Last Saturday, at Mount Tremper Arts, I saw ICElab (which stands for International Contemporary Ensemble), a collective of artists who met as students at Antioch in 2001. They played six pieces, with a little intermission in the middle. "We love it here," Claire Chase announced. "We’d love to live here all the time!" (Artists at this center get a week of residence, before they perform.) Normally, I see dance at Mount Tremper Arts, so I was struck by the dance-like elements of ICElab: the way the two flautists (Claire and Eric Lamb) bobbed along as they played, reading the 12 foot long sheet music for "Edgewater" by Marcos Balter; the ensemble pounding on bowls — yes, stainless steel kitchen bowls — in Phyllis Chen’s "Glass Clouds We Have Known."
Joshua Rubin, the clarinet player, produced a wonderful deep, chocolatey tone.
The whole show had a feeling of mutuality, as if ICElab were showing us their best moves, and we were their uncles and aunties.
I got a ride home — from the mayor of Hoboken! Who is a woman.