At Moogfest, a Demonstration of What Human and Machine Can Accomplish

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/arts/music/moogfest-festival-north-carolina.html

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DURHAM, N.C. — The music that ended the first night of Moogfest 2016 here late Thursday was patient and slowly evolving, an ambient blend of billowing sustained tones — floating in and out of dissonance — with the natural sounds of birds and insects, that was layered together onstage for nearly eight hours by the composer Robert Rich. There were passages that sounded like distant choirs and gentle patters of percussion; there were slow washes of harmonic tension and resolution. There was also another natural sound: audience members snoring.

It was one of Mr. Rich’s rare Sleep Concerts, his first in the United States since 2003, played for about 75 listeners — or hearers — most of whom snoozed on mattresses set up on the floor of a hotel ballroom. We dreamed, woke up fitfully to new expanses of music, perhaps glanced at what Mr. Rich was doing onstage and drifted off again. As the electronics tapered away for a final fade out of birdcalls, and the window shades opened to let in Friday’s daylight, I was wondering how the music had affected the dreams, and thinking that the music had been experimenting on us.

That’s the kind of speculation that Moogfest encouraged amid performances by musicians from all eras of electronic music: D.J.s, pop bands, rappers, electronic-music graybeards, makers of celestial consonances and makers of implacable noise. Instruments and interfaces, not genres or demographics, are at the core of the festival, which is now presented and programmed by the synthesizer company Moog Music. At Moogfest, the old opposition of human versus machine is replaced by a continuing inquiry: What can humans and machines accomplish together?

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Emmy Parker of Moog Music, one of the festival’s creative directors, said the event explores “the relationship between the engineer and the artist” as she introduced a keynote speech by the virtual-reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. He had written a “Symphony for Moogfest”; he started his speech by comparing the khene, an ancient Laotian mouth organ with 16 reed pipes, to a 16-bit digital instrument.

Among Moogfest’s headliners were Gary Numan, who added extra muscle, sinew and strobes to his stark, synthesizer-driven songs from the late 1970s; GZA, the Wu-Tang Clan rapper who drew shout-alongs for his 1990s rhymes; Laurie Anderson, telling stories about storytelling; Blood Orange, whose leader, Devonté Hynes, showed fancy footwork and an encyclopedic grasp of R&B; and Grimes, the peppy and subversive electronics-loving songwriter who reverse-engineered Top 10 pop on her 2015 album, “Art Angels.”

On Friday night, Grimes took “Scream,” a song from that album featuring a rap in Chinese by the Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes, and did her own rap in Russian instead. Throughout the festival, visitors could step into a tent and press on panels of stretchy fabric to change the mix of Grimes’s “Realiti,” playing in surround sound.

Moogfest has come and gone and returned since 2004, when it was a one-night club event in New York City. Its previous edition, held in 2014 in Asheville, N.C. (where Moog has its factory), lost $1.5 million, but sponsorships helped to revive Moogfest in Durham. This year’s festival had some difficulty adjusting to its new home. At times, crowds exceeded capacities and long lines stretched outside the Carolina Theater, a vintage movie palace, and Motorco Music Hall, a club. Still, Moogfest 2017 has already been announced for May 18-21 in Durham.

This year’s Moogfest had been largely booked when the North Carolina Legislature passed into law HB2, the so-called bathroom bill that requires people to use restrooms that correspond to their gender at birth and overrules local anti-discrimination ordinances. HB2 has led to boycotts of the state and cancellations of North Carolina concerts by Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam.

Moogfest made its opposition to the law clear. One of the keynote speakers was Dr. Martine Rothblatt, the chief executive of United Therapeutics and the author of “Virtually Human,” who is transgender. In her speech she envisioned a future of transplant organs grown from patients’ stem cells, and declared, “It is not someone’s anatomies that rule but their consciousnesses, their identities, their soul.” Store windows displayed fliers opposing the bill, and Moog’s “pop-up factory” at the festival, where employees were assembling and calibrating synthesizers amid a swarming crowd, prominently positioned a larger-than-life photo of Wendy (formerly Walter) Carlos, who recorded “Switched-On Bach” with an early Moog.

Moog Music has been a major part of the resurgence of modular synthesis, a return to analog methods after an era of all-too-neat digital sounds. Modular synthesizers are assemblies of modules — sound generators and sound shapers — that can act on one another in unpredictable ways, making unruly sounds. A widely used standard called Eurorack allows modules to interconnect, encouraging many small companies to manufacture their own modules; more than a dozen outfits shared a “modular marketplace” at Moogfest, demonstrating their capabilities in a thicket of patch cords. Some synthesizer tinkerers go even further, akin to steampunk style; Antenes demonstrated a synthesizer she had built around old telephone switchboard equipment, which also had patch-cord connectors.

