Bleeding Edge Festival
Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA
August 13, 2006
There was enough volume and noise to singe ears for two weeks at the Bleeding Edge Festival, but there was a whisper that kept drawing me into a room there once an hour, all day long. It came from the solarium of the Villa Montalvo, a century-old manor that overlooks the mountains of Silicon Valley. The sound was an orchestra's melody that floated out of a small tape loop. The tape itself appeared to risk sliding off the reel-to-reel machine if it weren't for a glass jar that kept it wrapped in place. The peaceful string melody could pass for Muzak for a shopping mall or funeral home lobby. Yet the loop cuts it off before the melody finishes; the orchestra's handful of seconds then recycles. Perched along a nearby wall in the room were small, portable shortwave radios, their nearly imperceptible static tinting the air. There was a sense that sound artists William Basinski and James Elaine's installation was channeling the ghosts inside that room who performed, danced, and fell in love there ages ago. The music was drained of its potential kitsch—only majesty and sadness were left.
Such haunting sounds that confronted audience members also gave great life to the Bleeding Edge Festival, which was held for the first time at Montalvo Arts Center in the Villa. The beautiful venue displays Gilded Age decadence and offers rural escape from the San Francisco area's bustle. There was an impressive international roster of musicians and installations, ranging from austere minimal-techno (Richard Chartier and Frank Bretschneider), assorted gonzo-noiseniks like Black Dice, Sunroof!, and Matmos, and headliner avant-metal band Isis performing with Montreal sound-drifter Tim Hecker.
The festival's eclecticism had an off-balanced quality, which was morerefreshing than the usual see-a-band-grab-a-beer-see-next-band routine. There were shiny sports cars advertised by a fest sponsor on a lawn, while a few feet away was a gazebo decorated with hanging drone-emitting bottles. I walked out of the Carriage House theater where Chartier performed in pitch-blackness and stripped his laptop's electricity into murmuring tones and desolate silence—and out into the bright sunlight.
As the old-time bluegrass and country of the Avett Brothers romanticized a simpler time before chemical plants and freeways infiltrated the Appalachians, nature recordings from our information age were played deep in the forest outside the festival grounds. Sound artist Jeff Cain hid a few speakers among the trees, several power cords dangling from the branches. A low, windswept drone first hit the listener, and released an ominous feeling like the quiet panic of hearing a predator's soft footsteps approaching. A keen ear could pick out the harsh, buzzing static coming from another direction, while garbled voices struggle to break through the mire. For his installation "Dead Air," Cain used sounds recorded when he attached contact microphones to the towers of a radio and television antenna farm that sits high above the Los Angeles Basin. Much like Basinski and Elaine's loop in the solarium, Cain's pieces suggest that technology's invasion of an environment could instill a sense that the supernatural is present and not leaving any time soon.
Chartier nearly caught that same sense, but he was more interested in having audiences play with a toy. He placed an antique, wooden desk in a lobby and strung white cords that connected to the desk from the second-story staircase. Chartier then had the public open and close the desk drawers to emit drones that were akin to biplanes circling the air. The audience seemed to be more amused by the novelty of it all, and how the sound's vibrations could be felt by hand on the desktop, than deciphering any grand aesthetic statement.
Technology turned a different trick for the members of Black Dice, who took the stage with an arsenal of amplifiers hooked to their samplers and synth-drums. They launched a UFO-like noise for 20 seconds until their power blew out. The Dice took nearly a half-hour to recover, and then proceeded to clang out a cadence of death-march rhythms and release synth carbon monoxide, a lost electronic piccolo melody looking for its parents amid the din.
Matmos and collaborators, harpist Zeena Parkins and a guest guitarist, indulged in the Matmen's trademark audio slapstick in an outdoor theater. They first performed "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein," where Martin Schmidt delivered a deadpan reading of Wittgenstein's semantic twist that led to the conclusion that the "Rose has teeth in the mouth of the beast." The ensemble kept the beat by playing rose bouquets like drumsticks, while Drew Daniel shot forth various goose calls, synth wonks, and recordings of Bjork uttering the "rose has teeth" eureka. Elsewhere, Parkins added an oddly placed, yet soothing harp flourish to the opening of the Paradise Garage disco ode, "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan." Between songs, Daniel triggered garbled microtones and cartoonish synth bonks that broke seltzer bottles over the listener's head as much as sprayed him or her. If you closed your eyes, it could sometimes be mistaken for a '50s-era Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center soundtrack for a fairytale book. When a few older couples left the audience to attend the Yo La Tengo set during Matmos' performance, Schmidt waved at them and quipped, "Goodbye Montalvo money."
Hecker and Isis closed the festival with some of their most emotionally rich performances to date. Hecker's solo set dwelt in waves of cascading guitar drones, shortwave radio static, and cathedral organ sighs that all evoked the experience of watching sunlight gradually pierce a stained glass window. Isis (minus two members) later performed with him and moved well far away from the heavy-metal canon. The band focused on string experiments, namely sprung and vibrating tones that suggested a frail suspension bridge ready to snap if anyone dared to set foot upon it. Hecker shaded the gaps between the band's notes, using pulsating, chlorophyll-fluid drones. His laptop sang best midway through when he played a weeping melody from microtones that felt like raindrops tapping here and there on a roof. Together, they ended the set amassing a drone that bloomed like a St. Elmo's Fire in the Arctic sky. When their volume died down, the air was wet with crickets. A perfect juxtaposition in a day full of them.
Cameron Macdonald
Photos: Yaron Kidron
