading live from the text and playing string notes that were then electronically processed. The annoying and fascinating piece disdains purity and organization. It is a severe challenge to the mind and a sensibility that craves organization, and perhaps that is its reason for being. At any rate, Noble is an attractive teacher and performer, whose students must think her really cool. Most certainly, some in the youthful, sold-out audience came to hear her.

Narucki’s work was challenging as well, in that it took the purity of poetry and imagination and layered them with sound enhancements. A noted interpreter of new works and a singer of extraordinary range and beauty of tone, Narucki proved adept at the spoken word, which she made sing almost as song. The meaning and nuance of Hutchinson’s work, “Time,” and her own narrative poem, “The Degrees of Truthfulness,” may not need such freight. This lover of art song again longed for purity. Nonetheless, the latter work, particularly as it applies to loss and grief, was consoling, peaceful, and restorative.

On Jan. 25 Wright presents a special engagement of the Maryland group Ear, Nose and Throat, which is known as “the Bermuda Triangle of sound.” The Fresh Sound percussion series begins Tues., Feb. 6. Sushi: A Center for the Urban Arts is at 390 11th Ave. in East Village. For more information, go to www.sushiart.org or call (619) 235-8466.