Amon Tobin's "ISAM" at Ogden Theater

Amon Tobin brought his visually and sonically stunning ISAM show to the Odgen on Wednesday, October 20, 2011. The extended ISAM set had a vaguely narrative thread to the sound and visuals, with some great deep space moments, interstellar craft, and deep solar flare sequences. Just as impressive were the cyberspaces that ISAM explored, which harkened back to intense machinic systems processes. All in all, tremendous blurring of the organic and the machinic, macrocosm and microcosm, and the core elements of fire and water, air and earth, which all came together in alchemical harmonies and dissonances, lightning storms, cybernetic systems spontaneously achieving higher states of (temporary) order before collapsing, and so much more!



The first encore went into some much faster tempo, harder edge material, and sustained this vibe with a whole new set of visual projections, while the final encore brought things down in tempo some with an excellent sequence of tumbling and rebuilding blocks that took full advantage of the amazing 3D visual mapping used for the projections. Great to see that he's selling this show out all around the country.

Gary Numan's "Pleasure Principle" Anniversary Tour at the Gothic Theatre

Gary Numan played Denver's Gothic Theater on October 28, 2010. Hearing Pleasure Principle album from start to finish was a great cyberpunk flashback, and the whole show reminded me of the role that artists like Gary Numan, John Foxx, The Normal, and Fad Gadget played in a wider cultural shift from outer space to the synthetic, replicating, interiorized spaces of late-`70s and `80s science fiction.

Robert Henke's "Intersection" at Gates Planetarium

The Digital Media Studies program at the University of Denver is hosting a visit from Robert Henke. Robert will be performing his multi-channel work, "Intersection," incorporating field recordings made in Hanoi in 2009, reconstructed through narrative, music and sounds. Monday's performance will unfold in the context of full-dome digital theater at Gates Planetarium, with live Uni-View visualization from Ka Chun Yu. The next evening's presentation will have Robert displaying his performance techniques, handmade hardware and custom software tools.

ROBERT HENKE
Gates Planetarium
Denver Museum of Nature & Science
2001 S. Colorado Blvd.
Monday, September 27
Doors open: 7:30pm
Show begins: 8:00pm (no late seating)

Robert Henke Workshop
Sturm Hall 253
University of Denver
2000 E. Asbury St.
Tuesday, September 28, 7pm

Cyborg Ritual and Sentic Technology in the Vortex Concerts

Trace Reddell presents the Vortex Concerts of Henry Jacobs and Jordan Belson, which took place at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium between 1957 and 1959, as extensions of astronautic research and cybernetic space sciences. While considering the audiovisual content and new performance interfaces used by these artists, he is most interested in how this space age ‘theater of the future’ plays out a cosmological agenda. The unique spatial structure of the planetarium dome represents the near atmosphere and distant outer space, but it also mimics the observatory and even the cramped interiors of spacecraft. Through this vehicular mechanism, the Vortex Concerts promote a new understanding of the nexus of mind, mood, and body as these are integrated into highly technical cybernetic systems by means of bio-engineering and pharmaceutical regimes. These performances facilitate the emotional life and imaginative health of the cyborg-astronaut through ritual use of sense-altering technologies.

Sonic Acts XIII: The Poetics of Space
spatial explorations in art, science, music and technology
25-28 February 2010, Amsterdam

TOS6. Contemplative Radio

2-4pm Wed Mar 03
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

Throughout the various waves of new age space music we encounter a common concern with sonic environmentalism for the mind. Tuning into the vast, intergalactic communications system that Philip K. Dick names “Radio Free Albemuth,” this presentation explores the dream radios, mood organs and spiritual cyborgs of new age music, with works ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Steve Hillage to Robert Rich, Lustmord, and Meg Bowles. Such space music performs a technological religiosity situating terrestrial experience and mental health within the grand scale of cosmic event, as well as sustaining the belief that the human enterprise is inextricably bound in an impulse to leave the planet Earth behind.

TOS5. Space Rituals

2-4pm Wed Feb 25
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

From the Pink Floyd’s space rock shows at London’s U.F.O. club to Hawkwind’s free concerts and the disasters of a Sex Pistols gig, media ritual surrounds these artists. Concentrating on space-related performers ranging from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, Yes, Tim Blake's Crystal Machine, and Arjen Anthony Lucassen’s Star One to Sun Ra and Parliament, I consider the spatial nature of group identity and the practice of collective deep listening and communal trance in relationship to the telematic bodies described by Roy Ascott and Derrida’s echographies of television. I’m particularly interested in conflicts between zones of cosmic spiritual identity and electronically mediated presence.

TOS3. Cognitive Dub Science

2-4pm Wed Feb 04
Lindsay Auditorium
Sturm Hall 281
U of Denver

This presentation zooms in on "memory" as a particularly important, discrete state of consciousness with powerful parallels in the use of magnetic tape in recording, manipulating and composing sound. Listening to diverse works by Brian Eno, Eno and Fripp, Richard Pinhas, Jamaican dub engineers, William Basinski, Boards of Canada, Tricky, DJ Spooky, and Kode9 + the Spaceape. I consider the relationship of the delay effect and sound recording to the phenomena of death, decay, and disintegration. Informed by the works of Jacques Derrida, I suggest a philosophy of electronic voice phenomena that helps us consider how dreadlocked systems produce sonic intelligences, Others otherwise known as ghosts.