No Bottom (Boundless the Source)

Born in Brooklyn and a long-time resident of Montreal, Malcolm Goldstein is widely recognized for his contribution to European and American experimental and improvised music. Beginning in the 1960s, this has included collaborations with John Cage, Ornette Coleman and the Judson Church collective in New York. This video seeks to understand Goldstein’s unique definition of experimental improvisation, as he continues that experiment through the performance of a series of new works composed for the ensemble Quatuor d’occasion (Nicolas Caloia, Émilie Girard-Charest, Jean René, Malcolm Goldstein). What Goldstein calls “soundings” seems to have two steps. The first is a way of improvising where the bow, the instrument and the body are intermediaries in the exploration of the material surround through the vibration. The second is the score, the notations like a map which guides where and how the exploration should be focused and modulated. In marine navigation, sounding is the technique of dropping a weighted line to determine the depth of water. When the depth exceeds the length of line, when we are beyond the range we can know, the sounding call is “no bottom”—the title of this video document.