At the end of this month begins the 38th Festival of Electroacoustic music in Bourges, and at long last Asymmetry presents the reports and interviews from the past two festivals there, the only two so far that Asymmetry has attended. Click the link above or check the sidebar under Upcoming Events for details about this year’s festival.

I first visited Bourges in 2005, thirty-five years after Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier founded the Groupe de Musique Experimentale Bourges there, fresh from their studies at the GRM in Paris. I had been collecting their festival’s Cultures Electroniques CDs for a dozen or more years, those distinctive covers with various views of the globe making them easy to spot in stores, and the consistently high quality of the very varied repertoire making them easy to listen to at home.

I first attended the Synthèse festival in 2006, where I met Beatriz Ferreyra, whose interview has appeared in Asymmetry, and Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram, who invited me to the first annual Spectrum XXI festival in Paris that November. And, of course, the festival organizers, Françoise and Christian, who both took time out of their busy schedules to talk to me about their music and the Institute and their busy schedules. Read more »

I first met Paul Rudy at the Bourges festival in the spring of 2007. When I attended the EMM festival that October, Paul kindly took some time out to sit down and chat with me about music and life and whether or not I had a plan for this interview.

Asymmetry: You can talk about whatever you want.

Rudy: Well, let me ask you, “What are you curious about?”

Asymmetry: I’m interested just to listen to you talk.

Rudy: Well that backfired, didn’t it! But that’s the teacher in me. I don’t want to just tell you something; I want to draw you out.

Asymmetry: Well, an interview is a complete fake, anyway. What will appear in the magazine will be something I’ve manufactured out of this raw material we’re producing.

Read more »

The Electrogals show at Portland’s Holocene on the 10th of April, co-curated by Heather Perkins and Mary Wright, opened with a short set by Heather herself, filling in for the absent Marianne Messina. Heather’s set was loud, lively, energetic stuff. Starting with high, bright sounds, it went through some complex gyrations until settling into a regular rhythm for a bit. But only a bit. Without entirely losing the dance beat, Perkins’ set went back to and ended with the gyrating complexities.

Next up was what is fast becoming the most often requested piece of Bonnie Miksch: Solstice for voice, didgeridoo, and computer. It’s a stunner, for sure. Lots of really interesting electronics (including processed voice and didgeridoo sounds), lots of variety, from extremely synthetic sounds to concrète, all moving slowly past the live stuff, all wildly gorgeous.

Read more »

Portland New Music Society’s second concert at Jáce Gáce (on April 9) featured the composed music of Scott Stobbe and the free improv of Fiasco.

William McGlothlan, oboe–Scott Stobbe, electric guitar–Becca Schultz, toy piano–Mary Sutton, violin and accordion–Shawn Sheff, trombone

Scott and a few friends played a set of his short pieces, strung together without break. While Scott’s music covers a fair range stylistically, there was one common goal this evening—to play interesting music and then go off the rails with pretty tunes and coordinated lines and then get back on track with more of the uncoordinated, nontonal, various music. You might think, as I found myself thinking—and fearing—that one schtick would get pretty old pretty quickly. Read more »

Composers Adam Reese and Matt Marble offered up two recent projects for our delectation Sunday evening, the 9^th of March, at Gallery Homeland in Portland’s Ford Building. Both used the same basic setup, a drummer in the center of the room surrounded by other musicians, but they couldn’t have been more different otherwise. Adam’s set featured a handful of harmonicas, each modified to play only one tone in a microtonal scale of Adam’s own devising, seated around a drummer (inspired by Banda Linda horn polyphony). Like his melodica set from several weeks before, this was excellent theatrical minimalism.

Matt’s set was a little more elaborate, consisting of several circles around the central drummer, with woodwinds and laptops and guitars and other drums and aluminum foil and metal bowls with gravel. The central drummer supplied the material for everyone else’s contributions, so that one could hear and see the licks move through the circles from center to perimeter. The most intriguing sound for me was the sleigh bells slammed against the concrete floor. Very nice use of space for both our eyes and our ears.

On March 12, Portland New Music Society presented Peter Karman, Matt Hannafin & Abusive Delay (Jason Morales), and the duo of Ben Kates & Seth Brown. The concert opened with Peter Karman’s new laptop set, a mostly already composed piece (If it hath not yet pleased him) that falls into two parts, each containing a frenetic quickcut section (short snippets of just about everything) followed by a more relaxed and ostinato section of softer dynamics and longer lines. The music is wild and wildly various, but the form makes everything seem unified and even inevitable. Read more »

Stéphane Rives, saxophone virtuoso, and Wade Matthews, laptop virtuoso, came to Portland on the 14^th of February this year (2008) via Portland’s Creative Music Guild for a show of virtuosic improv. They were joined for the second half of the show by Matt Hannafin, percussion virtuoso, and JP Jenkins, guitar virtuoso. I’m not exaggerating.

Living in Portland, I have of course heard Matt and JP many times—always good times—but I had never heard Stéphane or Wade before, so this was a real treat. Stéphane specializes in high, single tones made up of complex, various sounds. Introducing electronics into this spare, sparse, rich sound world could so easily be simple impertinence. But Rives and Matthews, having done this before, created a space that included individual, isolated sounds—in all their complexity—and complex interweaving lines and patterns, in all their simplicity.

Most satisfying. Read more »

Electronic Music Midwest 2007 was a smooth-running, well-organized, sonically and musically superior event, put on by some truly lovely people. Indeed, before the festival was very far along (fifteen or twenty minutes into concert one), I was already kicking myself for not having known about this nine year old treasure, and was planning to attend the next one, in Chicago, and the next one after that, back in Kansas City, and….

There were nine concerts in all, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (October 11-13), all held in the Performing Arts Center of the Kansas City Kansas Community College, inevitably and consistently referred to as KCKCC. Nine concerts in three days (one on Friday, four each on the other two days) might seem like a lot—the opportunities for listener fatigue many but for the good design: one hour concerts, lots of variety, plenty of time between each show for eating and drinking and just generally hanging out. Read more »

San Francisco new music organization, 23five, has been around since 1993, and has been activating the medium for eleven (XI) of those years. But I only heard about them this past January, when Asymmetry Music Magazine received an email from them announcing the three events of this year’s Activating the Medium festival, an announcement I dutifully put in the “up-coming events” column of Asymmetry. After all, the likes of Krieger, Karkowski, and Niblock are certainly worth mentioning. But this became more personal with the line in their announcement about Karkowski’s “orchestral scores.” That was intriguing. And it kept intriguing, until I made up some other work to do in the Bay Area, hopped on a plane, and flew from Portland, OR to San Francisco to go to a concert. Read more »

photograph by Jim Leisy

Review by James Bash of concert one of the Carter-Messiaen Project

A concert of new serious music is the most difficult kind of event to sell in Portland, Oregon. Most performances of new music in this town are lucky to draw an audience of a hundred people and most draw only a couple dozen. So, it is encouraging to know that Chamber Music Northwest was financially sound enough to sponsor a series of three contemporary music concerts, which took place over the weekend of January 25-27. Read more »