Transmissions 04 Review

[JANEK SCHAEFER <janek@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Found this review in the Chicago Tribune earlier, seems to be heavily edited
but worth a read I felt.
>
>
Music review, 'Transmissions Festival' of experimental electronic sound and
art      Tribune 15th September 2001    By Bill Meyer

Almost 25 years have passed since David Bowie crooned the words "Don't you
wonder sometimes, 'bout sound and vision?" on the album "Low," a record on
which he flirted with electronic experimentation. Bowie's days on the
cutting edge are long gone, but the fourth annual Transmissions Festival of
experimental electronic sound and art revealed the ongoing relevance of his
question.

When it began three years ago, Transmissions was a weekend-long affair
staged at a fraternity bar in Chapel Hill, N.C. It showcased improvisational
rock and jazz ensembles from the Southeastern United States, along with a
handful of films and sound installations.

This year's festival took place in Chicago. From Aug. 6 -12, artists from 10
countries presented more than 40 audio and video works at six venues.
Transmissions' organisers cannot be accused of making small plans, but their
ambition proved to be a double-edged sword. Using multiple sites meant that
when one venue, Subterranean, blacked out during last Thursday's storm,
organisers could move the program to another location. But their attempt to
present so-called "Intelligent Dance Music" ? a minimalist variant of techno
music ? proved disastrous at the Rednofive dance club.

The not-so-minimalist techno rhythms that emanated from another floor
spurred one performer, Monolake, to abandon his spacious music and crank out
some generic dance beats, which drowned out Japanese singer Noriko Tujiko.
And what was supposed to be an innovative Internet performance by the
Austrian groups General Magic and Farmers Manual, who were in Berlin, turned
out to be an ordinary, unidirectional Webcast. Inevitably some offerings
were more successful than others, but together they offered a detailed
picture of emerging digital art. Many sought new ways to combine music with
video. On Wednesday at Hothouse, Michael Schumacher sat in the audience and
used a laptop computer to project abstract images and to play a recorded
composition. However, the overwhelming physical force of his music, which
blended acoustic percussion and electronically processed sounds, far
exceeded the power of the visuals. The next night at the Chopin Theater,
Randall Jones used a Tactex graphics template wired to his computer to
trigger digital astronomical images and rubbery synthetic sounds with the
same touch.

Macintosh PowerBooks and Mackie mixers were as ubiquitous at Transmissions
as guitars and drum kits were at Woodstock. The former permitted musicians
to store and manipulate vast arrays of sounds; the latter enabled them to
simultaneously manage multiple channels of sound. Even the two musicians who
played good old-fashioned guitars, Chicagoans Ben Vida and Helen Mirra, used
electronics to augment and alter their acoustic sounds.

And the beauty in percussionist Jason Kahn's music derived from his
masterful balance of acoustic reverberations and computer-generated
resonance.

Many of the computer musicians employed a common language of digital thumps,
blips and clicks. Hecker and Pita, who are both associated with the Austrian
Mego label, took that vocabulary to an extreme by letting loose barrages of
shredded metallic sound. But the festival's closing concert at the Chicago
Cultural Center offered irrefutable evidence of how versatile and
individualised an instrument the computer can be.

Skuli Sverrisson used his PowerBook to construct a solemn, devotional piece
with church-organ tones and jet engine like whines, and Ikue Mori used hers
to make a dynamic, detailed collage of drums and metals.

But the Festival's highlight was made using a record player. Janek Schaefer
played records, many of them custom made, on a reversible turntable with two
tone arms, then looped and processed the resulting signals with a mixer and
a battery of effects. He layered digital chirps, crackling vinyl and
distorted machine sounds into gorgeous, meditative soundscapes.