Leo Magnien: Clarières

Abstract

that conceptual space of materiality, virtual place, and virtual place as apparatus, and in a spiritual space where preexisting material features become part of virtual image (credit to virtual image scholar and professor Lisa Zaher). The concert’s final piece, “Moksha Black” by King Britt featuring Roba El-Essawy, disseminates sonospatial models that can be transduced (based on registered aspects) into one’s metaphysical space (which is cognitively and psychoacoustically entangled). For example, the initial voices are farther and larger in metaphysical space than physical space; then, a square-like tone cuts through in metaphysical space; and later, voice is physically still while circling and stuttering in metaphysical space. Towards the end, voices are vertical poles (in allocentric space) from which frequency spectra fall like glitter and sparks. “Sun Ra’s gift was understanding the passage of humankind through large swaths of time. . . . The sound of those insects. That continuity. Who’s to say that that sound . . . can’t be interpreted as a meaningful sequence of something like language abiding to something like a grammar?” (Thomas Stanley, in conversation with the reviewer). In his keynote address “You Haven’t Met the Captain of the Spaceship. . . Yet,” Thomas Stanley presented extensive info about interfacing with and interpreting Sun Ra’s teachings, including myth as tech—specifically, Alter Destiny, a leap into a zone of justice that is now possible because the original myth of dominion has gradually become unstable. It involves solving the many crises (e.g., racism, intergroup conflict, “extractive capitalism and the filth that goes along with this way of life,” potential mutually assured destruction, capitalist labor, an American empire whose populace is largely “distracted, paid off, sedated by . . . the fruits of oppression that happen in other peoples’ country”) predicated on that myth, simultaneously. This seems impossible, but the resolve “to be that broad in our attempts to ameliorate the situation is the starting point” (Stanley, in conversation with the reviewer). Sun Ra’s music contains messages that can help us question our fundamental beliefs rooted in that myth. The Sounds In Focus II concert begins with “The Shaman Ascending” by Barry Truax: a constantly circling vocal not circling in metaphysical space, through which spectral processes sculpt a spider-shaped cavern around me in allocentric and metaphysical space. In “Abwesenheit,” John Young clinically and playfully makes audible the air currents and stases in the room. Lidia Zielinska’s “Backstage Pass” treats idiomatic piano moments as seeds nourished with playful curiosity and passion, presented with spatial polymatic frequency poiesis in a room-sized piano bed. To start the Sounds Cubed II concert, centripetal whispers in “śūnyatā” by Chris Coleman construct connective tissue to the Cube’s center. In “Toys” by Orestis Karamanlis, flutters of sonic pulses along the perimeters form spatially balanced (with stable centers) patterns articulating shapes that map intuitively to one’s body. Remarkably, it’s easy to imagine one’s bodily sensors located on the pattern. The pattern articulates and secretes space in a manner similar to point clouds (and incidentally, it’s easy to imagine mirrors of the pattern in real time), but also requires particular speeds and temporal arrangements of pulses, inspiring further studies of virtual bodies and spatial sense. The Listening Lounge in the Cube presented Eric Lyon’s spatialization of Sun Ra’s mind-altering album Space Is The Place, in which spatial orientation and arrangement of interweaving lines of instruments construct a gigantic floating head, directional flashes of fire propelling a negative-sound rocket, a metaphysical hypercube, and spherical radiation of life from each sound source if in a denser medium. The audience was intensely focused, and the spatialization allowed many to hear new sounds in the album. This was a fitting closing to Cube Fest 2022, which was not only continually awe-inspiring but also a tremendous historical event prompting countless future experiments. I look forward to the next one.