Memphis Concrète closes!

[ateolf]

It's over and it's happened! (That's redundant but I'm not running on much sleep right now so I'll let it fly). The last day of Memphis Concrète this year happened and it's looking like it was a big success overall. All the performances were once again incredible. A bittersweet thing was saying goodbye to Berkay Tok (Sarah got a job in Virginia so they're moving there this week!). W1ND0W brought actors onstage to perform Oedipus Rex (for Father's Day) through vocal effects and that was fun! Every performance was just incredible. Then there was the electroacoustic performance!!! I'll start off with saying that was the only part that had technical difficulties getting started. Well also, I kinda jumped ahead and skipped the beginning. I'll back up. Weird post, sorry. On my way to Crosstown I picked up Fino's again. This time I was better about telling everyone "hey, there's Fino's so go eat some!" and most of it was eaten (without even my help), they were nice and threw in chip bags for free and those got chomped up too! So I was there to help set up with the electroacoustic sound check. My laptop was running the sound out through my audio interface (while also being used for the video projections!). Daniel even got the quadraphonic sound set up for "Philomel" and I knew that was going to be incredible hearing it during the soundcheck for the first time! (Also, thanks again to the audio interface Josh gave me that we were able to do it.) Okay, so soundcheck was great (if a little harried at times, Max/MSP wasn't working right at first (used it on one piece) but then it did). Well, so took a little while to figure it out but here's what I realized had happened. Disaster Trees had video to give me on an sd card so it had the same adapter that I use for them where the card sticks out on the side in an awkward, misshapen way. Given I was projecting video for someone else's set at the time, I couldn't use the usb port on the side with the hdmi so the only other one was the one being used by the audio interface. So I unplugged it to copy the video over (that was my mistake, I should have just waited until between sets and unplugged the hdmi). Okay, so I don't know if it's because the interface is older but I've found that if it gets unplugged or turned off then my computer just can't recognize it again until I reboot the computer. So that's what happened. Didn't recognize that as the problem at first because in Reaper it was picking up the microphone and outputting the sound (I think there's a thing where the program bypass the computer's main sound channel), but then other sound wasn't working. Caleb, the saxophonist, had the Max/MSP setup on his laptop so he was getting ready to get that as a backup as I thought that's what the problem was. But then we went to start and the first .wav file for "Echoes" just didn't play, I knew I'd need to restart my laptop so I did that. Patrick, the clarinetist, is good at killing dead time with dumb jokes and easing the tension so that was very nice. Maybe we started about fifteen or twenty minutes late (we ended about fifteen minutes over, not too bad!). I was reassured that the delay wasn't bad, but still, especially when I didn't know why things were just suddenly not working when they'd worked a few hours earlier, I was starting to freak out just a bit!! But then once things got back on track it was so amazing and magical. All of the musicians were incredible. It was just a really phenomenal set of music. And then, yeah, ending with "Philomel". I've had the album version for years and have loved the piece, but it was like hearing it completely anew. For one, the quadraphonic experience is just mind-blowing. I mean, you'll know about it and be like well that's cool or whatever, but you almost never get to actually hear quadraphonic sound since everything is in stereo so all these pieces are reduced from four channel to two and that's how you experience them. And even when you think about the possibility of hearing them from the four corners, it's just not the same. Plus it was heightened by hearing someone sing it in person and how the human voice interacts and both blends and stands apart from the prerecorded vocal and electronic sounds. And Rebekah, the soprano, was so so good! Not only was her singing great, but she had a theatrical delivery that fit the piece so well. And she gave a synopsis of the background of the story and the myth and that enhanced it too. I mean, I've known it was based on a myth but never really thought too much about it so I listened to it and pieced together the story and how it's told through the vocal and the vocal delivery and the prerecorded vocals and how the sounds move around the room. It was deeply moving, the whole experience. The festival could not have ended on a higher note. I'm still in awe of the whole thing. Anyway, I'll just keep ranting about it. Load out was fine. Everyone was so nice and kind. I ran into and talked to Kim and Chris for a little bit. Got home after the tiredness hit me and then could not sleep at all for a while. And then woke up early and couldn't get back to sleep. Most of the week I was doing pretty good as far as sleep went, but at the end I guess my brain just blew up with it all. I'll shut up now because I still haven't even processed everything so it's just all spontaneous logorrhea!