Termen: Time Out Review

Our review just came in from Time Out Chicago:

Oracle’s latest multimedia experiment is like Dr. Frankenstein: It brilliantly reanimates a dead performance style: the static, old-timey, staged radio drama.

Termen’s genesis is intriguingly Info Age avant-garde. A few years ago, while running a small experimental company in L.A., Truax spent months recording colleague Deegan’s nonlinear sci-fi collage reimagining of Lev Termen—the Russian electronic-instrument pioneer who, most famously, invented the theremin in 1919—as a serialized radio webcast. Borrowing from 1930s radio serials like The Shadow in its use of spiky, ambient orchestral textures and scratchy radio feedback transmissions, quick-cut dialogue and hyper suspense, Deegan’s text differs radically in its Joycean wordplay, which careens and confounds like a marathon of slam poetry.

In the staged version, Truax has his actors lip-synch every line as the original recording plays in its entirety. Risking mockery at first, the choice pays off, lending a weird, unsettling vibe entirely appropriate for the inventor of an eerie electromagnetic instrument one plays without ever touching. Oracle’s stage is segmented with rows of transparent plastic sheets—manifesting waves of metaphysical ether—through which Wisniewski, as a haunted, time-traveling Termen, summons characters from his past while searching for the source of a voice emanating from one of his wireless inventions.

This risky venture radiates its own dimension-altering energy.

****

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