send + receive: a festival of sound

from Vital Weekly (NL): 

SEND + RECEIVE (double DVD by Send + Receive)

Occasionally Vital Weekly may have printed the line up of the Send & Receive festival, held yearly in Winnipeg, Canada, but it escaped me that they have been going on since 1998. To celebrate the first ten years a box was released with an extensive booklet about the artists who performing there, one DVD with music and one DVD with a documentary. The music DVD has no visuals, just music. And what an amount! This is not a compilation with snippets of music, this is, at least at time complete performances. Say Jason Kahn forty minutes, Oval twenty six, Lee Ranaldo & Dean Roberts one hour, Tim Hecker thirty-nine, Thomas Jirku almost fifty minutes etc. Altogether its almost eleven hours of music. Not something you would digest at once I guess. I'd recommend with starting with the documentary on the second disc. Here various people involved in the festival explain what the festival is about - experimental music in the broadest sense of the word, which is nice, but also we get fragment glimpses of concerts. We see Oval behind his laptop and devices (last minutes of his concerts and immediately packing up, not noting the sheers from the audience), Cindy with a cello, installation by Carsten Nicolai, obscure mechanisms by Micheal Dumontier or David Grubbs just with his acoustic guitar. Not a festival for those who do just laptop concerts, although there are who do (Tomas Jirku, Duul_drv). Also we see some people people not on present on the other DVD like Gert-Jan Prins, Skolz Kolgen, Otomo Yoshihide and Kaffe Matthews. Great to see, it gives the aspiring musician lots of ideas. From the live DVD its good to hear David Grubbs (although with four minutes the shortest concert here), Jirku's laidback dubby techno, the grainy textures of Tim Hecker, Kahn always fine minimalist electronics and drumming, I8U likewise minimalism of laptop processing and Oren Ambarchi's guitar playing erupting. And that's not even half of it. The sound quality varies from line recording to microphone recordings, which makes changes quite abrupt, but altogether this is a package that keeps you busy for an entire sunday, but what else should you do on such a day anyway?

- Frans de Waard

From Monsieur Delire's listening diary (CA):

ARTISTES VARIÉS-VARIOUS ARTISTS / Send + Receive: 10 Years of Sound 

On 2010-02-02 I posted a partial report on this jubilee double-DVD set released by the (mostly) electronic experimental music festival Send + Receive in Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada). I have finished listening to the 11+ hours of music on the first DVD and the feature documentary on the second. The 83-minute documentary is interesting, no moer. The staff and board members are interviewed, and those bits are added to short clips from a ton of musical performances and sound installations presented over the last ten years, chronologically. It seems that everything at s+r gets filmed, if only with a mobile phone. There’s all kinds of footage here, from profesionnal tripod camera to cheap hand-held devices that produce a terribly grainy image when shooting in very low light. Some of the clips are VERY short and the film is a bit simplistic but, hey, at least there IS this documentary - the FIMAV festival will probably never have that. As for the DVD of WAV files, there’s a lot of meat to chew there. Sound quality is more than acceptable though not great, but the performanced selected are pretty strong. Several major names are featured (40 minutes of Oren Ambarchi, of Jason Kahn, of Tim Hecker; 30 minutes of Martin Tétreault, 26 of Oval, 60 minutes of Lee Ranaldo in duo with Dean Roberts) and several local artists, like Crys Cole (21 minutes) and Steve Bates (17 minutes). A generous release that gives us a tangible idea of what is being accomplished in the Canadian Prairies.

(en français)

Le 2010-02-02, je publiiais un commentaire partiel sur ce double DVD anniversaire publié par le festival de musique expérimentale (surtout) électronique Send + Receive de Winnipeg (Manitoba, Canada). J’ai enfin terminé l’écoute des 11 heures de musique sur le premier DVD et du documentaire sur le second. Le documentaire de 83 minutes est intéressant, mais sans plus. On y interview le personnel et le conseil d’administration du festival pour en retracer l’histoire, et ces courts extraits d’entrevue sont montés à travers de courts extraits des prestations musicales des dix années, présentées chronologiquement. Il semble que tout soit filmé au s+r, quitte à ce que ce soit avec un mobile. Il y a là du matériel vidéo de toute sorte, allant de la caméra professionnelle fixe à la caméra à la main bon marché qui donne une image terriblement granuleuse dans la quasi-noirceur. Certains extraits sont TRÈS courts mais, bon, c’est intéressant. Bref, un documentaire un peu simpliste, mais au moins il existe (on ne peut pas en dire autant du FIMAV, par exemple). Quant au DVD de fichiers WAV, on trouve là beaucoup de matière à se mettre sous la dent, et de la bonne. La qualité sonore des prises du son du s+r est tout à fait acceptable sans être géniale. Et les prestations retenues sont solides. Il y a là des grands noms de la musique expérimentale d’aujourd’hui (40 minutes d’Oren Ambarchi, de Jason Kahn aussi, de Tim Hecker itou; 30 minutes de Martin Tétreault, 26 d’Oval, 60 minutes de Lee Ranaldo en duo avec Dean Roberts) et plusieurs artistes locaux, dont Crys Cole (21 minutes) et Steve Bates (17 minutes). Un objet généreux qui donne une mesure tangible de l’accomplissement que représente ce festival des Prairies canadiennes.

