The second night of the CEAIT Festival was as much a mixed bag as the first. They did an especially good job of showcasing a variety of approaches to creating music, but unfortunately variety doesn’t necessarily lead to interesting. Things started off pretty good with an entertaining performance by Nick Fox-Gieg and Sean Clute. I don’t know exactly how they did it, but they seemed to create their soundscape by the way one of them was shining and moving a light over drawings the other made, while images of the drawing were projected onto the theater’s large screen - at least it was visually interesting. One of the best and most entertaining performances of the night came from Kanta Horio. He had a weird set up - he projected a little set up space of his table onto the screen, through his computer which could manipulate the images displayed and the sound created in time. The music was generated by magnetized amplified contact mikes and little pieces of metal bouncing against them, vibrating in different ways as the current was changed or when Horio moved the pieces of metal by hand. The board was also covered with various sheets of paper, which were crumpled and manipulated by hand to create different sounds. It’s sounds a little stupid, but actually was fun - especially visually - the weird contrast of little things moving, clicking and clacking very loudly. Richard Chartier worked exclusively on laptop, dealt with very minimal sounds that required extreme listening. High pitched sinewave-esque sounds slowly cascading against very low, deep waves - barely audible but so deep the walls actually shook. The hall was a good place to listen to Chartier’s music - as on headphones it would have been unpleasant and if I played it on my stereo at home I wouldn’t have been able to hear it over the sound of cars roaring down the nearby street. The audience was thankfully filled with very quiet, attentive listeners. Richard Lerman created his music by applying the flame from a small butane torch to hanging sheets of metal and piezo elements and extremely amplifying the results. Weirdly, he seemed to be working from a score, although the results didn’t seem to warrant one. The sound created was completely uninteresting and so was the piece. Next was CD playback of a piece by Maggie Payne - also very blah/generic - supposedly computer manipulation of the sound of boiled water. Chris Mann read some kind of text while a computer and maybe his hand movements somehow manipulated the sound coming out of his mouth, cutting it up and change pitch and volume to make only snatches of the text understandable - it was a pretty weird piece, but ultimately not too interesting especially as it dragged on. The night’s momentum was fortunately recovered by Brian Crabtree. He’d built a whole little set-up with fun samples programmed into a lighted box, triggering the samples (and lights) by pressing the switches. The music had the same feel as some of the Childisc artists I’ve heard - the stutter-step beats and sense of humor was a very welcome relief after too much seriousness, too much pretension from some of the earlier artists. I wish his set had been longer, because unfortunately the last two acts headed right back (even further) into that too academic and just plain uninteresting territory that the festival often hovered around. Trevor Wishart used samples of two wine glasses being clinked together to explore the extremes of 16-channel stereo. Great cascades of sound were created by varying the pitch, speed and timing of the original sample, and at first the piece was interesting, like the THX demo before a bigtime movie. However, I now know, as neat as those THX trailers can be - you really don’t want them to drag on for twenty or thirty minutes. The final act, Laetitia Sonami created sheets of static and thrumbs of clicky sound through a wired up glove she wore which was connected to her laptop and some program or other. The sounds were triggered by her movements - and yes the piece was as stupid, pretentious and uninteresting as it sounds. Like the night before, the last act was definitely the lowlight of the festival.
As I walked back to the subway at midnight I passed a new, fancy restaurant whose speakers played onto their outdoor patio. The beauty of a saxophone solo by John Coltrane floated out across the night towards my ears. Ah - I thought - emotion. That’s what I missed in so much of the music I’d been listening to over the last couple of nights. Why is so much of the new electronic music so afraid of emotion? Nothing beats Coltrane.
