The fifth instalment of Winnipeg's Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound provided days of impeccable and multifarious music. Montreal's Tim Hecker commenced his laptop set with disconnected piano notes, adding escalating and resounding sounds that filled speakers with exquisite, lulling drones. Toronto's Tomas Jirku dispensed proficiently drugged beats, creating endlessly hypnotic rhythms. Montreal's Mitchell Akiyama merged reformatted live guitar sounds and echoing electronic noises into an inspired unity. A film projector draped the room in looped images, enhancing Akiyama's performance, forming an absorbing musical and visual narrative. The evening concluded with a collaboration by all three artists, creating a soundscape that swelled with effusive noise. Brazil's Amon Tobin opened his set with thundering tunes from his latest release and proceeded through a set of charged drum & bass. Atlanta's Prefuse 73 began his set with hectic beats and inspired collages of sound, while the U.S.'s P Love delivered fierce turntable scratching, and the UK's Bonobo supplied rumbling dance-floor beats. The performance by Toronto's Marilyn Lerner and Winnipeg's Ken Gregory offered riveting compositions; Lerner played an acoustic piano, extracting music by playing its keys, scratching its strings, and treating it like a percussive instrument using ping-pong balls and mallets to wring noises. Gregory added digitally recorded sounds, fusing ambient background noises and dialogue to Lerner's adept, imaginative piano playing. Winnipeg's Michael Dumontier made use of toy keyboards, fishing line, guitar strings, a record player, music box, and a saxophone case equipped with speakers, employing his unique, inventive instrument to generate measured reverberations that expanded and dismantled with remarkable grace. An evening of performances by Winnipeg's distinct sound artists and musicians included 3x3is9 supplying intricate, minimalist sounds that were deftly calming. Duul Durv presented acutely refined electronic timbres, integrating sounds with a live cello player to form imaginative compositions. Mink's laptop set offered subterranean low tones that magnificently vibrated the Albert's walls. "Let's Get" Dusted provided the most riotous performance of the festival, merging oscillating noises, hectic rhythms, and strident vocals, guitar, and drums into a superb cacophony. On closing night, the UK's Kaffe Matthews performed an improvisational set using sounds sampled from the venue, weaving an intricate and mesmerising sonic tapestry, completely entrancing the audience. Toronto's Lori Freedman followed with improvised jazz, using saxophone and clarinet to create stirring reverberations that proficiently ranged from calm to frantic. Later in the evening, Freedman and Matthews performed as a duo, generating an assortment of striking, ambient sounds, supplying an awe-inspiring conclusion to the festival.
Send + Receive Festival
Winnipeg, MB October 18 to 26, 2002
BY Rob NayPublished Jan 1, 2006