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Asymmetry Music Magazine - Events

Noise at the Worksound

worksound image 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 while that particular art may not be there any more, chances are what is there whenever you go will be good, too. I have my suspicions that these people know what’s good! More...


LIVE AT VALENTINE’S

valentines 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 beside one of the two chairs. If looks are any guide, this looks to be an interesting concert. Of course, we have heard Matt Marble and J.P. Jenkins before, though never together. That’s a new twist of Portland New Music Society founder Brandon Conway for the 2007-2008 season. More...

SPECTRUM XXI – October, 2007: Bruxelles, Paris, Genève

kids 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 and featuring Tim Hodgkinson and Robert Reigle, among others, along with the Hyperion Ensemble, Spectrum XXI is a wild, and wildly various, survey of new music for electronics and ensemble, electronics and soloists, and just plain soloists (if you can think of people like Andrei Kivu and Monica Timofticiuc as “plain”!).

At the end of the report on last year’s festival, you can see a portion from the press release for this year’s festival.

The first annual Spectrum XXI festival took place in Paris from the 15th to the 23rd of November 2006. The title word, by the way, is a pun—referring not only to the broad spectrum of new music presented at this festival, but to the spectral music favored particularly by Romanian and French composers. Last year’s festival began, in true French fashion, with a conference on spectral music, to which I was invited, more because I’d met Iancu at Bourges the preceding spring and he’d liked me than for any musicological reasons, I suspect. Not that I haven’t picked up an idea or two in a half century of listening to music (most of which has been spent listening to twentieth century music). And I must say that the real musicologists there, and the real musicians, were all very gracious and welcoming. More...

No Fun Fest '07

No Fun Fest 07 (Inside)

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 all of it, please feel free to write us with your impressions, and together we can make a review that does the festival some justice.

In the meantime, evening two, my first, opened with Charlie Draheim, whose set cast a long shadow over the succeeding acts. I attended this with some friends for whom this was their first experience of noise artists, and his rich, dark sound was very pleasing to them. More...


New Music@Valentine's

Valentines 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 in a bar no bigger than your living room, only ten or fifteen feet away from the composers and performers. And though the atmosphere is laidback, I almost always find I listen more intently at gatherings like this than I do in a big concert hall.

April’s offering of the Portland New Music Society took place on Tuesday the 24th at Valentine’s in downtown Portland—a new venue for the peripatetic society, but perfect for its characteristic blend of casual and edgy. More...


Seamus 2006
The annual SEAMUS conference, like all annual affairs, gives you a taste of some of what’s been going on in the past year or so and of some of the people who’ve been doing it. But an added bonus to events such as SEAMUS puts on, which move around the country, is learning where the activities are taking place. Everybody knows about Paris and Stockholm and Köln and New York and so forth. Things are always happening in big towns like that, including music. But size, as has been pointed out before, doesn’t always matter. Last year’s SEAMUS conference, for instance, took place in Eugene, Oregon, on the scenic campus of the University of Oregon. Eugene is a pretty, anyhow town and not a hotbed of new music activity. Perhaps the same could be said of the current conference’s location, Iowa University. But there it is. You find out that people are there, working, playing, making new music. And you’re a better person for it.
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Futura 06 —oui au weekend des 35 heures

Futura 06 South of Lyon, in the Rhônes Alpes region, the pretty little medieval town of Crest sits picturesquely on a hill overlooking the Drôme. (Those of you who own cameras will know that I mean that adverb literally.) For tourists, Crest is the home of the tallest castle tower in France and of the longest wooden bridge. For music lovers, however, much as they like castles and bridges, Crest is better known as the home of the Futura Festival. Since 1993, composer Denis Dufour has presented some of the finest music by some of the finest composers in the world. (Those of you who own cd players can find out for yourselves that there’s not a trace of hyperbole in that last remark.)
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