KcEMA Presents CULTURAL TRENDS, 12/3

For three seasons, the Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) has been introducing audiences to the cutting edge of electronic music and video being created in the Kansas City area.  For Current Trends, KcEMA is looking further, bringing examples of the most innovative work composed across the U.S. and internationally to Urban Culture Project's La Esquina for an exciting evening of sound and image on December's First Friday December 3.

The works selected for this performance were inspired by sources varying from the immediately relevant to the utterly timeless. 

Mike McFerron's Prelude to You Brought This On Yourself was composed as accompaniment to a play exploring the physical and emotional abuse experienced by an openly homosexual high school student.  In the composer's words, the work "attempts to comment on a human collective intolerant of an individual voice, who is not asking to be understood or even heard, but simply allowed to exist." 

Bret Battey's Sinus Aestum draws its inspiration from the lunar plain of the same name, smooth and dark, "articulated by threads of white dust, like the tips of flowing waves."  In both the music and video, algorithmic processes unfold in a fashion that parallels that image of the distant plain.
For A'aa, Matthew Burtner looked a little closer to home than the moon's surface.  He was not only inspired by Guatemalan lava flows, but included recordings of these flows in his deeply meditative, ecological work.

 Jeffrey Hass's Magnetic Resonance Music draws on the personal experience of having an MRI, during which he "focused on the bizarre, strident, extremely loud noises and complex rhythms the machine was making and how they might be incorporated into a musical composition."
Christopher Burns's Sawtooth incorporates the element of visual performance, by translating the motions of a live performer into both music and animation.
In Phoenix, Robert Ratcliffe "explores the possibility of combining characteristic features of synthetic-driven electronic dance music genres such as acid house and techno" with the characteristic elements of instrumental and electroacoustic composition.

And 2BTextures is the product of a collaboration between Composer Elainie Lillios and visual artist Bonnie Mitchell.  The two movement work of abstract animation "takes viewers on an integrated sonic and visual journey into a surrealistic environment influenced by nature."

The Kansas City Electronic Music and Arts Alliance (KcEMA) was founded in 2007 to encourage and develop understanding and appreciation of electronic music and to create an expansive sense of community for electronic musicians and other artists in the Kansas City Area. KcEMA organizes concerts of electronic music and collaborative projects with generative and performing artists.  KcEMA provides a forum for electronic musicians and artists in other media to collaborate, exchange ideas, and grow as an interactive, supportive community.

Images attached: stills from Elainie Lillios and Bonnie Mitchell's 2BTextures (left) and Bret Battey's Sinus Aestum
 
Urban Culture Project is an initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, an organization dedicated to making Kansas City a place where artists and art thrive. Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.charlottestreet.org.

 

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