Vol. 45 Issue 3 Reviews
Cube Fest 2022

On the evening of April 24th, 2021, a concert celebrating the music and career of John Bischoff was held in Oakland, California at Mills College’s Jeannik Méquet Littlefield Concert Hall.
Bitplicity: a compact disc and digital download, 2021, available from Artifact Recordings, San Francisco, California: www.artifact-ubu.org, and from Bandcamp: www.bandcamp.com/.
Artist interviews available at: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1AWO4crzATpMfeDnBKk94aa8KF1uS9T4P?usp=sharing

Reviewed by DJ Malinowski
Ōta, Gunma Prefecture, Japan

Event ImageThe Cube Fest 2022 spatial music festival took place in Blacksburg, Virginia, between August 19 and 21. It was sponsored by the Moss Arts Center, the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology, the Center for Humanities, and Cycling ’74. The Organizing Committee included co-directors Tyechia Thompson and Eric Lyon, as well as Sara M. Johnson, Margaret Lawrence, Dylan parker, Tanner Upthegrove, with a Technical Committee consisting of Tanner Upthegrove, Brandon Hale, and Gustavo Araoz. The festival’s seven concerts and keynote address included artists and scholars from across the globe selected through an international call for works. Thompson’s and Lyon’s artistic vision is to invite all sounds into cutting-edge audio research facilities—such as the Cube, a four-story black box theatre with 149.6 speaker system, motion capture system, 360-degree cyclorama, and four interacting virtual reality headsets—to generate new sonic possibilities, with this year’s festival celebrating Afro-futurist music.

The first concert immersed the audience in “The Sankofa Tape” by the Digging in the Crates community at Virginia Tech (VTDITC), which was formed through the VTDITC transdisciplinary event series fostering connection between hip hop artists and fans on campus, as well as on local and global scales. Extensive dynamic collaboration generated a spiritually transformative lyric, virtuosically enhanced by partial transductions into spatial sound in which audio and space became conceptual partials. VTDITC applies cinematographic techniques to microphone selection and placement, as well as spatial compositions of sonic energy that change one’s orientation by mapping onto the air surrounding one’s body, in addition to conveying scenes through everyday-embodiment protocols. The spiritual transformation is deeply informed by the Ghanaian principle of sankofa, which Dakotah Hamilton describes as “looking back so you can move forward […] our ancestors live through us in all of our actions and in all of our thoughts and how we move in expression.” I cannot understate the transformative effect that this album has on the listener in the present, as well as the density of cinema-experiential and self-experiential knowledge that it gives the listener to carry for the future. “Look within so you can go out” (DeRay Manning and Dakotah Hamilton, in conversation with the author).

In music, “you can model a system, and if it fails, nobody got killed.”“Perception is an act often of quantization. […] The appeal of microtonality is it doesn’t quantize […] it promotes neuroplasticity” (Stephen James Taylor, in conversation with the author).

The Other Wakanda concert in the Cube presented works by Stephen James Taylor. In the first half, pristine production gave sounds presence in a similar manner as point-source spatialization. In the second half, audio resolution itself was a mode in a virtual ecology and “alternate physical environment” in which “the shamans are the musicians” (Taylor, in conversation with the author). The introduction of virtual physical tribes (in which one can perceive each player’s sono-spatial cybernetics) also functions to set up a sonic-perspectival system, communication system, and belief system (prompting the question “what transformations does belief undergo when its material form is spatial sound?”), which, along with Taylor’s physically constructed or altered instruments, imbue live-ness and agency. Taylor designs and simulates new physicalities and socialities, and later plays with the systems’ rules, inviting creative chaos interfaced not only with one’s sonic interpretation system but also with one’s senses of meaningfulness and space.

