Open Ears day 3
Saturday, 28 April 2007 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daSaturday!
We skipped the "sound walk" in the park; and the Rzewski Piano Masterclass, but still saw three concerts and a half-dozen art installations.
TorQ Percussion Quartet was a whole lot of fun. They were earnest, and very young; I think all four were in their 20s. They seemed to travel with a huge amount of instruments: 4 marimbas, a pair of glockenspiels, a glockenspiel-like isntrument that was higher-pitched and consisted of small things that looked like cymbols... there were a numbers of drums, and I'm sure I've forgotten some of them as well. Dang. Anyway, lots of re-arrangements on-stage, without the benefit of roadies.
My favourite pieces were "Jerusalem" (folk song from S. Africa, rearranged by Jamie Drake, one of the quartet) "Sleep" by Eric Whittacre, and "Bossa Nova without Instruments".
Finally, my not-favourites:
"Will Tomorrow, I wonder, be Cloudy or Clear" was by Toru Takemitsu, and it may not have been intentional but it sounded almost exactly like an extended Super Mario theme: bouncy and cartoon-like.
They ended with a piece that reminded me too much of Stomp. They banged on garbage-cans, in a line; and occasionally shouted. I wish they'd ended right before it.
Overall, it was a good concert. This was one of the free events; still, the seats were only about 1/2 to 2/3 full. Lots of young kids.
We spent an hour and a half wandering through the festival's arts installations. Two things that stood out:
In the city hall rotunda, there was a somewhat immersive ambient piece with 8 speakers in-the-round. Only so-so. But I chatted with Pamela Z, who happened to be there at the same time as we were. She plans to come back again, and likes our festival more than the ones she goes to in LA and SF. On the subject of Open Ears, she is as unable as I am to explain why open ears works here; at least as well as the ones they hold in bigger cities. She was sorry to miss Negativland last time.
There was a neat bit of video art, still in installation at KWAG, called "Songs of Place," which is a projection of shredded video that was captured locally. Difficult to describe, but I found it fun and calming to watch for ten minutes.
Then we went and saw Zs. I wrote that up separately. After the first half, we went home for dinner. :)
Then:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
the_infamous_j's birthday party, at his and mtffm's house. Lots of laughing, insinuations, and ball-juggling. I'm impressed at the coordination of the present-organizers, too. And with hotcabanasauce's craftiness, in many senses of the word.
At 10pm, we jetted and went to see the movie Alphaville as re-cast and remixed by Robin Rimbaud (Scanner). Awesome ambient music; apparently he was remixing as he went, though of course that was hard to tell. It was an OK video, though I liked the ambient music more- I'm looking forward to seeing the original film. (It's a 1965 grim sci-fi, feels like a grandparent to Blade Runner for its visual palette, though it's black and white).
There was an interview with the performer before-hand, where he turned out to be very clever, well-spoken, and with a wonderful London accent. Then after the show, he was all bashful about taking bows. It was neat to discover in the morning that Scanner's got a dozen or so albums on iTunes. And here I'd never heard of the guy. I'm such a philistine.
We skipped the 11pm rave, alas; we were just too tired.
We skipped the "sound walk" in the park; and the Rzewski Piano Masterclass, but still saw three concerts and a half-dozen art installations.
TorQ Percussion Quartet was a whole lot of fun. They were earnest, and very young; I think all four were in their 20s. They seemed to travel with a huge amount of instruments: 4 marimbas, a pair of glockenspiels, a glockenspiel-like isntrument that was higher-pitched and consisted of small things that looked like cymbols... there were a numbers of drums, and I'm sure I've forgotten some of them as well. Dang. Anyway, lots of re-arrangements on-stage, without the benefit of roadies.
My favourite pieces were "Jerusalem" (folk song from S. Africa, rearranged by Jamie Drake, one of the quartet) "Sleep" by Eric Whittacre, and "Bossa Nova without Instruments".
Finally, my not-favourites:
"Will Tomorrow, I wonder, be Cloudy or Clear" was by Toru Takemitsu, and it may not have been intentional but it sounded almost exactly like an extended Super Mario theme: bouncy and cartoon-like.
They ended with a piece that reminded me too much of Stomp. They banged on garbage-cans, in a line; and occasionally shouted. I wish they'd ended right before it.
Overall, it was a good concert. This was one of the free events; still, the seats were only about 1/2 to 2/3 full. Lots of young kids.
We spent an hour and a half wandering through the festival's arts installations. Two things that stood out:
In the city hall rotunda, there was a somewhat immersive ambient piece with 8 speakers in-the-round. Only so-so. But I chatted with Pamela Z, who happened to be there at the same time as we were. She plans to come back again, and likes our festival more than the ones she goes to in LA and SF. On the subject of Open Ears, she is as unable as I am to explain why open ears works here; at least as well as the ones they hold in bigger cities. She was sorry to miss Negativland last time.
There was a neat bit of video art, still in installation at KWAG, called "Songs of Place," which is a projection of shredded video that was captured locally. Difficult to describe, but I found it fun and calming to watch for ten minutes.
Then we went and saw Zs. I wrote that up separately. After the first half, we went home for dinner. :)
Then:
the_infamous_j's birthday party, at his and mtffm's house. Lots of laughing, insinuations, and ball-juggling. I'm impressed at the coordination of the present-organizers, too. And with hotcabanasauce's craftiness, in many senses of the word.At 10pm, we jetted and went to see the movie Alphaville as re-cast and remixed by Robin Rimbaud (Scanner). Awesome ambient music; apparently he was remixing as he went, though of course that was hard to tell. It was an OK video, though I liked the ambient music more- I'm looking forward to seeing the original film. (It's a 1965 grim sci-fi, feels like a grandparent to Blade Runner for its visual palette, though it's black and white).
There was an interview with the performer before-hand, where he turned out to be very clever, well-spoken, and with a wonderful London accent. Then after the show, he was all bashful about taking bows. It was neat to discover in the morning that Scanner's got a dozen or so albums on iTunes. And here I'd never heard of the guy. I'm such a philistine.
We skipped the 11pm rave, alas; we were just too tired.
