Author: Lili Tobias
On Thursday, August 21st, 2025, I headed back to the DiMenna Center for my second concert of the week to see another performance that was part of the Time:Spans Festival. On the program was the world premiere of False Division, a collaboration between Endlings (Raven Chacon and John Dieterich) and Yarn/Wire (Laura Barger, Julia Den Boer, Russell Greenberg, and Bill Solomon), which created an emotional experience entirely different from Tuesday’s concert. While Chaya Czernowin’s the divine thawing of the core was powerfully haunting, False Division ultimately maintained a sense of underlying safety amidst the chaotic banquet of noise.
The music began with glowing bell tones in the percussion and electronics, reminding me of fireflies or droplets of water on a summer night. Everything that followed was incredibly different though! While I wasn’t a fan of each and every sound in the piece (such as the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound of bowing a block of styrofoam), each one was an experience of some sort, and many sounds were completely new to me (like the rumbling of a massage gun on the surface of a bass drum). There were often quick shifts between sections with very different sound profiles, each one with its own unique character.
False Division celebrated the joy of musical exploration and experimentation. I had really great seat, with a direct line of sight towards one of the elaborate percussion setups, so I could not only hear everything, but also see the process of how those sounds were brought to life. One of my favorite moments of the piece was when the percussionist nearest to me ecstatically bowed a cymbal resting on a drum until nearly half the bow hairs had frayed and split—and he did all this with a mallet held between his teeth!
I could tell all the musicians were having a ton of fun, and this fun continued through the duration of the performance. To kick off the “grand finale,” the keyboardist pulled out a twirly noisemaker, and, spinning it around above her head, made her way over to the piano bench to join the pianist for a lively 4-hand explosion of notes. Even as just an audience member, I could feel the joy of making music together, and I left the concert hall far more lighthearted than I did on Tuesday. Both nights were filled with incredibly inspiring music, and it’s always good to have variety at a long festival like this!
~ Lili Tobias
Oberon's Glade 