Making Her Presence Felt
Lisa Miles and Mike Michalski’s Musical Collaboration
Pittsburgh City Paper, August 22, 2001
Writer: Justin Hopper
Lisa Miles is candid when she speaks of her work; she’s not given to hyperbole, but neither is she willing to brook half-heartedness.
“At first we kept a distance from one another because, we realized later, we’re both very strong-willed,” says musician and performance artist Miles of her musical collaborator, Mike Michalski. “I always thought he was a little headstrong, and he thought the same of me — because we are! We don’t like incompetence.”
Rather then stern taskmasters butting heads, however, Miles and Michalski consider one another ideal collaborators for the musical side of Miles’ cross-disciplinary performance piece Presence. Begun in 1999 as a piece combining music by Miles with movement by dancer Michele Dunleavy as well as photography and other media, Presence has been revived this year by a grant from the Humanities and the Arts Initiative to add a new, psychology-themed level to the piece with guidance from members of the Jung Society and Dr. Eva Simms of Duquesne University’s psychology department.
According to Miles, Presence is “about finding sense of self — stripping away masks that we acquire, [that are] societally imposed,” a notion played out in real life in the logistical preparation of the piece’s music by Miles and Michalski. Miles may be “strong-willed,” but she’s not artistically big-headed: When she was told in the summer of 1999 that she would be funded for the initial performance run, she knew that this was something that would require help outside the core of herself and Dunleavy. She gave Michalski, a 15-year veteran of the Pittsburgh punk and underground scene, the nod to act as producer, engineer, and sometime musician for the recording that serves as the piece’s primary musical bedding. Then, Miles took steps to ensure that the project would be completed: on time, under the gun.
“When she presented the idea to me, “ says Michalski,“ she had it all mapped out already. She had a visual conception of what the music would be like: These pieces were going to each be this way and for this amount of time. It was a graph, and it would say ’[the song title], three minutes long, with the violin part represented by this cube, but I think that I might want some mandolin, too; and some creepy sounds here, and I’m going to have one of my students come over and [improvise] here.”
“I didn’t do it to be dictatorial,” Miles says, “I did it for me, because I thought: ‘Shit! Forty-two minutes, how am I going to do a 42-minute music piece!’”
The result of Miles’ meticulous planning — plotting the layers of instruments and spoken word, the length of the piece’s 11 segments, and the dynamics, often before a segment’s melody was written — is an intricate ebb and flow that creeps from relaxing to creepy and back again. The disc that Michalski produced plays though Presence’s performance, as Miles adds embellishments and improvisations on top of it; Dunleavy performs choreographed movements; and slides of Joelle Levitt and Michael Mangiafico’s glass art supplement their own three-dimensional work on the stage.
The music in Presence is mostly Miles’ violin and electric mandolin, set in layers of various depths, playing around a few basic themes. But the 36-year-old violinist is adamant that Michalski’s engineering and production decisions have as much to do with the resultant music as does her composition. Particularly the choice of recording location — in Miles’ mind; that played a dominant role in Presence, both musically and thematically.
“When she first talked about this project,” explains Michalski, “she liked the idea of the studio, but didn’t like the pressure of the studio. So I said, 'Why don’t we go to your house? You know where the violin sound good in your house. That’s what makes you comfortable; that’s what makes you play well and makes the instrument sound good.’ The microphones are just ears for wherever the music sounds good.”
Miles’ Perry Hilltop Victorian home became their studio; the natural reverberations of its hallways and floorboards became their effects boxes. The pair used only three or four microphones, distributing the recording process around the house to maximize the possibilities of hose mics in combination with the house’s acoustics. But while the recording was done quickly and cheaply, both agree that, with few exceptions, they got what they wanted.
Michalski and Miles’ collaborative success stems in part from a shared vision of underground art, music and community in Pittsburgh. Both are veterans of multiple local bands, and both agree that, all too often, those artists don’t get the support they need for their talents to truly flourish. In fact, Miles’ next project is a book, to be published next year by Creative Arts Book Company in Berkeley; it’s a biography of little-known artist Esther Phillips, which she says also serves as “the story of all struggling creative artists.”
“Everybody I’m working with represents just a small fraction of the underground talent [in Pittsburgh ],” says Miles. “By underground I mean true talent, not catering to mainstream conceptions of what’s artistic."
“But just because [we’re] not making money,” says Miles, “society says [we’re] not working. But the catch-22 is, at the same time, they’re saying, ‘You’re not working , and you spend so much time painting, or writing music, or playing in your band.'”
Presence will be performed at 8 PM Fri., August 24, 2001 and Sat. August 25, 2001, at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, East Liberty.