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Concert Tue Nov 16 2010
The Flickering of Sowing Time
The fall season of Lampo has proven to be one of the most conceptually unified in years. All of the performers this time around mate home-built, tactile electronics to powerful, minimalist filmic images, macheteing out new swaths of the electronic jungle for intrepid explorers.
Joe Grimm, an interdisciplinary Chicago-based musician and composer, presents his work for circuit-bent 16 mm projectors that trigger light-sensitive audio electronics at Columbia University, 916 S. Wabash, Room 214. (Admission is $10, $5 for students.)
Grimm's methods here are straightforward to describe, but fascinating: A circuit-bent 16mm projector transmits flickering lights onto a screen. In front of the screen, a collection of light-sensitive receptors are dangling, picking up the light's colors and intensities. This in turn triggers the audio machinery, building and swelling into a waterfall of cascading electronics. Grimm's background in philosophy and, to use his words, "the troubled legacy of minimalism" has directed him to create his work as an act of full sensory immersion. At all times, the things you're seeing are controlling the things you're hearing. It's all one great pulsating organism surrounding you.
The list of bands and composer with whom Grimm has collaborated is astounding and wide-ranging: Alvin Lucier, Glen Branca, Lucky Dragons, the Dirty Projectors, Black Forest/Black Sea, Geoff Mullen, Pleasurehorse, and Lightning Bolt. Fans of the new renaissance of vintage synth-driven exploration owe it to themselves to check out Grimm's process-driven tone bath.
