Last night in the deep wilderness of Weldon Township, skipping along a narrow gravel meander, I located our local electronic and experimental music festival, Mental Spaghetti, No. 3. Got the days mixed up, Saturday was the second and last day, not the start. Nevermind.
I made the scene about 30 minutes before Medicinal Groove hit the stage and parked myself by the bonfire. After attempting a couple of dysfunctional conversations, I retreated to big log and executed the stellarvasinya – a supine star gazing posture – until a friendly dog found me for some stick throwing.
MG is a Phish influenced jazz quartet with some sweet grooves. After that there was a rapper and then DJ whose names I didn’t catch. Somewhere in there Tim McKay showed up with his daughter Leaf. He and I did some rapport under the Perseid meteors and enjoyed the fire. Eventually I became curious about what the DJ was actually doing up there, what was the interface on his performance gear? I’m guessing there’s a library of looping samples and effects that are triggered via touch interface. When I got back to the fire, Tim was gone. I hit the road and made it home by 1:00 am.
Next to the stage was a laptop driven projection of some trippy visuals. It started me thinking about my attempts with Marion Ramirez at live painting performance. The question – what kind of live performance could rival or blow away trippy visuals algorithmically generated? Sort of a John Henry scenario, can we humans compete? More to the point, could I imagine an experience with paint as a component? I know VJs were out there at one point, on the fly visual montages created for an audience. What about now, and did painters ever get involved?
I’m thinking some shorthand characters that could be drawn and set loose. Backup. Just straight sketches, what sort of process in real time could be captivating? Worth a ponder.
There are supposedly a couple of big festivals in Michigan. Tim said Electric Forest (just an hour and a half drive) is big but has mainstream commercial sponsors and another guy offered that the Detroit Electronic Festival (Movement) is big and not so commercial. Some of this music is the future, exploratory, soundtrack-y and so maybe that fits into the Dan Kelly universe, or vice versa.