Tag: Memphis Concrète

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Memphis Concrète: Synth Fest is IRL Once More

W1ND0W (Photo: Jeremy Goodson)

When the days of lockdown struck in 2020, the Memphis Concrète Experimental Electronic Music Festival had to scrap plans for their fourth annual event. From 2017 to 2019, the gathering devoted to the unconventional sounds, rhythms, and textures of synthesizers, audio loops, and heavy processing had steadily gathered steam and a wider audience, culminating in the appearance of 2019’s headliners, Matmos. That momentum came to a screeching halt in the pandemic. And while a virtual version of the festival was held in 2021, the uncertainties of Covid’s Omicron variant prevented anything from happening last year.

That makes this week’s return to live Memphis Concrète performances at Crosstown Concourse very welcome, as the Green Room brightens up with the oscillating lights of synths once more, 3 to 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 17th, and 3 to 9 p.m. on Sunday, June 18th. Yet it’s more of a continuation of the Memphis Concrète brand than its rebirth: Even as the annual live festival has been on hold, the organization has promoted smaller shows throughout the year, such that Memphis Concrète has become a trusted name in electronic-leaning shows.

It’s no surprise, then, that the festival proper is more of a culminating endpoint to events that started last week and continue through the days leading to the weekend. Last Wednesday at the Hi-Tone saw a four-band mix of “ambient/noise/techno/hyperpop.” This Tuesday, the Memphis Listening Lab showcased the recordings of acts booked in the Green Room. And this Thursday, June 15th, will see Memphis Concrète take to the spacious Crosstown Theater, as festival founder Robert Traxler is joined by two collaborators — Revenge Body and Optic Sink’s Natalie Hoffman — in a live score to 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

“I’ve made a version of the movie with as much of the original sound taken out as possible — when there’s not dialogue — to give more room for what we’re doing,” says Traxler. “It’s a slightly modified version of the movie sound; I took out the sound, edited it, and put it back together.”

In the same gonzo spirit, the next night’s event will be a “Harsh Noise Karaoke” at the Lamplighter Lounge. “It’s not karaoke in the traditional sense,” explains Traxler, “but we’ll have a table with stuff that makes sound on it and some microphones, and you come and you play around with it, making some noise. It will be a user-activated thing. You know, turn some knobs and have some fun.”

Then comes the main attraction, a smorgasbord of 15 acts over two days, with four more “electroacoustic performances” tagged on at the end. While the festival has booked national touring acts more in the past, this year is somewhat more Memphis-centric, albeit with plenty of out-of-towners as well. Saturday’s headliner will be local synth heroes General Labor, who wowed audiences last summer with a live score to The Adventures of Prince Achmed. The group’s also known for their ’80s synth pop, and Traxler’s not sure which direction the band will go for the festival. “They’ve been really into pushing their sound in more experimental directions,” says Traxler. “I’m excited that they’re playing Memphis Concrète to showcase some of the new things they’re working on.”

One local act making their debut will be Stupid Lepton, whose music Traxler describes as “ambient and abstract and modular stuff. He does a lot with biometrics and he’ll have a plant with him on stage, hooked up with some wires and controlling the music.” Another Memphis group, W1ND0W, will bring some Sophocles to Sunday’s proceedings. “Because it’s Father’s Day, they’ll have a bunch of actors perform parts of Oedipus Rex, with microphones running through a vocoder.”

The grand finale will be a pet project of Traxler’s, though he’s not playing in it. Rather, the hour of “electroacoustic performance” will pair guest solo performers on acoustic instruments with electronic backing tracks, in a throwback to electronic music’s earliest days. “These are pieces that mix written scores with electronics. Two of them are classics from the ’60s and ’70s, with two newer composers for the other two,” says Traxler. The composer Milton Babbitt is familiar to many synthesizer fans, though his piece Philomel, which will showcase soprano Rebekah Alexander, is more obscure. The other compositions showcase clarinet, alto saxophone, and flute. Staging this segment of Memphis Concrète will be a dream come true for Traxler: “I’m super excited about this one.”

Visit memphisconcretemusic.com for details.

