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REV Festival, Brisbane April 2002
Introduction
The REV (Real, Electronic, Virtual) festival was held on April 5-7 2002 at the Brisbane Powerhouse arts centre. The theme of the festival was experimental musical instruments, and it was possibly the first such festival exclusively with this theme anywhere. The main organisers were Linsey Pollak (performer and instrument maker, based in Queensland), Andy Arthurs (head of Music at QUT, Queensland University of Technology) and Zane Trow (Artistic Director of the Powerhouse).
The festival was a very full-on three days of talks, concerts, installations, workshops and events. It was also the culmination of the postgraduate course in instrument building held at QUT over the past year or so. Usual disclaimer: What follows is a personal view of a complex event.
The Brisbane Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts (to give it its full name) is an old power station on the banks of the Brisbane River which has recently been converted into an arts and performance centre, with two properly equipped theatres and various other spaces. It is quite open and welcoming, which made it easy for members of the general public to come in and engage with the installations, and it is also well situated, near a popular park and the Brisbane River. I was told that well over 5,000 people visited the Powerhouse during the three days of the festival. I was also told that it cost something over $150,000 to put on, with grants and support coming from quite a few sources.
The festival was able to bring several overseas visitors to Brisbane, and these people made a big contribution. A big contribution was also made by current and former students of what is now QUT's Faculty of Creative Industries (music, dance, visual arts, film, journalism and the like). Apart from those performing or creating installations, an awful lot of the numerous volunteers appeared to be connected with QUT.
At first sight the festival appeared to be mostly about acoustic instruments,
but in fact there was quite a lot of electronic work, and I will focus
on the electronic aspect of the festival.
Presentations
Bart Hopkin (USA) is a leading expert on experimental acoustic musical instruments. He gave two presentations, one a wide-ranging and very informative survey of work in this area, and a second session on his own instruments. (Unfortunately he could only bring some of the smaller ones with him.)
David Toop (UK) is a writer, composer and sound designer whose interests range from rap and hip-hop to ambient music to people like Terry Riley. He talked about some of the things he had done and some of his early influences. Of these, the sound effects made by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the Goon Show seemed to be the most important.
David also engaged in a duologue with Robin Rimbaud, aka "scanner" (UK), a sound artist and performer who apparently got his performing name from his use of scanned mobile telephone calls in his earlier work. The two of them discussed changing performance practices in the context of various events they had been involved in; there has been a general opening up and mixture of genres. Incidentally it became clear that both these people have very busy international careers and travel a great deal.
Phil Dadson (NZ) described his work with his group "From Scratch", a small group of focused performers which uses entirely home-made instruments. Before founding "From Scratch", Phil worked with Cornelius Cardew in the UK, and set up a New Zealand branch of Cardew's "Scratch Orchestra". For a while a lot of his work as built around what is now called the thongaphone, an open length of PVC tubing struck at one end with a piece of footwear. The result is a short but resonant note; a suitably tuned group of pipes makes a good bass instrument.
Peter Biffin (NSW) presented his unusual stringed instruments, which have conical soundboards rather than the usual flat plate. It appears that the only other similar instrument is the dobro, which uses a metal cone, but the soundboards in Peter's instruments are made of thin wood, and he arrived at the form starting with consideration of the Chinese erhu. Several people commented that the instruments sounded "amplified", and someone (I think Craig Fisher) told me why: the sound is very directional and very direct, and the cones have quite pronounced resonances. So these acoustic instruments have some of the problems normally associated with electronic reproduction.
There was a "brainstorming" session on new instrument design with Bart Hopkin, Phil Dadson and Craig Fischer (SA). This was notably mostly for Stuart Favila's impassioned comments on Government funding and related matters. He said that the Tasmanian Symphony receives almost all of its funding from Government subsidy, so "Why are they playing Mozart? Why don't they play whatever they want?".
Among the experimental acoustic instrument makers there is clearly a great deal of knowledge about things like how to couple strings to a soundboard, materials to use for resonators (styrofoam was recommended), and the like.
At the festival I heard almost no discussion of just intonation and so on; though people obviously knew about tuning, it somehow wasn't an issue.
The presenters had a somewhat difficult task in that members of the
general public were present, so an audience would include everybody
from real experts to people who had never encountered this sort of thing
before.
Performances
There were several ticketed concerts, which took place in the two theatres in the complex, and quite a large number of less formal events, some of which took place outside. I didn't get to everything, and in particular I had to miss Jon Rose's extravaganza "Hyperstring".
Quite a few of the performances used electronic technology. The most interesting piece of technology for me was the set-up used by one of the dancers in the group "Unaccompanied Baggage". This consisted of two bracelets containing accelerometers and a small radio transmitter. It appeared to work very smoothly, though I'm told the radio link occasionally has brief dropouts. It was mostly designed and built by Aaron Veryard, an electronics technician who is now a QUT student in dance.
