Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Cream Calendar SoundCrawl:Nashville Sound Art Festival Oct. 3
Posted by Steve Haruch on Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 8:57 AM
Hey, dude, a sound art festival is coming to Nashville!
Awesome! But, I mean, what's sound art?
It's art you can hear.
I thought that was called "music."
Ha ha.
No, really. I don't get it.
Sound art is a diverse group of art practices that considers wide notions of sound, listening and hearing as its predominant focus.
Wait, what?
Like many genres of contemporary art, sound art is interdisciplinary in nature, or takes on hybrid forms.
Um, OK. Like musique concrète?
Fuck yeah! Sound art often engages with the subjects of acoustics, psychoacoustics, electronics, noise music, audio media and technology (both analog and digital), found or environmental sound, explorations of the human body, sculpture, film or video and an ever-expanding set of subjects that are part of the current discourse of contemporary art.
You're just reading from Wikipedia, aren't you?
SoundCrawl:Nashville arrives Saturday, Oct. 3 (in conjunction with ArtCrawl) and will include Twist, Sera Davis Art Advisory, MIR Gallery, Bel Arts Studio and Downtown Presbyterian Church, which will be hosting 40 or so sound works from composers/artists the world over. Full press release after the jump.
NASHVILLE, TN - Nashville will join an elite list of cities in the world when it welcomes the inaugural SoundCrawl:Nashville to music city on Saturday, October 03.SoundCrawl represents a new type of cultural festival that showcases sound art, the avant-garde art form that combines synthesis (artificial sounds) with "music concrète" (manipulating recorded audio).
The juried festival will feature approximately 40 works submitted by composers all over the world, most pieces being three minutes or less.
"The easiest way to think of sound art is to think of it as art you hear," said Aaron Doenges of Nashville, one of the event organizers and a composer. "It's an oversimplification, but it's one of the best ways to describe it. Easy to understand examples would include a rhythmic beat of water drops, or a mesmerizing sound that turns out to be the sound of coin moving through space."
More than five galleries will host installations, including Twist, Sera Davis Art Advisory, MIR Gallery, Bel Arts Studio and Downtown Presbyterian Church.
SoundCrawl:Nashville will take place in conjunction with ArtCrawl from six to nine p.m. and is free and open to the public. Maps identifying the locations of the installations as well as providing information on each work will be available at the galleries and headquarters during the event. Audio compilations will also be available for purchase, and an online merch table is up at cafepress.com/soundcrawlnashville.
"Worldwide, sound art is really catching on," explained Kyle J. Baker, who is also a Nashville composer and SoundCrawl event organizer. Doenges and Baker conceived of a sound art festival while in graduate school at Belmont University.
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The amazing "word jazz" artist Ken Nordine recorded a piece called "Sound Museum" that anticipated this sort of thing around 50 years ago. I think I'll play it on WRVU next time I substitute for somebody.
Thanks for commenting!
I'm not so sure about the shrooms thing, casio. Most of the works are pretty abstract, to be sure, but not quite in a drug-induced way...
Pete, we certainly don't think we invented the genre, we're just presenting it to nashville in a new format. I think artists will increasingly use technology as our society develops, and this is just as far as we've gotten. We received some entries from folks doing integrated video & audio pieces that we could logistically support this year, but that's a whole new frontier. One of our presenting artists, S. Pena Young has a commission to write a work for video-audio and Choir. I think that's totally where this is all headed.
Hope to see you guys on saturday
So is it Sat the 1st or Mon the 3rd??? Also... Hey Pete... I LOVE love love Ken Nordine. Big big fan here and I know that piece well :)
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