Spark Festival Reflections
For the Spark Festival, I attended on of the Nitelife concerts at the Nomad World Pub where I saw Freida Abtan, Gregory Taylor & Tom Hamer, and Soren Knudsen perform. The focus of the artists was to use computer technology to manipulate certain sound bites and create unconventional rhythms and dissonant tones. Freida's work reminded me very much of the music and sound used in evoking pictures of machines and industry, especially in Anime cartooning (i.e. Ghost in the Shell). Though the sounds themselves were the opposite of organic, the arrangement of the sound was techno-organic in that the artist let music grow in a way that made sense to them. Along with one of the pieces Freida also created a visual film component and was using the computer to manipulate those images as well. These I found to be reminiscent of the dancer Loie Fuller who used vast swaths of cloth in her dance work back in the 1890's. Freida's computer work seemed to emulate that flow of cloth by creating a new flow of the pixels that make up the image of a human on the screen. The other artists, like Knudsen, experimented more with incorporating musical instruments to create a blend of instrumental riffing typically done in jazz and computer generated sounds. All of the work was very intriguing and interesting to experience, but it is not music that compels your body to move. Or, we have simply not found a way yet for our bodies to move to this arhythmatic expression of sound. I had a difficult time keeping engaged in this music due to what I perceived as randomness and general noise. I'll probably be yelling at my kids someday and asking, "what ever happened to the electric guitar?"