A film and performance festival on Wednesdays in June
Sponsored by Amoeba Music
Join us as we explore the sometimes eccentric, but always ecstatic, ventures of composers and musicians who embrace the odder edges of sonic pleasure.
It was the “tyranny of the twelve-tone scale” that led rebel composer Harry Partch to construct the Surrogate Kithara, Marimba Eroica, Chromolodeon, and Cloud-Chamber Bowls, creating alternatives in tone and timbre. Partch's instruments were fantastical, he said, not by design but by “philosophic purpose.” This purposeful impulse has found exquisite expression in a broad community of instrument builders who seek sound possibilities clearly outside of traditional acoustic experience. This can be anything aural, from the PVC pipes turned into propulsive percussion by From Scratch, to the slender glass keys of the Baschets' Cristal; from Ellen Fullman's Long Stringed Instrument, a multitonal drone device 100 feet in length, to clothes-drying racks, miked then struck with chopsticks by The Cleaning Women. While recorded portraits and performance are at the center of The Key of Z, each evening will be accented with live presentations by some of the Bay Area's most delirious sound practitioners.
Curated by Steve Seid