Electronic Music Midwest 2019 took place 5-7 September 2019 at the Kansas City Kansas Community College, Kansas City, Kansas, USA. Information about this festival is available at: https://www.emmfestival.org/

Reviewed by Ralph Lewis
Urbana, Illinois, USA

Electronic Music Midwest celebrated its 19th annual festival in September of 2019, with three days of engaging electroacoustic music and inspiring collaborations. Hosted at the Kansas City Kansas Community College by KCKCC professor Ian Corbett, who served as both Technical Director and Festival Co-Director, and Kay He as the Creative Director, EMM’s nine concerts showcased regional and local electroacoustic composers and performers, including special guest artist, saxophonist Drew Whiting and the Kansas City-based Mid America Freedom Band. While the works presented involved familiar, fixed media and live electronic performance formats, the music frequently incorporated collaborations with instrumentalists, video artists, and technologists that added a particular currency to them.

The Mid America Freedom Band, and the pieces they played, offered a compelling example of how collaboration enhanced EMM’s concert selections. The presence of a local, large ensemble that was willing to engage with contemporary music, and specifically music beyond their typical repertoire, set the stage for a series of concerts that often featured works built in collaboration with, or inspired by, a collaborator. That the Mid America Freedom Band is comprised of LGBTQIA performers and actively programs LGBTQIA composers is a clear welcoming gesture for both new and returning EMM attendees about the equity and inclusivity for which electroacoustic spaces are striving.

In bookended performances conducted by MAFB Artistic Director Lee Hartman, works by EMM’s Organization Advancement Director Robert Voisey and Jessica Rudman combined Mid America Freedom Band’s concert band instrumentation with electronics in compelling ways that allowed these often separated musical ventures to work together. Voisey’s work Doomsday’s Passed (You’re Dead Already, Zombie) employed mass textures and a graphic score that played with, and against, concert band tropes, with the electronics supporting and enhancing the dense sound masses. I was impressed with the ensemble’s thoughtful and creative interpretation of the score. Rudman’s From the Blue Fog closed the first concert with stretched out, sparse moments that often blurred the space between idiomatic acoustic playing and distinctly electroacoustic practices, cultivating the atmospheric nostalgia for summertime music festivals and forest sounds in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

As the special guest artist, Drew Whiting’s remarkable saxophone versatility was on display throughout the concert series. During Christopher Biggs’ Transduction, Whiting embodied the work’s gigantic, frenetic electronic presence while playing in front of an exquisitely rendered video background. He channeled a similar aggressiveness throughout Brett Masteller Warren’s structured improvisation Feedbacz, maintaining the high energy level it required. In contrast, he provided a subtle, supporting role throughout Eli Fieldsteel’s gentle Depth of Field, allowing Fieldsteel’s performance on his LightMatrix controller to take center stage. Whiting’s performance of Alexis Bacon’s Ötzi was especially outstanding as he found a communicative balance between the music’s hard, percussive framework and its tender melismatic reprieve, delivering Bacon’s enticing ancient and modern technology-themed work with timeless grace.

Corbett’s Tesseract, one of several multichannel works programmed throughout the festival, also reflected EMM’s presence at KCKCC’s Performing Arts Centre in being written specifically for space’s the 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos speaker set up. Corbett’s music was explosive, with fast-moving metallic gestures shooting from speaker to speaker. Although a shorter work, Tesseract succeeded in demonstrating the expressive capability of the concert space. This capability also enhanced other fixed media works featured, including: Michael Smith’s Discords, Han Hitchen’s Hot Oil, and Jennifer Jolley’s Paint My Chopper Pink.

Like Corbett, Smith also took advantage of the multichannel possibilities of the space in Discords, using slow, gradually evolving textures that emerged from the corners of the space and fluttered across the stereo field. Hitchens’ Hot Oil unleashed the volatile nature of the titular liquid with abrupt processed attacks in an increasingly focused soundscape. Jolley’s Paint My Chopper Pink, described as a “motorcycle motet in four voices,” manipulates its opening motorcycle engine revs and reifies the percolating and beating patterns of the original source by processing them in Max and PeRColate toward increasingly distorted facsimiles. Eventually, these highly processed revving sounds dissipate into ringing bells (perhaps now referencing bicycles rather than motorcycles), dissolving away from the audience.

Kory Reeder’s Dance for Princess Charis Grant offered an interesting example of collaborative staging for a concert work for piano and electronics. Its origins came from a dance collaboration and from the perspective that the work “should be an invitation for choreographed energy, excitement and experimentation.” Inspired by, and developed with, a choreographing partner in mind, Dance remained a rich experience from its full opening gesture through the rush of its artfully curated noise and sound masses. As it continued to maneuver through a series of gear-crunching transitions, a formal calm came into focus.

