Tag: Steve Bates

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  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?

(FdW) Vital Weekly

Address: http://www.sendandreceive.org