The year marches mercilessly on and it’s already time for my favourite festival in Winnipeg, send + receive, an exploration of experimental music, sound, and media. This year’s acts and installations revolve around the ideas of Noise & Disruption–and since Noise is any undesirable sound, I know it’s difficult to fathom not only one night of reveling in it, but half a week’s worth. Regardless, the noise music scene here (albeit small) is thriving and revolves around s + r, and this year is a good showcase of a few of them.
First of all, there is the Sonic Emissions series, running from 1-2 p.m. every day of the festival, and send + receive radio on Sundays from 2 – 4 p.m. on CKUW 95.9 FM. Tune in for a taste of some of the performers, interviews, and more. And in case you start worrying about the hiss or dead air, there’s no need to adjust your radio. I once tuned into s + r’s show only to hear falling rain.
There are the exhibitions which are running for longer than the duration of the festival. Montreal’s Steve Bates, who had a hand in starting the festival, has created the piece Dead Air which is pictured above, a criticism of human’s larger notion of time, which is currently at ace art inc. Then at Video Pool there is Free Space Loss, a project by Erika Lincoln, which looks like a number of sensory deprivation devices, but sounds even eerier–“As the viewers wear the Head Mounted Displays, they become linked to a network where their physiological outputs are tracked and measured, in turn altering panoramic images… depictions that can be easily constructed and manipulated.” And over at the Platform Gallery, Swiss installation and sound artist Zimoun has rigged up 150 Prepared DC-Motors, Filler Wire 1.0mm, which is a stripped down minimal piece to evoke connections between creativity and organization.
The in-person events which are happening are mostly artist talks, but there is a book reading as hosted by Spain’s Mattin, who is one of this year’s performers. As a performer, he openly seeks to criticize the “social and economic structures of experimental music production,” so no doubt that the reading of Noise & Capitalism is going to be a very inward criticism. That’s happening at the Mondragon tonight, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. As for the artist talks, Paris’ Julie Rousse, who uses and actively collects field recordings, will be talking at MAWA tomorrow at noon, and Christof Migone, Toronto multidisciplinary artist who will be performing on Albert Street at 5 p.m. with the help of some volunteers and contact microphones, will be talking at the Plug In ICA at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
Then, of course, there are the performances. Sometimes draining, sometimes exhilarating. Tomorrow night, at the Atomic Centre (167 Logan Ave) the aforementioned Mattin and Julie Rousse will play, supported by Winnipeg’s White Dog, co-founder of Prairie Fire Tapes and founder of Dub Ditch Picnic. Then on Saturday night, also at the Atomic Centre, the rarely public Winnipeg band Double Hook will be opening up for Vancouver’s Josh Rose, who likes to affect tension and the body with sound, and Ohio’s Aaron Dilloway, former guitarist and tape manipulator of Wolf Eyes, but a prolific musician in his own right, using vocals and tape manipulation as his main method of scrambling eardrums.
Stylus Magazine