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, […]

Portland, Oregon residents who have not been to Czech Republic recently to see and hear installation artist Dan Senn’s Huffa Puffa can see a version of this at the Autzen Gallery of Portland State University through February 7. Entitled Air Lift, Lilt with traffic, the Portland installation uses the same ideas of audio and subaudio […]

Montréal was where electroacoustic pioneer Francis Dhomont spent a good deal of his life before moving back to France, so of course Montréal was going to throw a big celebration for his 80th birthday, putting on a five day festival of music by Elio Martusciello, Ludger Brümmer, Christian Calon, Francis Dhomont, and an evening […]

Worksound is a new space in Portland for art and music. At the show on the 21st of October, which included one of Portland’s new acquisitions from New York (Matt Hannafin), art from gallery co-owner Modou Dieng and others was hanging from their opening show a couple of months ago. It’s an interesting space, and […]

The second annual Spectrum XXI festival will take place this November in Bruxelles, Paris, and Genève. If it’s anything like last year’s festival, and from the line-up it looks as if it will be, this is a festival you will not want to miss. Put on by Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram […]

It’s the 2nd of October, 2007. We get to Valentine’s early, but already a small table set up in front of the bar’s only window is covered with synthesizers and other electronic devices, microphones, and a large metal salad bowl with crumpled-up bits of tin foil in it. Two gourds rest on the floor […]

The 2007 No Fun Fest at the Hook in Brooklyn covered four nights, but my schedule only allowed me two, and jet lag (the great universal excuse) made me bail early on the second evening—meaning I missed Meate and Oblivia, Tom Recchion, Ju Suk Reet, Keijo Haino, and Merzbow. If you were there for […]

Recently, I’ve been hearing laments (still!) for the diminishing audiences at symphony concerts, and one cannot help wondering if the lamenters really think that concert halls are the only places where great music-making goes on. And while one might wish that new music concerts were better attended, there is something quite engaging about sitting […]