Eve Maret, Coupler and More Plug In for 12-Hour LiveDream

Seth Graves is closely engaged with the Nashville music scene. At any given time, you might find him organizing a show, directing a music video, making a documentary, spinning records at a party or on radio station WXNA, or making a thoughtful critique of pop music, as he has on a freelance basis for the Scene since 2006. Like other musicians and music-biz folks abiding by the stay-at-home order, he's adapted to staging online events like Saturday’s 12-Hour LiveDream Extended Release. During the streaming fest, from noon to midnight, 15 experimental electronic musicians, who either are Nashvillians or have strong local ties, took turns sharing fully or partly improvised pieces they’ve been working on during quarantine.

The concept, for the viewer: Come and go as you wish, but take some time to fully immerse yourself in the tones and textures. The experience can feel something not unlike lucid dreaming. (Especially if you've been having trouble sleeping.) I left the stream running all day, checking in periodically — occasionally toggling between YouTube, Facebook (see clips here and here) and Twitch for the best connection — and taking a closer listen if I especially liked what I was hearing. Sets that caught my ear included the gorgeously warped downtempo soundscapes of patchbay pro Kim Rueger, alias Belly Full of Stars; Michael Hix, who crafted micro-symphonies from an assortment of keyboards laid out across his living room floor, flanked by houseplants and beams of light from outside; and Eve Maret, whose fluid modular-synth trilling had me losing track of time as if I were back in the Tonalism Tent at Bonnaroo.

Ryan Norris’ late-night Coupler set had an organic, off-the-cuff feel to it, with friend and collaborator Michael Albert sitting in on live piano, a programmed bossa nova beat (sped up and slowed down at Norris’s whims) keeping the pulse, and a nocturnal eeriness hovering over it all. In places, its collage-like nature felt like stumbling upon a lost recording of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs’ ahead-of-their-time ’90s project Gastr Del Sol. Last year, Coupler took its live score of the Japanese silent gangster movie Dragnet Girl on the road, and from the sound of this set Norris is raring to do his next soundtrack. Knowing Graves, odds are strong that the next installment in the 12-Hour LiveDream series — a solid primer on the small, dedicated and oft-overlooked experimental music community in our backyard — is already in the pipeline, too.