Choreographic, improvisational, and performance-focused works also received ample programming time, as seen in performances of Qin, a real-time interactive composition by Chi Wang, ISOLATE by Douglas McCausland, semi-human // semi-sentient by Kristopher Bendrick, and two works performed by the Kansas City-based Mnemosyne Quartet. Wang’s Qin stood out in terms of subtlety in regard to both composition and performance, expanding upon and replacing the gently flowing mode of playing of the zither-like qin with Kyma controllers. The piece comfortably drew on synthesized sound, but whether employing near approximations of plucked string sounds or distantly related ones, they were frequently contained within the sort of performativity and attack and decay times seen in performing the acoustic instrument. In contrast, Douglas McCausland’s ISOLATE used a handmade electronics interface called the Master Hand (a wearable glove) to control chaotic elements of synthesis. With abrupt, percussive motions, this controller was used to create a harsh, metallic, and unstable soundscape. Kristopher Bendrick’s semi-human // semi-sentient, more so than any other work in the festival, produced distinctly theatrical, purposeful discomfort. Employing live gurgling, strained vocal rattles by Bendrick, as well as a no-input mixer setup, fixed media, and a video of intense strobe light patterns, his immersive performance succeeded in communicating the sense of uncomfortable vulnerability written about in the composer’s program notes.

Meanwhile, the Mnemosyne Quartet, made up of Eli Hougland (electronics), Michael Miller (bass clarinet), Russell Thorpe (saxophone), and Ted King-Smith (saxophone), presented King-Smith’s Suite for Four Items from a Thrift Shop and the Donna Haraway-inspired Swamp Thing by Seth Andrew Davis and Colin Mosely. In King-Smith’s work, the quartet used improvisation with live processed found objects used as tools for realizing the fixed media track for the work. The ensemble, switching to their usual instruments in the middle of the performance, contrasts the quotidian rhythms of how they played the found objects and reconciled with the limitations of them. Even as the ensemble stretched its rhythmic language, it maintained a focus on its middle register.
Davis’s Swamp Thing requires Mnemosyne to interact with a video score contributed by Mosely. Drawing formal boundaries inspired by the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Chthulucene epochs in Haraway’s Posthumanist writing and the fictional humanoid plant elemental created by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson for DC Comics, the work features the quartet improvising as it follows the video score. At first they play with glissando-heavy, destabilized gestures, being propelled forward into new sections with new characteristics by swooping electronic interludes. Near the end, the electronics and live improvisation settles into a circulating, iterating space that fades away.
Davis’ and Mosely’s work was far from the only one employing video or visual scores. Other examples included Carlos Catallo Solares’ and filmmaker Timothy David Orme’s Generations 1.1,  Emily

MacPherson’s and filmmaker Austin Windau’s Phosphenes, and Mario Diaz De Leon’s and interdisciplinary researcher Donya Quick’s HAILO. In some cases, such as Generation 1.1, an intense, energetic concrete sound world was combined with grainy, poetic, black and white visuals, while the visuals and electroacoustic sounds Quick and Diaz De Leon employed were generated by an interactive artificial intelligence system making inferences about Diaz De Leon’s guitar playing.

In other cases, the visual component was a longstanding component of the composer’s practice. Kay He’s HEAT it UP!, for clarinetist Jackie Glazier, He on piano, and fixed electronics, employed an animated component of the work that portrayed surreal Southwest desert landscapes from sunrise to starry night. Mark Zaki's be still and wait without hope’s drew on a shared feeling of separation, gently accompanying a collage of brooding portraits and pianist Mara Zaki’s thoughtful performance with traces of electronics.

Each year, the Electronic Music Midwest festival offers unique circumstances for electroacoustic composers and performers. This iteration had particularly compelling guest artists, strong concerts, and an array of aesthetic interests and creative musicians at various stages of development. My hope is that EMM will continue to exist and support emerging composers and performers for many years to come. I have found that festivals like EMM that serve a specific area or sub-discipline, yield a strong sense of community, offer entry points to new and student composers, and a refreshing exchange of ideas and interests that cannot always be easily replicated at a home institution or with local peers. In addition to its interest in collaborative endeavors, the Electronic Music Midwest festival, taking place at KCKCC or at Lewis University in Illinois in alternating years, allows new and returning participants to better plan ahead, especially as funding for travel continues to diminish.