Not "Pointless" Anymore:
Mike Hovancsek's Temporal Angels
By Anastasia Pantsios
The founders of Standing Rock Cultural Arts Inc ., a Kent-based non-profit devoted to offering a variety of community arts programs, have a dream: They hope in the not-too-distant future to establish a full-service cultural arts center in Kent. In the meantime, the organization, founded by executive director Jeff Ingram and artistic director Gary Lockwood, presents theater, film festival, visual art exhibits, spoken word and performance art events and concerts in their tiny North Water Street Gallery, as well as other spaces around Kent. Now they've taken a baby step toward their dreams of artistic empire with the launch of SRCA Recordings.
“We wanted to do a record label to celebrate the people around here that aren't getting represented,” says Ingram. “We have some great, culturally diverse music around here, and we thought it would be nice to get it out there and promote it more. We're not going to disqualify any music, but the areas we're going to be putting our energy into are the areas that are outside the radar.”
SRCA's first release is Temporal Angels , a solo disc by SRCA associate director Mike Hovancsek, well-known in the area for his work with the sonically adventurous Pointless Orchestra.
Hovancsek is a musician and visual artist who eagerly crosses artistic and cultural boundaries. He began to play around with unusual approaches to music as a kid when an early attempt to learn guitar met with putdowns from a hotshot teenage guitar teacher.
“After a few lessons with him, I thought, ‘I am going to go underground, create my own approach to music, get really good at it and then re-emerge years later with my own approach,'” Hovancsek says. “I spent years making up scales and rhythms and different combinations of sounds. When I started at Kent State, they have just a world class ethno department, so while I was earning my degree in psychology, I was studying Chinese and Japanese music.”
Through Kent's ethnomusicology department, Hovancsek got to know musicians from other cultures and had the chance to learn from them. In return, many played on Temporal Angels. In addition to Hovancsek's own work on percussion, cello, koto, sitar, tambura and gu zheng (a form of Chinese zither), the meditative music, which Hovancsek has dubbed “multicultural chamber music,” features guest performances by an impressive line-up of musicians. The list ranges from 82-year-old Egyptian composer Halim El-Dabh, Vietnamese master musician Phong Nguyen and Chinese musician Wah-Chiu Lai to fellow Pointless Orchestra member David Badagnani and the Kent Unitarian Universalist Choir. The result is elegant, textured music that sounds spare and understated yet is quite complex.
“I've worked with people where it's just humbling,” says Hovancsek. “I think it's just because I've created this niche that people respect. I'm not a master of Egyptian music like Halim, but I'm doing stuff that's interesting to a guy like him. People who are really high-end like Phong or Halim are fascinated by the next levels of music beyond conventional concepts of how you construct music, and that's what I'm all about.”
