Fans of weird, experimental music can rejoice this weekend: The contemporary music organization Bang on a Can's fourth annual Long Play festival kicks off today and will run through Sunday. At venues around Brooklyn, including Roulette, BAM, Pioneer Works, and Fort Greene Park, festivalgoers will have the opportunity to hear some of today's most adventurous musicians. Weekend passes are $235, and day passes are $95.
At a preview for this weekend's Long Play festivities in the Public Records sound room on Thursday night, I got a taste of what New Yorkers can expect.
In one performance, ambient composer Tim Hecker was joined under the haze of fog machine by electronic musician Otonashi Fumiya and trumpet player Alex Zhang Hungtai, who is also known as Last Lizard. Attendants at the door handed out complementary ear plugs. A friend of mine told me that the last time he saw Hecker perform, he had gotten absolutely "blasted," and his ears were ringing the next day.
Inside, I took my place next to a guy in a dad cap that read "outsider art." We were blasted, alright, with a smear of trumpet and electronic sounds, some of which could have been voices, others of which were definitely synthesized. Hecker loomed in the background, twiddling knobs that emitted oceanic sweeps of sub-bass, Otonashi carved sounds from some unfathomable digital instrument covered in lights and buttons, and long breaths from Hungtai's trumpet compounded, harmonizing with themselves via a looper. The three created an illusion of a vast space housed within the sound system. In the fog, it looked like Hungtai blew the horn for an hour straight, like he was really a statue of a trumpet player.
By the end, the performance was less about sound and more about feeling. I felt like I had forgotten all the possibilities music contains, but had just remembered.
If you're interested in getting blasted by contemporary classical and experimental music, check out some of what Long Play has on offer this weekend. Here's what I'm most looking forward to: