Performance music: Six Exquisites International Sound Art Festival Broadway Performance Hall, August 2 by Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly, August 6, 1997
Wiggly wire stems strung with sliding metal discs that looked like Dr. Seuss flowers and which rasped and clanked when distribted among the audience; a mortorized windmill also strung with jingle discs; a tabletop wired for amplification and struck and scraped with various found objects, notably two penlights; a bowl gong slowly filled with water; These were among the imaginative noisemakers brought up from Tacoma by Six Exquisites curator Dan Senn, who's gathered sound artists (performers, composers, inventors, and installationists) from across America and Europe for a Northwest mini-tour.
Some of the performers were content just to demonstrate their sounds and reluctant to impose organizational decision-making on them, but others did use this stageful of means to satisfy my hunger for ends. Pamela Z combined sung melodic hooks, spoken phrases, street sounds, and piano sounds through digital sampling, activating some of these sounds through hand and arm gestures as if she were playing an invisible theremin (she was wired up to her synthesizer). Brenda Hutchinson offered and audio documentary make of interviews with amateur pianists, followed by a sweet two-part (one taped, one played live) piano epilogue, all immensely charming.
There were also traditionally written-out pieces: a piano suite by Manos Tsangaris and played by Pi-hsien Chen (these two were also the tabletop percussionists), and a tasty, aggressive piece for amplified violin and synthesizer sounds written for violinist Dorothy Martirano by her husband, who I'm guessing is composer Salvatore Martirano. In all, a generous evening (almost three hours) of sonic play, attention-holding throughout, vivid, and refreshing.