Halim and Pauline

Well, I started my festival day by attending a workshop called The Expanded Instrument System, with electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros. For a frame of reference? She’s worked with the likes of David Tudor, Philip Glass, and John Cage in her time, and one of her favorite compositions involved 10 water bottle players, and 5 apple box players, in the sixties. Pauline was experimenting with loops, reverbs and delay well before most working musicians were born. At this workshop she told us a bit about her philosphies and styles, and used some software she’s been developing (shareware!) in Max/MSP.

And the coolest part? She’s extremely maternal and playful. When asked about musicians who dislike their sounds being changed so much, she simply responded, “Well, that’s ok. You either wanna play with me or you don’t. There’s room for more sandboxes.” When asked about non-musicans and how they work with her sounds, she said, “Well, after a while, people start to listen,” implying that when people listen, it’s the first step towards collaboration, play, making music and they can even “begin to improvise” their performance, represented sonically.

Halim El-Dabh was the big headline later that night; and what a sweetheart this guy is! He literally offered to compose music for the party if my wife and I wanted to marry again, and I spent about 30 mins just chatting away to him about his days as a farmer, and how had become an “international composer” overnight after playing with some wire recordings (and before that, he was neither international, nor a composer). The experimental to which I’m referring is circa 1944 (he playe dit alongside some recent work last night), and Halim is widely considered to be the first Electronic Composer (certainly the first African one, coming from Egypt).

Last night, Halim was collaborating with the likes of Blake Tyson, Pops Mohamed and some gymnasts on trampoline. But the real highlight was George Lewis doing some trippy trombone (pictured below, left – thanks Kaganof!). Man that was the highlight of the whole evening. Beautiful ambience that I never knew a trombone could produce.

And most of these dudes are cheeky, funny buggers ;)