Sounds of Other Minds.

Last weekend I drove to San Francisco for a music festival. The Other Minds Festival is an annual event that I used to attend when we lived in SF, but I haven't been able to go for many years. This year was Other Minds 18, Looking back at the history printed in the program, I realized that the last festival I attended was Other Minds 5 in 1999!

OM is a celebration of cutting-edge music from around the world. This year's offering were as varied and eclectic as ever. The two-hour concerts took place Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at the new(ish) Jewish community center at California and Presidio.

I was surprised and pleased that what was once a shoestring operation has grown to a somewhat grander affair with nicely printed programs and a much larger venue. Charles Amarkanian who has run OM from the beginning, hosted the concerts, which were co-sponsored by the Djerassi Foundation. OM also has a record label and a web site that includes a radio stream that includes recordings from earlier festivals, as well as of Amarkanian's 25 years of radio shows for KPFA. Check it out: http://www.otherminds.org/

The concerts featured a wealth of new music. The following were my favorites.

The Danish trio ‘Gáman’ opened the first concert. The trio plays violin, accordion and recorder, but their music, inspired by the folk music of the Faroe Islands, was quite different than you might expect. The tunes were short and simple, haunting and mournful. The accordion was using mostly as a continuo, stretching notes out as a bed for the other instruments to play over, while the violin was often used pizzicato as a percussion instrument.

Friday night began with the world premiere of the music theater performance piece, ‘ARA’ by Korean-American artist Dohee Lee.  Lee designs her own costumes and instruments, and sings and dances while she plays.  The Eye Harp (seen in the above photo) is an instrument she designed that is played by bowing and plucking strings. It is connected to electronics as well. Her performance was odd and mesmerizing.

Next, Anna Petrini, a Swedish recorder virtuoso performed three pieces for an instrument called the Paetzold contrabass recorder. The square contrabass recorder is a modern design
that augments the traditional sound of the recorder with electronic processing. For the first piece, all the openings on the instrument were taped shut, so all that could be heard was the performer's breath and the clacking of the valves. These sounds were amplified and looped to produce a very untraditional sound.

The second concert concluded with a stunning solo piano performance by Craig Taiborn.  Billed as a jazz pianist (he has played with many well known jazz groups), his sound in this performance was not traditional jazz in any sense. He started with a few simple, widely spaced notes, then gradually developed the piece into a fierce, mutli-layered, complex explosion of sound. His playing was both incredibly rapid and extremely precise, so that even when the piece was at its most complex, it never became muddy. A very exciting musician.

The close of the last concert was Pamela Z's arrangement of Meridith Monk's Scared Song. Ms. Z, uses proximity-triggered devices and looped voice to perform Monk's complex vocalizations. I saw Monk perform at an earlier OM festival, so this was a fitting close to this musical adventure.

A comment I overheard from one of the other attendees sums up my fondness for OM: "I never know what I'm going to hear, but I know it's always going to be interesting."

I'm looking forward to next year.

P.