The lineup also included synthesizer pioneers like Morton Subotnick, whose set moved from barely audible chirps to volcanic devastation and a gradual climb out from the rubble, and Suzanne Ciani, who sent dulcet and percussive sequences swirling around a quadraphonic sound system. Tyondai Braxton, formerly of Battles, summoned some of the abstract sounds of early electronic music, then kicked them into motion with dance beats.

At an opposite extreme — quiet, hazy, haunted — was Grouper, the solo project of the Oregon-based songwriter Liz Harris. She performed in shadows, gently strumming a guitar and singing whispery ballads blurred by reverb. But her video images utterly recast the songs: They were a rush of oncoming, amorphous shapes like headlights in a heavy rain, while an enginelike hum played between songs as if she were being spirited away to some scary place.

On Saturday afternoon, the First Presbyterian Church became a temple of resonances — electronically with Julianna Barwick, who looped her voice into a celestial choir, and acoustically with Daniel Bachman’s trio, playing homemade instruments: hurdy-gurdy-like cylinders holding eight strings that all played the same note building up overtones in a lingering drone as they were cranked faster. A louder, almost seismic drone, with ritualistic vocals that at one point suggested Tibetan throat singing, was deployed by the glacially slow metal band Sunn O))), as audience members were offered earplugs.

A three-part noise blast shook down some plaster in the Carolina Theater: deep subwoofer dread and grim threnodies by Ben Frost, looming apocalyptic rumbles and hollows from Tim Hecker, and then the more up-tempo but equally assaultive Oneohtrix Point Never. Kode9 used crisp digital tones and a video tour of a sterile architectural model, a “notel,” to open up dystopian hollows in dance music.

Jlin, a D.J.-producer associated with Chicago footwork, played hurtling, skittering tracks that weren’t always tied to dance music’s typical 4/4 time. Silver Apples, which was a duo in the late 1960s and is now just its vocalist, Simeon, used an imposing, asymmetrical construction of oscillators and effects pedals to generate nervy, repetitive, insistent and ultimately unstoppable tracks that now sound like precursors to bands like Suicide and Can.

One of Moogfest’s staples is a four-hour “digital sound installation” each afternoon, featuring musicians who usually play more conventional concerts. Greg Fox, the drummer for Liturgy and other strenuous projects, drummed as various synthesizer players joined him onstage, generating noises and drones. Early in the afternoon he was a human turbine, walloping fast and precise patterns; during the final hour, he was holding down slower tempos and then paused to sip some water and speak to the audience. “Drumming for four hours is hard,” he noted.

By day at Moogfest, there were also tech-minded presentations involving new gizmos and thoughts about the future — some dire, some optimistic. And there were master classes with performers and producers like Daniel Lanois (U2, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris). He answered questions about recording techniques in minute detail, citing brand names and model numbers. But he also insisted on perspective. “Tools don’t make music,” he reminded the audience amid the technical minutiae. “People make music with tools.”

Established 2004 in New York City. It was reconfigured as a multiday festival in 2010 in Asheville, N.C., and relocated this year to Durham.

What it is Part music festival, part science fair, part futurology symposium; a celebration of knobs, switches, patch cords and waveforms; a branding opportunity for Moog Music that welcomes competitors.

Attendance About 10,000 people each day for four days, as well as performers, instrument makers, tech visionaries and bright-eyed volunteers.

Number of events About 100 musical acts, along with speeches and panels about “the future of creativity,” demonstrations of newly invented instruments, “durational sound installations,” exhibitions of vintage synthesizers, visual-arts and virtual reality projects, master classes and all sorts of synthesizers to play (and play with).

Landscape Multiple locations in Durham, all within a mile of downtown: a former movie palace, armory, church, clubs.

Typical festivalgoer Unashamed instrument geek, male, anywhere from 20s to 60s, knows what a voltage-controlled oscillator is, wearing a T-shirt that was either a statement about gender politics or a picture of a vintage synthesizer. The kind of concertgoer who lingers after a set to photograph the equipment.

Moog employees working in a pop-up factory amid the swarm of visitors. IDEO’s Play-Sound synthesizer generating boops and bell tones set off by kids and adults knocking around beach balls suspended overhead.

Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic playing brief, spur-of-the-moment Minimoog solos for a few dozen people in the pop-up factory, bending notes and tones through familiar P-Funk basslines and stray thoughts. It was like watching Picasso doodling. Electronic musicians have proven that the beautiful harmonies of acoustics are no less natural to the human soul when rendered synthetically and technologically.