Subtropics Sound Arts Festival
I know Miami Nights is known for promoting music that is mostly known for moving behinds. But really, music was originally made for the mind. It is rare that we have artists or festivals that reflect that perspective down here. Thankfully for Gustavo Maramoros' Subtropics Sound Arts Festival, every year we get the counterpoint (pun intended) of WMC around the same time.
Now, in it's 19th year the festival has grown and has moved to the Miami Performing Arts Center. In past years, Maramoros set up sound experiments all around Downtown and Miami Beach using odd sources to produce sound and custom instruments. In addition, participants took to broadcasting these performances on home-made shortwave radio transmitters that the musicians wore as backpacks.
This year's focal point is of one of tribute, specifically to one of the most controversial composers of the 20th century, John Cage. He is known as one of the first classical composers to incorporate electronics into his work and begat a composition method called "indeterminacy" or "Aleatoric Music" or "Chance Music". Cage would use combinatorial methods such as rolling dice to determine which note (or series of notes) followed the next. This was a very unorthodox procedure for writing music and was not widely accepted at first. The general public still has some trouble realizing it at the classical level - more on this with my review of the Split Sides/Sigur Ros performance. While many people find his later compositions more challenging, and some down right reject them as music, his influence is still felt today in the avant-garde genres of modern music. Synthesizers have adopted this aleatoric technique in generating the notes (or tones/waveforms) that we hear today in Club Space dance tracks.
Back to the present, besides just the tribute aspect the festival has brought into town world-renowned sound artists and composers such as Robert Black, Jan Williams, Akehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, John King and David Behrman. One of the performances will run for 14 hours straight! Fuck afterhours! The festival runs through March 4. For more information, please click here.
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