The Remix, the Cut-Up, the Open Work
November 7-9, 2014
Doors open at 8:00 p.m. Show starts promptly at 8:30 p.m.
Tickets: $12 Online / $15 at the door, Festival Pass: $30 (online only)
https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/900486
RSVP on Facebook!
Expect performances, lectures and listening parties that delve into the recurring urge in the art world to collage, shuffle, and sample. In true Fidget style, the program aims to shift our sights toward a future for experimentalism where music, performance, and philosophical discourse converge.
Friday, November 7
Bruce Haack: Listening & Remixing Party with Peter Price
Come hear recently unearthed, rare tapes of electronic music outsider, pioneer, and innovator, Bruce Haack. Price has recently been granted unprecedented access to Haack’s basement archival material and permission to remix it live. A portal into Haack’s strange sounds and space-age synthesizers.
Saturday, November 8
Thomas Patteson explores the “open work”
From the invented notations of Christian Wolff to contemporary graphic and video scores, curator Thomas Patteson presents a selection of music from the 60’s to the present. The concert featuring musicians Eric Derr, Aaron Stewart, Chris Schelb, and Quinn Dougherty, will be framed by a contextualizing lecture by Patteson and a post-performance discussion with the musicians.
Sunday, November 9
Dada>Cut-up>Code – thingNY & Adam Vidiksis
Special guests thingNY are back again to close out yet another FEMF, sharing a bill with <fidget> artist-in-residence Adam Vidiksi. thingNY will perform mouthfuls of Kool-Aid for the masses: vocal Dadaist babble, entrancing instrumentals, rapid-fire verbiage, and heaps of paper detritus. Adam Vidiksis will remix electroacoustic pioneer John Chowning’s iconic work, Stria, using percussion and quadraphonic sound.
Context:
As a society, we are enamored of the remix, the mash-up, and other derivative spinoffs of this idea. <fidget>’s 2014 Fall Experimental Music Festival (FEMF) unearths and celebrates historical contexts of the remix, honing in on how this kind of activity keeps reasserting itself onto the cultural landscape. <fidget>’s co-director, Peter Price and guest curators Thomas Patteson and Adam Vidiksis look to the cut-up technique of William Burroughs, Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work”, and the rigorous tinkering with sampling and electronics by outsider and pioneer of electronic music, Bruce Haack.
This year <fidget>’s FEMF celebrates its fifth anniversary, looking back on thematic threads from John Cage to Afrofuturism, and carries forward ideas from The Remix Festival, a dance festival co-produced by <fidget> in partnership with curator Annie Wilson. FEMF looks to the past to emphasize that the remix cannot be reduced to a contemporary phenomenon. Questions of authorship, ownership, pluralism, and experimentation through play are still relevant to us today.