BathHouse reviews keep coming in! Check out Ned Randolph’s creative review of Julie Patton’s recent reading at EMU:
Julie Ezelle Patton is preoccupied with the sonic echo of words in the space of performance.
The author of Notes for Some (Nominally) Awake, Alphabet Soup and Slug Art, Patton alighted briefly at Sponberg Theater in November for the BathHouse Reading Series.
See her crawl and drape over the registry of sound, inching as a slug through the artifice of verbal construction.
Patton invites
Exploration through sonic dissonance. Patton relies upon the spontaneity of her interpretive instrument, which is the artist itself.
With the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, Dr. Seuss and disjointed loose leaf pages of notes, Patton explored the space of her own mental landscape where words, meanings and sounds collide to create new associations and potentiality.
Patton invites
The audience to do the same. She bends and tumbles through genres which, drawn by the wake of her own energy, follow and wrap around our expectations. She is guttural and brooding, screeching and hissing. The full meaning is realized at the end, if at all, when meaning matters.
Does it … does it matter?
Perhaps that is the point, yet her work defies a single pixilated point. There is no ending in her punctuation, only the sonic scales and tapestry over and through which she pours her instrument.
Appropriating the good Doctor and his Green Eggs and Ham and the opaque reception of a distant war trickling home in flag covered coffins, she engages in linguistic collage.
Then Patton the trickster brings forward a basket of simple instruments for audience members to play in exquisite disharmony. Banging, spinning, knocking – a collision of registries that play that in the space of sonic dissonance rolling over and through the scales of musical composition in manifested debate.