Standing on the side of a yellow-lit stage, Laura Ortman drew a quiet, grainy hum out of her Apache violin that felt like holding a pile of sand in your hands and letting it fall between your fingers. Her duo partner, drummer Ryan Sawyer, matched her energy, scraping his drumsticks against each other in hypnotic strokes, creating a swishing wave that flowed beneath her bowings. That careful attention to texture — and to each other — became the backbone of the duo’s hour-long set at Roulette on Sep. 17, deliberately connecting each different structure they explored.
Ortman and Sawyer have had a longtime, ongoing collaboration, and this concert presented all new material derived from their intuitive sense of playing together. They covered a lot of ground in just an hour: after the stillness of the first few moments, their faint sounds grew into full blown noise, swerved into folk-inspired tunes and spoken word, and engulfed the room in fiery improvisation. It was a fluid performance driven by the duo’s innate understanding of each other’s techniques and their commitment to the nuanced ways in which they approach their instruments, even in the loudest moments.
Laura Ortman — Photo courtesy of Daniel Efram
After the hushed opening, Ortman put down her Apache violin and grabbed her Western violin, which was hooked up to a contraption of pedals. Her melodies were simple — an arpeggio, a scale, an open string — yet the way she dragged her bow gave each note a glistening, coarse texture, adding to its depth. At one point, just sliding her finger up and down the fingerboard filled the room with a sound like the scream of a ghost. Sawyer responded with his drums, complementing the pulse of her melodies. His cymbals crashed when her violin roared; his snares slithered when it faded back into silence.
During other portions of the set, the players each highlighted their solo work. Ortman began with looped fiddle melodies. As she introduced each phrase, she gradually built a lattice of blown-out tones entangled with each other. She passed her solo off to Sawyer after letting a rainfall of plucks transform into a flood, and he responded with a cymbal ring that sliced through the plumes of noise with the precision of a sharpened knife. He began with a gentle touch, but as his bass drum pulse grew, his rhythmic patterns became more forceful and more untethered. Every moment felt intentional yet lucid, free yet totally decided upon.
Ryan Sawyer and Laura Ortman — Photo courtesy of Daniel Efram
Later on, the duo switched gears and tried out some structured verses, but these songs weren’t as compelling as Ortman and Sawyer’s instrumentals — they seemed more focused on singing straightforward melodies than on the subtleties that make their music shine. Ortman began, painting pictures of New York City buildings and rainbows, a sense of melancholy in her voice as Sawyer’s drums rolled like thunder coming in from the distance. Sawyer took a turn at song, too, yearning in his voice accompanied by dry drums. They alternated these verses with snippets of mesmerizing tumultuous noise, but the parts felt disjointed when put together.
Ultimately, the two were at their most powerful when they let their music go. At the end of their set, they fully embraced the strength held inside of each of their instruments and all their techniques. Ortman’s bow strokes became increasingly frenetic as Sawyer pummeled his drums; a windchime twinkled onstage like clockwork, until it let loose into clamorous ringing. As the duo’s sound crescendoed, and all their interwoven textures ricocheted around each other, the music became what I imagine freedom would sound like: ablaze with the catharsis of succumbing to the moment.
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