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Luís Seixas and the Thisco Duck

Luís Seixas (Photo: Jacques Granger)

The experimental music scene in Memphis is an elusive thing. It’s certainly out there, as evidenced by the Memphis Concrète music festivals, but a newcomer may find it hard to discover. That was certainly the case 12 years ago, when an electronic artist and co-manager of an experimental music label in Lisbon, Portugal, found himself in the Bluff City. Luís Seixas recalls those days, after his wife’s new position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital brought them both here, living in America for the first time.

“It was tough to find the people here,” he recalls now. “It took me a while to understand how things move in Memphis. I didn’t find the scene I was expecting to find in a city of this size. Then I came across Mike Honeycutt.” Honeycutt, an electronic musician who releases his work primarily on cassettes, had collected tapes that Seixas’ label partner, Fernando Cerqueira, had released decades before. “I was like, ‘He has tapes going back to the late 1980s! A Memphian with a radio show on WEVL!’” Seixas continues. “But he told me, ‘No, there’s not a scene. We’re struggling, it’s hard.’ And it was. Not finding a scene here was the strangest thing. I expected Memphis to be an epicenter, that would attract people, but regarding electronic music, I saw the opposite: People who were born and raised in Memphis then left for other parts of the United States.”

Seixas in turn may have become one of the scene’s best-kept secrets. Ever since he arrived here, he’s been helping to make that scene bigger, plugging Memphis artists directly into a network, centered in Lisbon, that reaches across Europe. Thanks to Seixas, Thisco (pronounced “disco”), the label that he and Cerqueira founded in 2000, has become a presence in the Mid-South. “We were about to leave Lisbon,” Seixas recalls of his pre-Memphis days, “and Fernando suggested I operate Thisco only in Memphis. But I said, ‘No, we’re going to have two headquarters, one in Lisbon and one in Memphis.’ Why not?”

By now, many local knob-twiddlers (including myself) have collaborated with Seixas, who creates his own music under the name Sci Fi Industries. And still more have benefited from the breath of fresh air he brought to that elusive experimental music scene. In 2012, when he was working for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (in the capacity of his trade as an art conservator), Seixas curated The Paik Sessions I – Music for the Vide-O-belisk, a collection of ambient pieces that paired well with Nam June Paik’s sculpture Vide-O-belisk (2002), then located in the rotunda of the museum. The following year, he compiled The Paik Sessions 2.

Since then, he’s become increasingly more active in local electronic music. “We released the compilation for Memphis Concrète, On Triangles, and that was totally supported and paid for by Thisco,” Seixas notes. “We gave carte blanche to [Memphis Concrète founder] Robert Traxler to pick the lineup, and of course we sent copies to Europe. We’ve also released albums by Robert, The Pop Ritual, Ihcilon (Paul Randall), and we’re still waiting on a few more to join us. The label just turned 20, and we’re still getting new artists.”

Alas, Seixas’ Memphis chapter is now coming to a close, as his art conservation work will soon take him to Florida. Yet it doesn’t appear that his labors in music will cease anytime soon. “I started Thisco partly because I’m kind of a librarian,” Seixas muses. “I want to preserve these things. I want to see what people are doing and put it out there. If I can document what was happening at this moment in time, I’ll do that. I guess that’s why I became an art conservator. I’m preserving something, and Thisco comes directly on the same path. It’s a way to capture what was going on in a moment. I know anyone can put their music on the web now, but sometimes they need that push. Someone saying, ‘This is good!’ There’s always this self-criticism. ‘I’m not good enough! Should I put this out?’ Or the opposite: They just put everything out without a filter. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you, ‘Well, maybe work a bit more on that one.’ So I think there’s still a role for people like me. Someone to say, ‘Do it this way, do it that way. But do it.’”
For more information, visit thisco.bandcamp.com.

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Memphis Concrète Goes Virtual and International in Three-Day Festival

Evicshen: "Very noisy, but very richly detailed and textured" (CREDIT: Arnaud Pagès)

Aside from all the punk rock, folk, blues, R&B, funk, soul and hip-hop that Memphis is known for, another scene has been gaining momentum here for some time: experimental electronic music. In 2017, this crystallized more than ever with the advent of the Memphis Concrète festival (and of course, the Memphis Flyer reported on it). If the depth and breadth of regional artists dedicated to all manner of synthesized and unorthodox music was impressive then, it’s only become more so as the festival continued to be staged every year since.

