From October 9–12, Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound will celebrate its 15th anniversary in various venues around Winnipeg. The festival, which celebrates experimental music and sound art, will feature performances, screenings, installation pieces, and artist talks.
The theme of this year’s Send + Receive festival is “transcendence.” Artists participating in the festival are free to explore this theme in any way they choose. According to festival director Crys Cole, “Most interpretations of this theme evoke thoughts of mysticism, ritual, trance, and the like.” Other interpretations range from “seeking the miraculous in the ordinary” to “communication with the afterlife.”
The festival is hosting sound and music artists from all over the world, including Swedish duo Sons of God. These two artists, Leif Elggren and Kent Tankred, have been collaborating as Sons of God since 1988. Their work blurs the boundary between performance, music, and visual arts, falling outside of “traditional aesthetic boundaries.” Sons of God, or Guds Söner in Swedish, describe their art as “an investigation of a mental airspace [where] the aural aspect is important, but equal care is devoted to the visual.” Sons of God will be performing on Oct. 11.
Send + Receive is also welcoming American artists Tony Conrad and Charlemagne Palestine. Both are veteran artists who greatly influenced drone-based music. Conrad, who is “a pioneering force behind the evolution of American minimalism,” creates droning, mesmerizing music that he categorizes as “eternal music.” Conrad often uses long duration, amplification, and precise pitch to explore the nature of sound. He is also a visual artist, filmmaker, writer, and lecturer.
Charlemagne Palestine also emerged from the American minimalist scene, but takes a different approach from Conrad. Palestine’s more visceral work creates a complex and lush sound that is meant to envelop his audience, invoking a “ritualistic atmosphere.” Palestine’s body of work includes music and performance, installation art, video, and sculpture, but the artist is best known for “long, intense performances where he plays and sings wearing brightly coloured scarves, sipping cognac and surrounded by his brood of stuffed animals.” His work with ritualism and use of shamanic symbolism in his art make him an ideal addition to the transcendence-themed Send + Receive festival.
Local artist Curran Faris, under the name Greenhouse, will also be performing. Greenhouse uses a guitar as the primary instrument to explore non-traditional, non-guitar-based soundscapes, creating sprawling and immersive sounds.
Other artists taking part in the festival include Montreal’s La Révélateur and Magneticring from Vancouver. La Révélateur combines electronic music and video to create a fusion of sound and visuals that inspire and inform one another. The visual half of the duo, Sabrina Ratté, will also be giving a free artist talk about her work on Oct. 11.
American artist Christine Sun Kim will also be active in the festival. Though deaf from birth, Kim explores the aural world through her sound art. Her work focuses on the politics of sound, “reflecting on her own experience of reading and learning sound etiquette by mirroring other people’s actions and reactions.” Kim will be performing as part of both the Send + Receive festival and the Arts and Disability Network’s See Me Hear festival. She will also be giving artist talks, and her visual artwork can be seen on display at Parlour Coffee until Oct. 21.
Send + Receive is also hosting Voices From Beyond: The EVP Project, a curated collection of works inspired by the Electronic Voice Phenomenon. EVP is a paranormal phenomena that manifests through technological mediums such as radio, white noise, computers, telephones, and other devices to communicate with the spirit world. Voices From Beyond is a collection of work from 11 female artists from Winnipeg, Montreal, and New York. The project will take place in various downtown venues throughout the festival.
Festival passes are sold at Into the Music and Plug In ICA. Individual entry can be paid for all events as well. For more information on the festival and a full event calendar, visit sendandreceive.org.
