The mad scientists at CalArts premiere their KarmetiK Machine Orchestra at REDCAT tonight. Basically, imagine looking inside a machine that made music, and finding that there were actually instruments in it. Or something. All we really know is that the musicians communicate with the robot by gestures.
From REDCAT:
SCREAM Festival
Co-presented with the Southern California Resource for [...]
I Nyoman Wenten can be anybody! Born in a small Balinese village, Wenten studied traditional Indonesian culture with his master-puppeteer grandfather. He now holds an MFA from Cal Arts, a doctorate from UCLA and is chair of the World Music Program at Cal Arts. He and his ensemble Gamelan Burat Wangi will perform the Indian epic Ramayana tonight and tomorrow at REDCAT. This interview by Drew Denny.
On the night of the show, Perhacs greeted Redcat smiling. “In the spirit of the ‘70s, we’re going to have a very special night,” she said, smoothing her purple dress. For the first performance ever of her music, her 1970 album Parallelograms was presented in its entirety by Dublab-selected guest bands.
Linda Perhacs sees colors. The psychedelic nature of reality follows her around and tugs at her pant leg for attention. On Parallelograms, her psychedelic gem from 1970, she captured the waveforms of color through sound, and now she’s been called back to REDCAT with Dublab and some of the most wonderful weirdos making music today—for her first live performance ever. This interview by Daiana Feuer.
Jennifer the Leopard—a.k.a J-Lep—is not a band, though they are not not a band either. J-Lep is four women who combine sound-making with visual practice and performance with participation. J-Lep performs a band in order to create what they’ve always wanted to see: a process that involves as many props as instruments and as many hours of girl talk as rehearsal. This interview by Drew Denny.
I’d faithfully missed most of the other hallucino-treats on hand the previous week, from the Acid Mothers Temple/Kinksi overandunder at the Echo on Friday to a Westside underground trance bash with FatFinger, Mark Zambala that failed to go off due to venue problems. Yes, in my decadent search for cheap out-of-head thrills post-rock revisionism that lead me to concert-hall mutations of the Bach family and writhing before cracked speakers in dust-storms, I’ve come to be overawed by traditional Balinese court music.
