Sonic.focus Friday Night Performances@ Brown University...

AGF/Sue C. live performance

sonic.focus 2006 was a 2 day sound art symposium that was held at Brown this past Friday and Saturday. In additions to lectures and roundtable discussions during the day, performances of music/sound/video were held late into the night.

Amazingly Providence had the Kronos Quartet playing downtown Friday night, but seeing the conference was sans-cost I (wisely)chose the cheaper alternative (though I'd still love to see Kronos). On Friday about 50 people watched the performances, which started off with Robert Lippok. Lippok energetic, bopping around as he used his laptop, guitar pedals and various knobs on sound generators to produce noises that, though at time ambient, had a beat. He performed with the lights up so the audience could see that each knob he turned or switch he flicked affected the sound coming out of the speakers.

Following Lippok was a quartet of performers, led by Guitarist/sound artist Christopher Willits and visual/video artist Scott Pagano, who were joined by a drummer and a female vocalist. They played music that ranged from the dissonant sound often associated with noise/sound music to more pleasing (to my ear) music that verged on mainstream sound (think Postal Service). With each changing sound Pagano manipulated between his two video sources (camcorder and mac mini) using a video mixer. Imagery switched between the architectural, organic plant life, and the digitally constructed seamlessly. It was difficult to decipher what the highly manipulated voices of the harmonizing singers was saying, but for some reason I don't believe it was of extreme significance.

The third group, and my favorite of the evening, was AGF/Sue C., who presented a live presentation of their film "Mini-movies". AGF produced the ambient musical backbone of the performance using her voice to recite partial sentences and phrases, creating the loose, non-definitive "narrative" of the "film". Utilizing a light board, drawings on vellum, photographs, a small flashlight and a camera with live video feed, Sue C. produced all of the visuals for the 40-minute presentation, improvisationaly matching AGF's soundtrack. This cross-continental (Sue being a Long Islander and AGF from Berlin) duo met in 2002 at a sound festival in Montreal. A DVD studio version of Mini-Movies (Which is more photographic-based) is available through Asphodel.

All in all the night was a great evening, though being somewhat of an audio-visual overload.