SF Tape Music Festival
Victoria Theatre, San Francisco
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Abstract music tells a story. There is a trajectory — maybe a gradual buildup, maybe the classic fast-slow-fast, maybe an epic novel of surges and fades. But reaping these rewards can take focus. Sure, I sometimes play sfSound Radio in the car, but much like a complex novel, listening to electronic music is most rewarding in an undistracting environment that lets you absorb.
That’s what makes the San Francisco Tape Music Festival special, and it’s why it fills up the Victoria Theatre. This is a gathering place for people who want to celebrate this music and hear the pieces presented with dedication: high-end loudspeakers surrounding the audience, lights off (save for the glowing EXIT signs), and mixing-board curators tweaking the stereo pieces to take advantage of the speaker field. The atmosphere is communal — artists chatting, catching up on one another’s projects and lives, then going reverently silent during the program.
“Tape” music refers to an audio composition committed to fixed media, the term dating back to reel-to-reel tapes and the musique concrète work that began 75 years ago. Nowadays, is done digitally, but the practice and process of musique concrète still fascinates, and part of the fun is to learn the real-world sound sources that mutated to form these pieces.
Adam Stanović’s Into the Sea used the normally pleasant sounds of a crashing surf to create glimpses of gaping terror. As you can read in the concert program, Stanović had played ocean sounds to his mother in her final stages of cancer — a gesture of comfort, but one that he believes could not bring her peace. “I couldn’t listen without hearing terror, agony, and fear,” he writes.
Boyi Bai’s Echoes of National Parks drew from recordings at National Parks. I remember a lot of water involved, and the larger project, What Does Your National Park Sound Like?, bears that out. But there were also human-made sounds (a bell), wind, possibly some traffic. You can hear it on Soundcloud.
One of the “classic” pieces, Xenakis’ Concret PH from 1958, sounded glassy. I pictured solid glass rods spilling out onto a floor, bouncing a little. But no — Xenakis used the sound of burning charcoal, clipped into an irregular percussive flow.
Some pieces went amusingly “meta” by using other pieces as sources. Brian Reinbolt’s Bischoff Surface Variations was built from segments of John Bischoff’s electronic music album surface variations, used with permission. Francis Dhomont, who had died weeks before this show, had submitted a new piece to the festival: Somme Toute, an octophonic construction alluding to many of his past works — a joyful crazy-quilt of sounds.
And Matt Ingall’s new revision of Scherzo. Allegro molto included chopped-up recordings of his own radio interview about the Tape Festival and the original 2002 version of Scherzo. Allegro molto, making it possibly the only Tape Festival “song” ever to include the title. That piece began with segments of intensely fast cuts with lots of musical sources — Ingalls’ own clarinet, out-jazz, cartoony sounds.
This year, sfSound posted extensive online notes for each of the four programs that it presented, a rich resource for learning about the pieces and the composers. Here is the link to the Sunday show’s program, and below is the Sunday agenda, with links to artists’ own pages:
Sunday January 7, 2024 (7:00pm)
PIERRE SCHAEFFER – Étude aux tourniquets (1948)
BRIAN REINBOLT – Bischoff Surface Variations (2023)
BOYI BAI – Echoes of National Parks (2023)
JOÃO PEDRO OLIVEIRA – N’vi’ah (2019)
THOUGHT GANG (ANGELO BADALAMENTI (1937–2022) & DAVID LYNCH) – Stalin Revisited (2018)
MATT INGALLS – Scherzo. Allegro molto (2002/2024)
JOHN GIBSON – In Summer Rain (2021)
GILLES GOBEIL – Un cercle hors de l’arbre (2014-2015)
MAGGI PAYNE – Aries 2020 (2020)
ADAM STANOVIĆ – Unto the Sea (2022)
IANNIS XENAKIS – Concret PH (1958)
FRANCIS DHOMONT (1926-2023) – Somme toute (2022)
Memory Select: Journeys in Creative Music 