Sound Symposium XXI: Day One
Brandon Auger at Fred’s Records. Photo by Terry Day.
In anticipation of eight days of programming that are lying in wait for spectators, performers, and any synthesis of the two, Sound Symposium XXI began in true form with a diverse day-one catalog of sound art.
The first Harbour Symphony of the symposium beckoned its beginning to those both near and far, and after a bright, hot afternoon of relative relaxation, the lively trio SoHo performed the first of numerous popup performances in the middle of downtown St. John’s.
Soon after, Halifax-based noise artist Brandon Auger treated the crate diggers at Fred’s Records to a half-hour of hardware-based electro-acoustic intrigue. Tape recorded sounds and ambience from radio transmissions interacted vibrationally with additional objects situated at Auger’s station, creating new, improvised sounds.
Gabriela Sanchez Diaz at the LSPU Hall. Photo by Greg Locke
At the LSPU Hall, Gabriela Sanchez Diaz performed her graphic scored piece There is No Separation, with the help of local artists Michelle LaCour, Matthew Roome, and Bert Power. Conveying themes of past, present, and future, the piece began with gentle ribbons of accordion and saxophone before devolving into atonality and frenetic percussive expressions, eventually returning to cohesiveness once again. Each artist walked gingerly around the stage, manipulating a variety of noise-making objects strewn across the floor, and triggering a number of color changing lights that added some dynamic eye candy to the presentation.
Quebec based artist Kasey Pocious took the stage soon after to perform On the Edge, an audio visual, surround sound performance manipulated by a T-Stick, a cylindrical mechanism first developed at McGill University. As Pocious manipulated the T-Stick through various twisting motions in physical space, visuals projected on the LSPU Hall’s massive screen would react accordingly through a set of modulations and distortions. Scenes of Montreal, Newfoundland, and Eastern Canada were layered through geometric designs and swirls while 8-channels of audio filled all corners of the room with shifting, crackling abstractions.
Toronto turntablist SlowPitchSound closed out the night with an innovative set effect-based vinyl loop trickery. Armed only with a turntable, mixer, and Korg Kaoss Pad, Chel Patterson pieced compositions together on the fly that would slowly reveal themselves as new loops and effects were layered on top of each other. Patterson began his set with some endearing crowd work and simple scratch play before evolving into full-on rhythmic, ambient trip-hop flavored beats as the set progressed.
For the final show of the night, the music-seeking throng found itself upstairs at Bannerman Brewing Co. under the gentle glow of its array of incandescent bulbs. Co-presented with Lawnya Vawnya, Montreal performer miniheartsbeating… opened the night symbiotically fusing analog and digital sounds, effectively recontextualizing each other in its presentation. Recordings of a crowd of people and frolicking children were warped and twisted which gave way to cascading piano virtuosity. The digital and analog would interact and trade places for the duration of the performance, sometimes in a subtle way, sometimes deliberate and imposing.
With just two members, ROSSY/DAIGLE managed to create an active, cinematic soundscape that ebbed and flowed through emotive expressions of voice, drum, and synthesizer. Never one to play a straight beat, Martin Daigle’s drums provided the technical but meaty backbone to Sarah Rossy’s absolutely soaring, sometimes idiosyncratic vocal delivery that seemed to merge with synthesized sounds before you even knew what was happening.
There’s so much more to come. See you there!
Photo by Terry Day
Photo by Terry Day
Photo by Terry Day
Photo by Greg Locke
Photo by Greg Locke
Photo by Greg Locke