There were two other wired-up dancers. One, whose name I didn't catch (she was a replacement for the person named in the program) wore a "Miburi" jump suit by Yamaha. This has flex sensors at wrist, elbow, and shoulder (at least) and sensors which fit into the wearer's shoes. However, the dancer has to trail a cable. (Yamaha no longer make this suit.) This suit was used in an audio-visual piece by Lindsay Vickery (WA), where the dancer was influencing both the sound and the images.
The third "wired" dancer was the belly-dancer Amber Hansen (a former QUT student). She was wearing lots of jingly things and had (I think) two small microphones on her waist and two more in her bra. These led to a sort of fishtail of cables. The set-up allowed Amber to control her music effectively.
An engaging performance was "ewevee", by Jessica Ainsworth (Qld) and Linsey Pollak (Qld). There was an installation consisting of twelve tall poles erected on a concrete platform by the river (part of the old powerhouse construction). The performers wore jump suits with horizontal black and white stripes, and the whole was illuminated by UV light (this took place after dark). The performers jumped about like frogs and struck the poles, which turned out to trigger samples, and indeed the first group of samples were all frog sounds.
Stuart Favila (Vic) performed his light harp together with Joanne Cannon (Vic) on "serpentine bassoon". The light harp is in fact a big MIDI controller in a very attractive form. It has no strings; instead the player's fingers cast shadows on light-dependent resistors. The serpentine bassoon is (more or less) an acoustic instrument, a sexily twisted leather tube equivalent in length to a normal bassoon, and with a bassoon mouthpiece. However, as well as finger holes, the player has a touch pad and some knobs, with which effects units can be controlled and the acoustic sound modified.
The circular harp (David Murphy, Vic) turned out to be an acoustic instrument, in general appearance like a very large kettledrum, with a lot of strings (66) strung in a complicated pattern across the top. During performance, which seems to require three people, a video camera was pointed down at the instrument from above, and the sound was fed into small speakers underneath containers of water or mercury, which also had cameras trained on them. The resulting images were superimposed to make interesting visual effects.
The most spectacular acoustic performance was that of Hubbub Music (Qld) on their "pyrophone" (fire organ). This was an array of large metal pipes. The performers stood below the pipes with gas-fed blowtorches, and when these were thrust into the lower ends of the pipes, the result was an incredible roaring noise, and occasionally great gouts of flame.
Late at night there were electronic events; I caught the three main events on the Saturday night. They were interesting to me because they gave me a sort of bridge to the laptop noise music I encountered at the "Waveform" conference at the University of Western Sydney in July 2001.
The performers at the late night events in Brisbane were working under some difficulties, because the performance space was in the bar area, and a lot of the quite large (and young) crowd were drinking, talking, and even playing snooker. The atmosphere was good, though.
Oren Ambarchi (NSW) was equipped with an electric bass guitar and some effects units. He played very slow single notes on the guitar, and for a while it appeared that that was all. However, he turned out to be using very long delays, and the sounds slowly built up in the effects units. Eventually he stopped playing the guitar altogether and just manipulated the sounds in the effects units.
David Toop gave a somewhat similar performance using effects units arranged in feedback loops; his live sound sources were some flutes and a bowed metal plate. The general effect was of much harsher sounds than those from Oren's performance.
Scanner gave a performance which compared with the other two sounded quite "commercial": a definite up-tempo beat and reasonably harmonic timbres. There were not the feedback loops used by the others. Scanner had a laptop, a mini-disc player and something that looked like a personal organiser but was actually a dedicated music device made by Roland. I talked to scanner later, and it seems that this performance was at one end of the spectrum of what he does, which also involves a lot of sound design and installation work. He arguably read the audience and the space better than the other two performers, but I thought that Oren's was actually the most interesting performance of the three.
The first two performances connected for me with the laptop noise music (even though neither performer used a laptop), in that effects units were used in unpredictable ways, the performances were totally improvised, and as far as I could tell, you get what you get. This is quite opposed to the careful studio sculpting of sound in "traditional" electroacoustic practice. However, at the Powerhouse performances, the original sound sources were instrumental sounds rather than digital grunge, and it was somehow clearer to me what was happening. Scanner's performance was also improvised, but it seemed to me to belong to a different genre.
I have by no means mentioned all the performances. Highlights were the wonderfully comic percussion performances of Graeme Leak, Linsey Pollak and Greg Sheehan on all sorts of "found" instruments, including office equipment (staplers etc.), cooking gear and a collection of children's toys, and the equally funny wind instrument performances by Mark Cain and Lee Buddle. The wind instruments were largely home-made: PVC pipe and rubber gloves (which make good air reservoirs) were the main construction materials.
I also want to mention "Sprocket" (Hubbub Music again), a
bizarre percussion-mobile about the size of a car, mounted on what looked
like two motorcycle frames, covered with home-made instruments and a
substratum of thongaphones, the whole topped off with a Hills Hoist.
