If—as Phil Elverum sang during his performance of an unreleased Mount Eerie song at the West End Cultural Centre (WECC) on June 26—recorded music is a “statue of a waterfall,” then concert reviews are poems about a blurry photograph of said statue. Words cannot capture the experience of a sound, let alone reconstruct a memory that is already fading from the mind.
Cluster New Music & Integrated Arts Festival is known for the quality and innovation of its programming in music and interdisciplinary arts, with its annual call for submissions being answered by artists all over the world. Cluster also maintains an unwavering commitment to highlighting the work of Winnipeg artists alongside that of their cutting-edge contemporaries from farther afield. Stylus recently got in touch with several of those involved to find out more about Cluster’s 2014 program, the theme of which is AMPLIFICATION. Continue reading “Cluster New Music & Integrated Arts Festival”
So, you think that you have it tough, loading up your drum kit, your Marshall stacks, and oh-so delicate guitars, and driving them off to some venue? Well, you’ve never heard about sonic cuisine.
“Sonic cuisine one of the things that gave us confidence to do Cluster Festival,” says one of the festival’s co-founders, Luke Nickel. While he and Heidi Ugrin were attending the University of Manitoba for their music degrees, they were also members of XIE, the eXperimental Improv Ensemble, and wanted to organize a fundraiser for Amnesty International. “We cooked a meal for something like 60 people. And we cooked it for them, in front of them, live on microphones, while making music,” says Nickel. “Which is kinda crazy. Three of us cooked a meal for 65 and had a convincing performance of music at the same time.”
“Yeah, just think of all the onions you need to cut for 60 people,” says Ugrin. “We made a three or four course meal.”
“And the fact that the place we were in didn’t have a kitchen. We had to bring the entire kitchen,” says Nickel.
Needless to say, after that performance, and working together in XIE for some time, Ugrin and Nickel felt pretty prepared to organize anything they wanted to.
Cluster Festival’s second year will host a trio of events at the tail end of this week, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The bar is set pretty high—last year’s festival included performances in Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall and 290 McDermot, including challenging (yet rewarding) contemporary dance, projections, art installations, and musical performances. Within the experimental scene in Winnipeg (of which there’s quite a sizable one—what with the WSO’s New Music Festival, send + receive, and Groundswell), they recognized the need for more integrated arts, rather than multiple-disciplinary.
The difference between integrated arts and multiple-disciplinary arts is a semantic one, as Nickel notes, but still an important one. “You’re actually forming relations and collaborations within [the different art forms], and ‘multi-disciplinary’ doesn’t address that.”
Ugrin says that it means the artists are “not trying to slap on multiple disciplines for the sake of it, but only if works organically ask for different degrees of arts. It’s not just music and visual arts,” and she slaps her hands in different places to emphasize her point.
“Freyja Olfason, who is an intermedia artist,” Ugrin continues, “she is presenting her large, wonderful work Avatar, which incorporates dance, live video projection, webcam, Chat Roulette, music—that is basically our posterchild for integrated arts right there. That’s in the middle of our festival on Friday night.”
This Thursday, taking place at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church in Osborne Village, organist Alexandra Fol will be playing a number of pieces, half of which were written for the festival. And for the second half of the evening, Trio ’86 will be playing a set original works by Cluster’s creators. “We’re going to be projecting images all over the pipe organ, essentially the front wall, as our way to transform the space.” Giorgio Magnanensi will also be doing electronic improvisations to start off both halves of the night.
And on this Saturday, the Cluster organizers are promising one hell of a warehouse party, with BLITZ. It’s going to be three open floors of beatnik poetry, DJs, Wallballs, and way more.
So the three nights of Cluster Festival should be interesting, to say the least. And what the festival creators have to share are nothing but thanks, and encouragement.
“I’m 22, and we’ve done this thing,” says Nickel. “People should think to themselves, ‘What does Winnipeg need?’ And then do it. Whoever feels that something is lacking, should go and create that venue for themselves.”
