I have always found the Carriage House Cafe to be a rare and jubilant weekend morning treat, whether with my girlfriend or visiting family. For me, the cafe's dining experience has always been marked by globs of syrup atop almond butter pancakes, endless dark-roasted coffee, unintelligible bits of chatter and thousands of clinks of striking glass, forks and knives. But last Monday evening was by no means the typical experience I usually enjoy at the Carriage House. That night, I ventured upstairs to the cafe's historic Hayloft Hall to catch a memorable performance by a subset of the Cornell Avant Garde Ensemble (CAGE) sharing the stage with special guest cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser Theresa Wong, with free jazz Soar Trio closing the night afterwards.

The Cornell Avant Garde Ensemble is a free-form collective of musicians, many whom teach in Cornell's Department of Music. The select subset of members at Monday evening's performance involved Kevin Ernste, director of the Cornell Electroacoustic Music Center; Chris Miller, professor of the Gamelan music courses; Tim Feeney, director of Cornell's Percussion Ensembles and Annie Lewandowski, a Cornell music lecturer currently on a duo tour with Theresa Wong. Hailing from the San Francisco Bay Area, Theresa Wong brought a post-metropolitan sharpness to the evening's improvised collaboration.

The cherry-branded open space, supported by mighty lumber beams and lit by mellow peach lamps lined across the parchment-colored walls, provided a rich warm venue for the experimental sounds to occupy. As audience members gathered in, sipping on glasses of red wine and local craft beers, the members of the Cornell Avant Garde Ensemble humbly found their way onto the intimate stage.

The show began with an introduction of hard and hollow knocks on wood emanating from Wong's cello, followed by faint sleights of hand and bow to create eerie buzzes, setting an appropriate mood. By nudging his fingers along strips of sandpaper on his drum, Tim Feeney, considered by many to be more of a “frictionist” than a percussionist, produced the winds of a sandstorm in a dune sequence that was perfectly complimented by the entrance of Chris Miller's rebab, a stringed instrument that once spread along ancient Islamic trading routes. Miller transitioned into a duet of call-and-response between his rebab and Wong's middle-range chirps and whistles that bounced off the cafe's walls, reverberating a chilling potency. Annie Lewandowski filled the background as her fingers brushed up along wooden roods, coated in resin, jammed in between her piano's strings, to send out chilling vibrations through the air. Juxtaposed alongside this display was Kevin Ernste, plucking the strings of an Indonesian kapachi, revealing twisted and churned drops of metallic rain.

Here was a group of musicians exploring the inner workings and transcendental possibilities of their instruments when coupled upon one another, acting out on what looked like a purely instinctive and emotionally driven state of flow. Commenting on the performance, Kevin Ernste expressed, “It is the nature of our group to be responsive, to be always listening. We thrive on the unknown, which is why working with guests like Theresa (and Peni and Jessika at the recent Johnson show) is such a pleasure and yields such interesting results.”

Expanding forward, further and further into the unknown throughout the show, the ending sequence brought forth a dreadful underpinning into the human soul. Jagged micro-collisions disturbed the air and tore at a primitive fear, growing from double-bowing the sharp edges of drum cymbals and amplifying the vibrations of rubber super balls dragged along the drum skin. The finale culminated in a scene of mutual Zen and desperation, engaging intense sonic combinations that griped the psyche. Unreasonable friction spawned forward, grinding, chewing and chiseling at the mind. It was akin to dosing off for a split second then snapping back as an engineered, jagged highway curb alarms the driver of the difference between life and death.

Miller bounced his bow — which looked like a gnarly saw — up and down the neck of his rebab revealing every tiny nick, indent and imperfection in the alloy of the string. Rolling sands and distant thunders interacted with clicking gears and the howls of digitally compressed beats that were missing their defining essential vocal frequencies.  And finally it all came crashing down in an abandoned aural space of squeaky resin, Theresa patiently buzzing like a bee, landing on an immensely respectable applause.