Taylor virtuosically moves through information and communication systems (e.g., drawing similarities between diversity in music, pitch relations, plants, and concepts as all sustaining life), and practices continual openness to (and conceptually listening for) variation and floating (e.g., fascination with transitions between tuning systems). Rather than projecting and maintaining kyriarchal social arrangements to utilize schemas of futurity’s believability politics (as so many TV shows and films marketed as futuristic or documentary do), he begins with a verbal, explicit invitation to the work’s systems. He doesn’t construct an agents-audience membrane and hide his own influence, nor construct a Taylor-audience membrane and remove virtual agency; he cultivates multidimensional, heterogeneously woven (with portals and folded densities) conceptual blending of his sprawling intelligence, posthuman agents, and audience. I will not describe extensively the silent twelfth movement—ask anyone who was there, each audience member had a drastically different experience (Taylor, in conversation with the author).

The Sounds In Focus I concert in the Perform Studio, a relatively dry and intimate space with 24.4 speaker system facilitating closer, more detailed listening, began with “Waterfall” by Dexter van Schyff. In this piece, bell samples take on a vocality towards water samples when convolved with the water’s impulse response. This convolution-allows-communication operation could inspire insights for hybrid metaphor theory and cognitive linguistics in general. Towards the end of “Bestiaire” by Roxanne Turotte, my self’s center felt duplicated as the giddily vocalizing animal, so that we existed vicariously through each other in real-time—material as image and vice versa. Later, an ethereally resonant bass tone forms a large skull with internal structural acoustics.

“…grind…” by Ryne Siesky brings environmental waste to the fore. Starting the piece is a large, right-to-left wave made of smaller waves that audio-spatialize Zeno’s Paradox, after which my neural-associative image, or atmosphere, of the Perform Studio gradually transformed, perhaps through the various 3D shapes that Siesky adeptly produces, such as sonic holes in the walls sucking into a virtual outdoors, a large distorted flying saucer in the corner of the room, and a vast glacier with spatially-nuanced echoes of cracks. He used Richard Garrett’s Audio Spray Gun SuperCollider plug-in, in addition to many processors, to holistically and efficiently prototype temporal and spatial processing of a single K-cup sample, blending functionality with David Huron’s ITPRA expectation theory, which prompts questions about intra-action between functionality and place (Siesky, in conversation with the author).

The overall structure of the next piece, “N’vi’ah” by João Pedro Oliveira, matches idioms of architecture, though on a smaller time-scale. It mouths micro-behaviors that elicit, in turn, a cyberpunk machine whose automotive-like elements are arranged functionally inside a gigantic torso, an eye-level, room-sized frying pan with bubbling hot metal strips, and several launch pads in various stages of launching, layered simultaneously.

“I think that the ability to have that type of freedom really allows you to develop something new […] and to develop a sound that […] allows you to find different places inside of yourself to try to […] allow for vulnerability to happen, and allow the space for […] a different voice to come” (Jupiter Girl Blue, in conversation with the author).

The Sounds Cubed I concert in the Cube began with Jupiter Blue registering the audience and “the energy of that moment, what’s happening inside that space,” to inform their delivery of the song. This exchange invites the audience to a shared space with emerging values. Jupiter Girl Blue explained that she delivers her roadmap of the song and hopes that the listener can “discover something maybe even deeper inside of those things” (in conversation with the author). In “Helium Diamonds,” Jupiter Girl Blue’s low-register vocals of micro-slopes and texture layers parallel spatial sounds that are myths, as well as percussion in a loudspeaker wall that forms acoustic ligaments (via spectral ventriloquism) with DM Hotep’s live percussion. Then, it builds into a cognitive and spatial whirlwind between live and time-processed sound, too multifaceted for me to currently describe. In “Kwa Song,” words and sounds create vectors of communication in various gravities, and seem to incidentally construct a large black hole or singularity. In “Traveling Jupiter,” acupuncture-ly spatialized guitar, bass, percussion, and vocals create a scene so joyful that I couldn’t tear myself away for even a split second to write.

