Nearly 10 years ago, Jackie-O Motherf-er began its journey through the realms of collaborative noise craziness. Drawing from virtually every possible soundscape, the group has emerged instrumentally stocked up and ready to perform to the Columbus crowd at 9 p.m. Saturday in the Wexner Center’s Performance Space. JOMF is revolving between seven and eight multi-instrumentalists from various locations around the country to capture a variety of voices.
“It’s like talking to somebody but we’re talking on a completely different level,” Andrew Cvar, one of JOMF’s musicians, said. “Each person has their own voice and utilizes it with their own tools so it’s been really fun to recognize each person’s qualities musically and be able to play off that.”
Musical compatibility is an important part of the JOMF mixture.
“Everybody on this tour had been playing together really nicely and listening really nicely to each other, and with that you don’t get a lot of overlapping sounds and it’s a really nice fusion of personalities,” Cvar said.
With improvisation of this level, the music is free to change from night to night.
“One night you’ll have blaring electric guitars. It’s a lot of fun and you come out with this blissful, exciting set,” Cvar said. “Other nights we’ll start out with some percussive elements and it turns into this really wonderful, primordial battle.”
At times it may be a bit much.
“It’s really free. It’s sometimes too free where it’s the whole spectrum to deal with, but I guess the percussion’s job more than anything is to add a little structure,” drummer Jeff Mooridian said.
Mooridian is not content, however, just sitting behind a drum kit. He plays percussion but is on a quest every day to invent something else to add to JOMF’s already bursting sound possibilities.
“Whether it’s finding a piece of metal somewhere or a new rhythm, it’s always fresh, new and I appreciate that,” Mooridian said.
The point is to construct the sound in a way where everyone is building off of each other, sometimes the moments are composed, mostly they are free form.
“It’s not really a conscious thing. We’ll be in the midst of playing and all of a sudden, things will drop out and someone will chime in with everything from a guitar to drum beats,” Cvar said.
The possibilities are nearly endless when it comes to the opportunity of sound. Besides the drums and related noisemakers, other examples of JOMF’s instrumentality are turntables, a musical saw, lap steel, saxophones, guitars and even the occasional banjo – all in the name of adding texture. Whatever is picked up is based on what’s happening.
“Generally it’s never really premeditated though at times I’ll set up some things that are at the ready, but it’s generally in the moment that I decide,” Cvar said.
Music like this has the potential to sway from remarkably beautiful to chaotic, but relies upon the chance to develop.
“If you walked into it – depending on what’s going on, if there’s something really magical going on at that moment – you would be entranced, but a lot of times it requires patience,” Mooridian said. “You have to listen to it a little more deeply than some pop band or something.”
Tickets are available at the Wexner Center, by phone or online at www.wexarts.org, and are $10.