From the Wire (UK) #314 / April 2010

Send + Receive: 10 Years of Sound

It's not crystal clear why Winnipeg, Canada of all places should have become such an enduring centre for sound art and performance, but much of the credit for this must go to Steve Bates, artistic director of the Send + Receive festival between 1998 - 2003. In the notes to this box set, which contains a dual layer DVD featuring ten hours of audio plus and 83 minute documentary tracing the history of the event, he explains how Winnipeg's very isolation was the initial inspiration for Send + Receive. He recalls as a child hearing the distant rumble and whistle of Canadian trains cutting across the countryside, and how this instilled in him a heightened sensitivity towards ambient noise. 

With the help of a group of likeminded aficionados he and his successors have managed to summon the wherewithal to maintain a festival that from its inception has attracted artists of the profile and calibre of David Grubbs, Lee Ranaldo, Otomo Yoshihide and Dean Roberts, performing alongside local artists such as Crys Cole. As much as it is about the festival, it is about the humble dedication of those who are engaged in the continuing struggle to preserve and to fund it. This anniversary set is a worthy and lovingly put together testimony to their efforts. 

Since its beginnings, Send + Receive has gradually moved from a visual to a sound orientation, with video installations and the like giving way to live performances, as the line blurs between what is and is not 'sound art'. That blur is conveyed in the grainy, sometimes slo-mo miasma in which the copious performance footage is steeped. This ranges from Peter Brötzmann to Alexis O'Hara, from Kathy Kennedy dashing breathlessly up and down from the stage declaring at the mic, "I'm making... a noise!", to Sawako weaving alluring electronic fabric with the studied diligence of a lacemaker. What is clear throughout, whether it be a horizontal cello being stroked by two bows or a turntable remotely operated by a piece of thread, is the importance of spectating the processes whereby these sounds are produced. That said, the ten hour audio disc, compressed into 16 bit .wav files, is a formidable collection including, as well as the aforementioned Grubbs, Ranaldo, Roberts, the likes of Tim Hecker, Taylor Deupree, Oren Ambarchi, Jason Kahn and Martin Tétreault.

- David Stubbs 

ARTICLES / REVIEWS FOR THE DOCUMENTARY:

From UPTOWN Magazine, Winnipeg, the week of May 27 - 2010

Send + Receive: 
Ten Years of Sound
May 29, 9 p.m., 
Cinematheque

Robert Fulford probably had it right.

The venerable arts columnist for the National Post wrote that one attends avant-garde happenings, essentially, for the hell of it. You go and see whatever cockamamie thing the artist(s) dreamed up, you say you were there, and you have fun trying to describe it to others.

That’s not to say there’s never any merit to the art, of course – although some people drive themselves mad trying to divine meaning that may not have been intended. Sometimes even the artist is just trying to have a mischievous good time, at least before he’s trying to say something serious.

All this feels conveyed in Caelum Vatnsdal’s new doc Send + Receive: Ten Years of Sound, which provides a loose historical overview of Winnipeg’s festival of audio art. More valuably, it allows us to experience much of the featured work for ourselves, and decide what we think about it.

According to festival director Crys Cole, it was at Video Pool, Winnipeg’s media arts centre, that the festival originated. What’s even more noteworthy, however, is how organizers managed to nab leading international artists right from the start.

The festival has garnered an international reputation, says festival board chair Tom Kohut. This reflects the local arts community’s innovative and even enterprising nature; as Cole says, it demonstrates how receptive Winnipeg audiences are to the “out-of-the-ordinary.”

You may be wondering: what is sound art, exactly? The doc presents it as a blanket term, incorporating both abstract sound art and experimental music; the label can be either very broad or very narrow, Kohut says. Cole declares herself a champion of “pure abstraction,” fighting against too much inclusion of the “too musical.”

For the majority of the doc’s running time, we see both, although mostly projects creating all manner of bizarre audio effects and soundscapes. Some of these pair distorted sound with bizarre imagery; another installation involves a room full of lit candles. The featured footage aptly conveys the moodiness of the experiences.

Indeed, most of the art featured seems to aim to evoking feeling: the kind of sounds produced are alternately surreal, ethereal, eerie, and downright irritating. 

As Cole says, the work challenges what people think is worth listening to. 

It also inspires the question of whether such work sometimes seems odd, simply because audio art is still so new. After all, there are still a lot of people out there who don’t get Jackson Pollock; when there’s still that much ambivalence in a more long-established medium, no wonder sound art finds itself relegated to the fringe.

It’s fair to ask: does it work? Sound art, that is. Maybe more to the point, is it any good?

If you’re willing to set aside preconceptions and surrender to a more purely sensory experience, then yes, sometimes. Especially if you’re prepared to embrace the unexpected purely for its own sake.
— Kenton Smith