There were six players, and it turned out that four of them were attached
by harnesses to the Hills Hoist, so that they ended up by swinging wildly
round the contraption, merry-go-round style.
Installations
These were numerous, and I am only mentioning a sample. My favourite electronic one was the fish installed in the lift in the Powerhouse. This cute object (devised by Tim Opie, Qld) was actually a MIDI controller with about 10 sliders around its body, and was used to control a granular synthesis algorithm running on a computer also in the lift.
Andrew Brown (Qld) had a computerised sonic walk-through of the centre of Melbourne - the mouse controlled the pointer on a street map, and appropriate sound samples would be played.
Rene Wooller (Qld) demonstrated his ZerOne project, which is a program for creating dance music, using an algorithm controllable by sliders in real time. This seemed to attract quite a lot of interest from the general public.
Paul Cohen (Qld) showed MooZk, an "interactive visual-music instrument", based on a graphics tablet, which as well as displaying in a large screen whatever one drew, controlled a layer of sound generated with the help of the Koan generative music program. (Background sounds were also generated independently of what was drawn.) Both this and ZerOne are intended to be developed into commercial projects.
Remarkably, I think all of the people mentioned above are connected with QUT.
Craig Fisher (mentioned earlier) makes both acoustic and electronic instruments. His construction "Table 4/4" was a small pyramid with wires attached to pickups. The wires could be plucked, strummed, etc. On one side the wires were also being driven by small coils, and could exhibit various modes, including chaotic ones.
Many of the acoustic instruments were displayed outside in a sort of sculpture park. There was a park bench that functioned as a marimba, a set of "water chimes" (tubes suspended by elastic above a trough of water, so they could be dipped in and out of the water while being played), and "Medium Foonki", a bellows-powered outdoor organ made of agricultural pipe.
There was also a large array of "Airbells", tuned soft-drink bottles (Hubbub Music yet again). Take a 1.25 litre soft-drink bottle, insert a tyre valve into its lid, and pressurise it with a tyre hose. The result gives quite a nice sound when played with a drumstick, and can be tuned by adjusting the pressure. The ones installed at the Powerhouse were tuned to a pentatonic scale.
Another remarkable display was the collection of exuberant sound sculptures by Steve Weis. These were meant to be banged, scraped, shaken, and so on. Most were acoustic, but there was one which combined an electric string bass with a didgeridoo. Steve describes himself as a "professional madman" with "a feverish enthusiasm for scrap metal imagination". He was auctioning off some of the sound sculptures near the end of the festival. I was tempted, but I'm not sure what I would have done with something that looked like a two-metre high metal alien - getting it onto the plane would have been interesting!
The installations were attended by volunteers who explained what was
going on and helped people play the equipment or instrument. The resulting
sounds could be heard in the main space all day long, the electronic
dance music of ZerOne colliding rather with the harmonic sounds of Sarah
Hopkins' "whirlies" and the samples people had recorded into
Linsey Pollak's sampling percussion instrument made with wooden bars.
The music
The instruments were amazing and the performers wonderful, so what about the music?
I have to say that what I heard wasn't cutting-edge, with the exception of the performances by Oren Ambarchi and David Toop (though I didn't hear everything). Most of the home-made instruments had a humorous character: an extreme example was the "Savart's Wheel" instrument by Bart Hopkin. Unfortunately this was too big for him to bring from the USA, but from his recordings it sounded like a demented singing chicken, and it was very difficult to stop laughing. Bart said that he took it with a folk group to a festival; the group were a success and were invited back the next year - on condition that they not bring Bart's instrument.
This generally humorous quality of the instruments meant that the music tended to have a funky-folk character. It appears that the performances by Phil Dadson's group "From Scratch" have a more serious side, but we only had excerpts on video of these, as the rest of Phil's group could not come over from New Zealand. Peter Biffin played Middle Eastern music on his stringed instruments. Unfortunately I did not ask him what sort of music his customers use them for.
So in general the music was less experimental than the instruments.
Conclusion
The festival was a great success, both in bringing together people interested in the area and in attracting the general public. I certainly haven't seen crowds like this at an event where substantial technical and artistic matters were being discussed. That said, the talks had relatively small attendances, but there did seem to be some seriously interested people who did not belong to the usual in-crowd.
Some of the installations were really good at demonstrating ideas to people off the street; in particular Linsey Pollak seems to have a genius for this sort of thing.
The fun aspect was very enjoyable, though I would have liked some more cutting-edge music.
Was anything else missing? Well, it wasn't a conference, so there were no proceedings or contributed papers, though for me the festival was actually quite like a conference in feel. There was a packed schedule anyway, so a formal conference would have had to occur say in the two days before the actual festival. Also, it would be great to bring out an electronic instrument builder like Perry Cook or Chris Chafe to complement someone like Bart Hopkin.
I gather there is talk of another REV festival in 2004. Bring it on!
© Gordon Monro 2002. Last modified:
April 12th, 2002.
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