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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Composers Adam Reese and Matt Marble offered up two recent projects for our delectation Sunday evening, the 9th 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 […]

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 […]

Stéphane Rives, saxophone virtuoso, and Wade Matthews, laptop virtuoso, came to Portland on the 14th 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Portland New Music Society held its first concert of 2008 at the Towne Lounge on January 22nd. Society founder Brandon Conway always puts together a great show, and this one, which also featured him as one of the performers, was no exception. In spite of freezing temperatures, there was a pretty good crowd there, […]