The Brooklyn Rail

Bent Duo is a music and performance group founded by David Friend and Bill Solomon in 2017. Through a variety of recordings, performances, and installations they have created a body of work that rigorously, and playfully, investigates the queer body, queer spaces, and queer history. As veterans of the New York new music scene, their grounding as highly trained musicians has provided a sonic through-line in all their work. Their most recent project, DARKROOM, was presented in Brooklyn, at Brick Aux in August 2023. Over the course of two days of performances, single audience members were blindfolded and led into the titular room where the twenty-five minute work unfolded. Sounds swirled around the listener, who gave themself over to the experience while the duo created a virtuosic sonic performance, an environment where all the senses were heightened.

Their collaboration began as a way to subvert the heteronormative, patriarchal structures of the classical music world: music is provided by a (usually) white, male composer, and the ensemble performs what’s written. Seeking a more collaborative creative and conceptual environment, Bill and David realized that they would have to create it themselves. As they described it to me, their core principles include exploring the outer reaches of performance practice, what a collaboration with another artist can look like, how to subvert the audience-performer relationship, and how to function internally as an ensemble. This is all filtered through a queer lens, which sometimes appears in the content of the work, though not always legibly. 

Their first recording, Bent Duo Presents ghostses by Casey Anderson (a wave press, 2018), focused on indeterminacy. They commissioned the work from Anderson, but the open framework of the composition, and the freedom in sound choices, ensured that the process was meaningfully collaborative. Bill and David’s training in each other’s respective instruments (piano for David and percussion for Bill) allows them to continually blur the lines between who is playing what, an intrinsically nonhierarchical, queer idea of role reversal. The recording realized this sonic openness; speech, chains, chimes, radios, bells, are all intertwined, and the listener isn’t able to pinpoint who is performing what. 

Also in 2019 they created Ramble, their first entirely original installation and recording. In response to an open call from the queer-run Lower East Side community garden Le Petit Versailles, the two formulated a performance installation concept based on the leafy pathways winding through the space. Much like its historical antecedent (the Ramble in Central Park, a famous gay cruising ground in the 1960s and 1970s), the audience wandered through the garden, navigating a space enlivened with multiple channels of sound installation, having unexpected encounters with the performers. Dressed in fetish gear or jockstraps, Bent Duo performed incongruous musical solos on instruments such as melodica or triangle, based on the color of a hanky provided to the audience. After the solo, their experience complete, the audience left. Ramble also birthed a recording where the duo manipulated sonic materials from the installation and performances. Each side of the cassette release, “Top" and “Bottom,” was created by one of them, though uncredited. With the cassette recording, the zine they created for the project, and the staged performance, Ramble was a completely DIY project that established roots for their subsequent work. 

DARKROOM centered the queer focus on an indoor cruising space, historically the dark, back rooms of bars, clubs, and other places where men could have discreet, anonymous sex without entanglement. The duo’s performance foregrounded the experience by having the blindfolded listener (one person at a time) guided by a host into the space. Entering in media res, the clomp of footsteps and whirr of electric fans provided a sonic grounding. Bent Duo explains this as a way to not scare the audience. The listener has to feel, only via hearing, the piece for themselves—a startling subversion of the traditional audience-performer relationship.

Sonically, the material in DARKROOM is not explicitly queer, though the sonic architecture (composition) of the work is propelled by Bent Duo’s self-described archive of queer sound: from Henry Cowell, to John Cage, to the recent work of Sarah Hennies, all queer composers. On immediate hearing, it hews closer to musique concrète, separating sound from its source. Yet as the sounds accumulate over the course of the piece they take on Bent Duo’s meanings. By not using objects or instruments in their common roles, Bent Duo unsettles traditional notions of music making; nothing is taken at face (or ear) value. They shift the sonic field through what they call their “radical faerie dance,” communicating queer bodies in motion. What was under the surface becomes legible, and the more audible these queer sonics become.