The
Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Festival schedule
In 1939, John Cage, America's quintessential classical-music
iconoclast, created his Imaginary Landscape No. 1, a work
for muted piano, Chinese cymbal and multiple phonographs.
In this short piece mixing the slow grind and whistle of the
turntable with ambient percussion fills, Cage was the first
to explore the aural potential in the new audio medium of
the turntable. Ever the rebel, he jumped at the chance to
be the first to use "technology" as a musical instrument.
Though the composer was coming at this nominally from the
classical music school, he was never one to cozy up to music-academy
purists. Call him DJ JC (or DJ Cage aux folles), but his bold
step--spawned more by curiosity than anything else--may have
inadvertently created a genre all its own.
Witness the upcoming Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Festival.
The three-day fest celebrates the industrial, ambient, silly
and downright strange of the burgeoning musical idiom of
Electronica. Exploring the alleged high- and low-brow elements
of the form by throwing classical, jazz, ambient, rock,
hip-hop, blues and performance art into the experimental
stew, this just may be oddest music festival on the planet.
"Our goal," says Joseph Waters, festival founder and artistic
director of the Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Organization,
or NWEAMO, "is to bring together the side coming at this
music without a traditional music background and the other
side, coming from what I'd call an 'art music' perspective."
A Cagian goal if ever there was one. Waters, a fortysomething
assistant music professor at Lewis & Clark College and
an electronic composer himself, is pumped to pull it off.
As he tells WW about his pet project, he bounces
and gestures, continually interrupting his festival partner
Jeff Payne, the artistic director of local classical-music
comedians Fear No Music. It's that intensity that managed
to unite three of Portland's most adventurous musical forces--his
own upstart NWEAMO, Fear No Music and Third Pyramid, the
local Hypno artist collective run by James Boring. Through
turntable wizards and nob twiddlers, tape splicers and feedback
aficionados, the joint collaboration offers an ardent army
of believers united in the common belief that electronic
music is nothing short of the musical bridge to the 21st
century.
From a Fear No Music performance of Cage's Imaginary Landscape
No. 1 to contemporary pieces by local ambient-industrial
heavies Smegma, the festival aims to cover the entire history
of the electronic music form. In Cage's spirit, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink
lineup thumbs its nose at any academic notions of cerebral
soundscapes. Fear No Music's Payne has programmed the Saturday
FNM concert while Waters handled the music and gathered
the artists for the Friday and Sunday shows. The resulting
three concerts present 18 performers performing the work
of 24 different electronic composers. Excluding FNM's Saturday-night
concert, the majority of the pieces will be performed by
the composers themselves.
The variety is dizzying. To give you a flavor, here are
a few that typify the scope of the offerings. Internationally
known Phillip Rhodes will present "Fiddletunes," an electronic
hayride through Appalachian folk-fiddle forms that tosses
Aaron Copland in the loo with Yoko Ono. "Sarahnade," a piece
by Louisiana State University professor Stephen Beck, is
a spliced tape of his baby daughter's crying voice deftly
arranged to mimic the trilling of an operatic diva. Local
artists Office Products will present their brand of workplace-related
Dilbert hypnotica. And the pretentiously named Philip Kent
Bimstein will unveil his completely unpretentious "Garland
Hirsch's Cows," a down-on-the-farm taped chorus of farmer
and livestock that creates the effect of Steve Reich's Different
Trains with dairy cows standing in for the string quartet.
There really is something for everybody, and why not? "Technology
has played such a large role with almost all the music people
listen to today," stresses Waters. Payne agrees: "We're
surrounded by technology in our natural environment." Their
view is that it's only natural then to embrace the "unnatural"
for musical inspiration. Waters first discussed the project
with Payne in the beginning of the year when the two were
discussing an upcoming Fear No Music world-premiere performance
of Waters' video collaboration with animator Joanna Priestley.
Both were excited about the possibilities and the newness
of the festival. "I don't think anyone else has done anything
with electronic music on this scope before," Waters says,
and he's probably right.
There may have been a good reason for that. "When electronic
music first started, the medium was relatively unforgiving,"
says Payne. "It took composers a while to be expressive
and personal with this stuff and get past the beeps and
squawks of the early work." Much of the computer-inspired
music of the '60s sounded, well, like music for computer
operators, self-consciously the sum of its parts. Over the
past 30 years, there's been rampant electronic experimentation
from the likes of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Robert Wilson,
and rock-influenced musicians like Brian Eno, Robert Fripp,
Kraftwerk and even the Beatles. ("The Beatles were really
the first to realize that the studio itself was a recording
instrument," say Waters.) It took these innovations to make
composers understand the concept of letting the technology
serve the music and not the other way around.
So now not every piece has to sound like the soundtrack
from Logan's Run. You can have the moody, bittersweet
yearning of Finnish composer Kaija Saariajo's "Petals" for
cello and electronics on the same program as "Machine Music"
by Lejaren Hill, a piece that according to Payne "pits the
machine's ungodly pace to live performers à la Chaplin's
Modern Times." Both pieces will be part of Saturday
night's Fear No Music concert, a show that closes with David
Chandler (a.k.a. DJ Broken Window) accompanying the group
on turntables. "From Cage to a contemporary DJ," Payne says,
"we kind of come full circle."
The
Northwest Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
James Croson,
A nat HEMA, Nancy Teskey, Craig Burk, Alex Bundy, Maggi
Payne, Mary Lou Newmark, C. Mathew Burtner and Smegma
Lewis
& Clark College, Evans Auditorium
0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, 768-7460
8 pm Friday, Oct. 8.
Fear No Music
First Christian Church, 1315 SW Broadway, 224-8499.
8 pm Saturday, Oct.10
$10-$15.
Ryan Wise,
Bruce Hamilton, Stephen Beck, Office Products, Phillip Rhodes,
Matthew Mobberley, Keith Benjamin, Cyanosis/Atrophy, Nancy
Teskey, John Hubbard, Carol Biel
Lewis & Clark College, Evans Auditorium
0615 SW Palatine Hill Road, 768-746
5 pm Sunday, Oct. 11
$5.
Contacts:
Fear No Music
1220 NE 17th Ave. No. 12-D,335-3386
www.fearnomusic.org
Northwest Electro-Acoustic
Music Organization
booher@lclark.edu
www.nweamo.org.
Third Pyramid,
294-7138
sites.netscape.net/thirdpyramid
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Willamette Week | originally
published October 6,
1999
|
