{"id":1600,"date":"2011-03-21T14:34:58","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T20:34:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=1600"},"modified":"2011-03-21T14:34:58","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T20:34:58","slug":"cluster-festival-fries-your-brain-and-lightly-sautes-your-ears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2011\/03\/21\/cluster-festival-fries-your-brain-and-lightly-sautes-your-ears\/","title":{"rendered":"Cluster Festival Fries your Brain and Lightly Saut\u00e9s your Ears"},"content":{"rendered":"

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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? \u00a0Well, you\u2019ve never heard about sonic cuisine.<\/p>\n

\u201cSonic cuisine one of the things that gave us confidence to do Cluster Festival,\u201d says one of the festival\u2019s 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. \u201cWe cooked a meal for something like 60 people. And we cooked it for them, in front of them, live on microphones, while making music,\u201d says Nickel. \u201cWhich is kinda crazy. Three of us cooked a meal for 65 and<\/em> had a convincing performance of music at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, just think of all the onions you need to cut for 60 people,\u201d says Ugrin. \u201cWe made a three or four course meal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd the fact that the place we were in didn\u2019t have a kitchen. We had to bring the entire kitchen,\u201d says Nickel.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Cluster Festival\u2019s second year<\/a> will host a trio of events at the tail end of this week, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.<\/p>\n

The bar is set pretty high\u2014last year\u2019s festival included performances in Eckhardt-Gramatt\u00e9 Hall and 290 McDermot, including challenging (yet rewarding) contemporary dance, projections, art installations, and musical performances.
\n<\/strong>Within the experimental scene in Winnipeg (of which there\u2019s quite a sizable one\u2014what with the WSO\u2019s New Music Festival, send + receive, and Groundswell), they recognized the need for more integrated arts, rather than multiple-disciplinary.<\/p>\n

The difference between integrated arts and multiple-disciplinary arts is a semantic one, as Nickel notes, but still an important one. \u201cYou\u2019re actually forming relations and collaborations within [the different art forms], and \u2018multi-disciplinary\u2019 doesn\u2019t address that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ugrin says that it means the artists are \u201cnot trying to slap on multiple disciplines for the sake of it, but only if works organically ask for different degrees of arts. It\u2019s not just music and visual arts,\u201d and she slaps her hands in different places to emphasize her point.<\/p>\n

\u201cFreyja Olfason<\/a>, who is an intermedia artist,\u201d Ugrin continues, \u201cshe is presenting her large, wonderful work Avatar<\/span>, which incorporates dance, live video projection, webcam, Chat Roulette<\/a>, music\u2014that is basically our posterchild for integrated arts right there. That\u2019s in the middle of our festival on Friday night.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Thursday, taking place at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church in Osborne Village, organist Alexandra Fol <\/a>will be playing a number of pieces, half of which were written for the festival. And for the second half of the evening, Trio \u201986<\/a> will be playing a set original works by Cluster\u2019s creators.\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re going to be projecting images all over the pipe organ, essentially the front wall, as our way to transform the space.\u201d Giorgio Magnanensi <\/a>will also be doing electronic improvisations to start off both halves of the night.<\/p>\n

And on this Saturday, the Cluster organizers are promising one hell of a warehouse party, with BLITZ. It\u2019s going to be three open floors of beatnik poetry, DJs, Wallballs<\/a>, and way more.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m 22, and we\u2019ve done this thing,\u201d says Nickel. \u201cPeople should think to themselves, \u2018What does Winnipeg need?\u2019 And then do it. Whoever feels that something is lacking, should go and create that venue for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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? \u00a0Well, you\u2019ve never heard about sonic cuisine. \u201cSonic cuisine one of the things that gave us confidence to do Cluster Festival,\u201d says one of the festival\u2019s co-founders, Luke […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[198],"class_list":["post-1600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-cluster-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}