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Also this issue: Mould Spores Sand People Like Clockwork Snapcase/ Boy Sets Fire Dave Brubeck Isis Songs: Ohia Rilo Kiley |
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October 24-30, 2002
music
 CIRCUIT BROKER: "Philadelphia is a strange place," says DiAngelo. "I'm certain I would tremble if I knew exactly to what extent it impacts my work." |
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Fingernail's Adam DiAngelo hooks Philly up with Sonic Circuits.
It’s been said the artist-as-curator is as dunderheaded as the client-as-lawyer. Despite that, iconoclasts like Sonic Youth, Wire and David Bowie have made music-fests like Meltdown, in the U.K., a buoyant blend of oddball objectivity and fascinating subjectivity.
For a first foray into Philadelphia, the American Composers Forum's Sonic Circuits Electronic Music Festival chose (or was chased by) homeboy Adam DiAngelo, the 24-year-old, single-cell-unit behind Fingernail.
"My compositions are deliberate," says DiAngelo, from his South Philly home, of the math-moog-ishness of his CDs like A Childhood in Aeden. "They are the sum total of my technique and emotion governed by intellect. My best compositions make me forgetful. I make sounds become music. Maybe others can do this, though no one ever seems to."
What no one else bothered to do was bring Sonic Circuit here. The electronic-media festival seeks the best and brightest, dealing with electronic aestheticism in intellectual fashion. "The American Composers Forum is a bit of a mystery to me," says DiAngelo, who started his quest with a desire to participate. Magnanimously, he has decided not to, opting instead to organize and present British woodwind-based ambient droner Peter Green, Washington, D.C.'s improvisational electro-acoustic-maker EBSK and Philadelphians Eric Sherman and Erin Anderson.
"ACF don't admit me to secret meetings. I understand the fest to be an area between academia and very nice pop music. Philadelphia has an awareness of electronic music, so it was natural that Sonic Circuits would eventually find its way here -- it just needed a little coercing." A year after his initial cajole, DiAngelo made up his own criteria of who and what his Sonic Fest would sound like: Simply, nothing like anything typically being played in Philadelphia.
"Philadelphia is a strange place," says DiAngelo. "I'm certain I would tremble if I knew exactly to what extent it impacts my work. There is a great breadth of work within the city but some of the more distinctive artists are neglected. Furthermore, exposure to new sounds could only benefit artists living and working here."
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New sounds come fast and furious (or, maybe that should be slow and languidly). Eric "Octorock" Sherman presents his brittle, elegiac Reichian composition "The Establishment of the Twelve" and EBSK's John Rickman and Eric Bruns improv on sampler and clarinet. Norfolk, England's Peter Green and his team of eight are preparing an original composition especially for our town: "Philaex."
"They are based on the idea of the [alleged] ŒPhiladelphia Experiment' carried out by the U.S. military's top secret research in World War II," says Green in an e-mail. "The music follows the flow of various stages of the experiment from its high-energy electromagnetic encapsulation to the perceived space transposition and liquification of altered states."
Where altered states are concerned, there may be no finer a local practitioner of such than Erin Anderson, one half of Flowchart, a 700 Club DJ, a visual artist and a sound designer. Her spontaneity makes her stuttering, Stockhausian debut PAMS and Other Conspiracies (Zenapolae) -- under the nom de plume Fidgets -- as jarring and, even dangerous-sounding, as it is beautiful.
"Adam asked me to play something to counteract the small ensemble piece that Green is performing," says Anderson. In similar fashion to the static, screeching cut-up collage of PAMS, Anderson will record her rehearsals, then remix them live.
"When I decided to do a solo project, I figured having a moniker would be fun," says Anderson. "I was bouncing around with using the word midget, but couldn't figure an adjective that I liked with it. Fidget evolved from there, descriptive of my nature to a certain degree and how the music sounds. I like things that are a bit Œoff.'"
If the double-edged nature of what Anderson and Green have wrought and brought separately is any indication of what DiAngelo's put together, Sonic Circuits is definitely "on."
But being merely "on" isn't everything to DiAngelo. Sonic Circuit -- unlike many a festival outing -- isn't agenda-laden or forcedly fraught with purpose. Instead, this cumulative combination of sounds cool, crisp and moody is much in tandem with his own CDs, the autumnal Childhood in Aeden and meditative So Backwards.
"My music makes me forgetful," says DiAngelo of shimmering spectral music and eerie repetitive-string-layered suites. Still, when push comes to shove, his curating of Sonic Circuits -- a gig he hopes to continue with locally, as well as perform with, since ACF hosts over 75 gigs a year -- means something very still and silent to him this time. "At the very least, I'll be able to just sit back comfortably and enjoy the noise."
Sonic Circuits, Thu., Oct. 24, 7 p.m., free, The ARCH Building, University of Pennsylvania, 3601 Locust Walk.
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