Electronica catches fire at the Spark Festival
The U of M's six-day celebration of techonology and music kicks off this week.
courtesy Walker Art Center
Ray Lee's Siren
Article Tools
The average listener takes a lot for granted in music: melody, harmony, lyrics, rhythm—these are the things we’re taught to find and hold onto when we’re listening. But the Spark Festival Of Electronic Music And Arts, now in its seventh year, invites you to reconsider your assumptions via a plethora of invited musicians and artists who are delving deeply into the bones and ligaments that make up music and other arts in a digital age. Loosely conglomerated around the theme of artists using new technologies, the festival brings together a shockingly diverse assortment of installations, performances, and keynote lectures Feb. 17-22, centered in the University of Minnesota’s West Bank Arts Quarter.
PoleWhile you’d be hard-pressed to call any of the artists at Spark Festival mainstream, they do fall out along a spectrum from less to more abstract, with electronic artist Pole (Feb. 21 at Bedlam Theater) mining a minimalist dub vein not too far removed from the spacious, ghostly territory of Burial or the kinetic, manic groove of Benga. Born Stefan Betke, Pole porduces music built from tiny fragments of tape hiss, half-heard melodies, and analog synth growls laid against often off-kilter rhythms, resulting in ever-shifting explorations of electronic tone. Somewhere in the middle of that scale lies British sound artist Ray Lee, performing Feb. 19-21 at the Walker Art Center and giving the festival’s keynote address Feb. 20 at the U's Hanson Hall. Lee is perhaps best known for his 2007 installation Siren, which positions giant rotating arms equipped with electronic tone generators in a space the audience is free to roam, rather than a stage. The resulting sound environment is dynamic, with the listeners’ experience changing depending on where they stand. It’s eerily choral in nature, starkly beautiful, and not to be missed when he restages it at the Walker.Edging ever closer to abstraction is the work of Kanta Horio (Feb. 18, Barker Center For Dance), which makes use of all manner of gadgets and found objects from magnets to contact microphones to paper clips. His installations are almost Rube Goldberg-esque in nature, with headphones dangling from strings and whacking into spinning electromagnets. It won’t be for everyone, but if you find this video clip clever and kind of hypnotizing, it might be for you.
STEIMPlenty of other artists pushing the boundaries of what constitutes modern music and performance will be on hand, including representatives from Holland’s STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music), which is celebrating its 40th year of working on electronic instruments like the Blackbox Modular Synth System and the Cracklebox; electronic dance artists Puzzleweasel and Speedy J; Iraqi video artist Waafa Bilal, whose “Domestic Tension” project placed him in a room with a computer-controlled paintball gun that allowed Internet viewers to shoot him with pellets; and local electronic artists like Beatrix*JAR, Tarlton, and Keston & Westdal. A full schedule and links to many of the artists’ websites can be found at sparkfestival.org.
