Compare the following scenes: a butterfly is captured, preserved, and pinned down on an album page; a butterfly is captured, kept alive, and placed inside a large, transparent net. While the former presents the insect in inert, static form, the latter contains aspects that are fixed (the boundaries of the net) with aspects incapable of being precisely controlled (the arc and height of the bug, its rate of wing flutter, its torque). The flexiblity of this latter method of capture offers a chance to witness the insect in living flux, contained but not oppressed by the form in which it is held.
Névé also centers around an unruly thing: a 55-gallon oil drum. The barrel is scraped with wood, rubbed with glass, and pushed against with tightly wound coils of wire. Played live, these sounds intrinsically resist authorial control, their internal structures too dynamic for explicit, exact manipulation. They snap like embers, creak like gates, and groan in fits like cracking trees. With a language extrapolated from acoustic analyses of the oil drum, instruments enter and expressively warp these metal screeches, blurring the boundary between intransigent noise and composed, controlled, constricted musical form.