“Rest as Resistance: The Invitation” simulates fountains, birds, relaxing etc. When resting, stimulated schemas and memories rise to the surface, changing ‘space’ into immersive ‘place.’ Duplicate sounds radiate and hug me. The birdsong is too frequent for reality—it’s spatio-temporally arranged for algorithmically increased comfort while signaling artificiality (similar to ASMR role-play videos). It felt strange to register birdsong in a minimalist-industrial black box theatre such as the Cube, and the realism brings out the materiality of the Cube (and all current audio tech), which is really incredible but can’t recreate complex 3D sound projections from mechanical structures nor sound waves between speakers. This piece plays in that conceptual space of materiality, virtual place, and virtual place as apparatus, and in a spiritual space where pre-existing material features become part of virtual image (credit to virtual image scholar and professor Lisa Zaher).

The concert’s final piece, “Moksha Black” by King Britt featuring Roba El-Essawy, disseminates sono-spatial models that can be transduced (based on registered aspects) into one’s metaphysical space (which is cognitively and psychoacoustically entangled). For example, the initial voices are farther and larger in metaphysical space than physical space; then, a square-like tone cuts through in metaphysical space; and later, voice is physically still while circling and stuttering in metaphysical space. Towards the end, voices are vertical poles (in allocentric space) from which frequency spectra fall like glitter and sparks.

“Sun Ra’s gift was understanding the passage of humankind through large swaths of time.” “The sound of those insects. That continuity. Who’s to say that that sound […] can’t be interpreted as a meaningful sequence of something like language abiding to something like a grammar?” (Thomas Stanley, in conversation with the author).

In his keynote address “You Haven’t Met the Captain of the Spaceship…Yet,” Thomas Stanley presented extensive info about interfacing with and interpreting Sun Ra’s teachings, including myth as tech—specifically, Alter Destiny, a leap into a zone of justice that is now possible because the original myth of dominion has gradually become unstable. It involves solving the many crises (e.g., racism, intergroup conflict, “extractive capitalism and the filth that goes along with this way of life,” potential mutually assured destruction, capitalist labor, an American empire whose populous is largely “distracted, paid off, sedated by […] the fruits of oppression that happen in other peoples’ country”) predicated on that myth, simultaneously. This seems impossible, but the resolve “to be that broad in our attempts to ameliorate the situation is the starting point” (Stanley, in conversation with the author). Sun Ra’s music contains messages that can help us question our fundamental beliefs rooted in that myth.

The Sounds In Focus II concert begins with “The Shaman Ascending” by Barry Truax: a constantly circling vocal not circling in metaphysical space, through which spectral processes sculpt a spider-shaped cavern around me in allocentric and metaphysical space. In “Abwesenheit,” John Young clinically and playfully makes audible the air currents and stases in the room. Lidia Zielinska’s “Backstage Pass” treats idiomatic piano moments as seeds nourished with playful curiosity and passion, presented with spatial poly-matic frequency poiesis in a room-sized piano bed.

To start the Sounds Cubed II concert, centripetal whispers in “??nyat?” by Chris Coleman construct connective tissue to the Cube’s center. In “Toys” by Orestis Karamanlis, flutters of sonic pulses along the perimeters form spatially-balanced (with stable centers) patterns articulating shapes that map intuitively to one’s body. Remarkably, it’s easy to imagine one’s bodily sensors located on the pattern. The pattern articulates and secretes space in a manner similar to point clouds (and incidentally, it’s easy to imagine mirrors of the pattern in real-time), but also requires particular speeds and temporal arrangements of pulses, inspiring further studies of virtual bodies and spatial sense.

The Listening Lounge in the Cube presented Eric Lyon’s spatialization of Sun Ra’s mind-altering album Space Is The Place, in which spatial orientation and arrangement of interweaving lines of instruments construct a gigantic floating head, directional flashes of fire propelling a negative-sound rocket, a metaphysical hyper-cube, and spherical radiation of life from each sound source if in a denser medium. The audience was intensely focused, and the spatialization allowed many to hear new sounds in the album. This was a fitting outro for Cube Fest 2022, which was not only continually awe-inspiring but also a tremendous historical event prompting countless future experiments. I look forward to the next one.