Every year except last year, of course, when COVID-19 put a stop to so many gatherings. And yet, drawing on an already-established tendency to stage shows featuring small handfuls of artists throughout the year, Memphis Concrète did just that practically as soon as lockdowns became common. Smaller virtual shows popped up at the organizers’ behest in March and April of 2020, but it was no substitute for the full-blown festivals that had been staged in and around Crosstown Concourse in previous years.

Now the festival is back in force, scheduled this Friday through Sunday. But, unlike many venues that have rushed to embrace live music again, Memphis Concrète is sticking with the virtual realm. I asked one of its principal organizers, Robert Traxler, about that and other details, and it soon became clear that, true to its innovative spirit, the festival is turning its embrace of the virtual into a positive asset.

Memphis Flyer: What will the festival look like this year, as you adhere to a wholly virtual, live-streamed approach?

Robert Traxler: It’s gonna be three days, 26 artists, a variety of genres. There will be a lot of musicians with very different approaches to music that can make you think about music differently, both local and scattered around. It’s a few hours over a whole weekend. You can drop in, drop out. There’s no cost to watch the stream on Twitch TV. It’s free, but we will have links on the website where you can donate to the artists. And all that money will go to the artists.

Would you say there’s a positive side to the virtual approach?

Yes, in that we are trying to connect with as many friends in other places as possible, to make use of the streaming format. We have one person who will be playing from Ireland, Nicholas Maloney, who’s actually from Mississippi. He played the first year of the festival as Blanket Swimming. Now he’s playing under his own name, and he’s in Ireland right now. Also, instead of waiting until people can come here, let’s let them come here virtually. True, things are opening up, but it still feels weird. I haven’t made it out to a show yet. It still seems kind of on the border. Some people might especially not want to attend a festival with a lot of artists, even now.

There are a lot of artists, spanning many styles, being featured. Who would you say the headliners are for the three nights?

On Friday, we have Duet for Theremin & Lap Steel. They played in Memphis at the Continuum Festival a few years ago. They’re from Atlanta. They’re awesome and their name describes them very well.
Also on Friday, we have Disaster Trees. That’s Kim, who is Belly Full of Stars, with her husband Chris. She does a lot of ambient and drone, with a little glitch. From what I’ve heard, this new project is kind of heavy drone. Really great stuff.

Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel (Credit: Jamie Harmon)

On Saturday, we have Eve Maret. She’s from Nashville and does a lot of synth-pop. She can get dancy, disco-y. But she put out an album just a few months ago that is much more abstract and experimental. So she has a rich variety of sounds, usually synthesizer-based.

And Post Doom Romance from Chicago is also on Saturday. This is a newer industrial ambient project by Michael Boyd, who played with us a few years ago. In this project, he’s playing with Chelsea Heikes, and they work with both sounds and visuals. The visuals are a big part of their set.

On Sunday we have Pas Musique. He’s from New York, and he works in a lot of styles. A lot of it is kind of psych-based. Experimental noise and ambient and a whole slough of things. And there’s also Evicshen. She’s now in San Francisco, a noise artist who’s worked with Jessica Rylan, who had a boutique synth company called Flower Electronics a while back. They made all these weird little boxes that made all kinds of crazy noises. Evicshen is very noisy, but also very richly detailed and textured. It has a lot of layers. I’m excited because her stuff is really awesome.

Overall, it has a similar mix to what we’ve had in the past. Some we’ve had before, but also a lot of new people. We tried to get as many local people who hadn’t played the festival before as we could. I didn’t want to have too many of one thing or sound together. Everything’s spread around.

No doubt some fans will want to boogie to the bleeps. Which artists veer more into EDM territory?

For those who are more interested in the dance side of things, CEL SHADE is very rhythmic. Argiflex. Some of Luct Melod’s stuff veers more to EDM. Eve Maret is more rhythmic or even poppy sometimes. Window can get kind of dancy. Some kind of straddle that line between ambient and rhythmic, like Signals Under Tests or Paul Vinsonhaler.

Memphis Concrète 2021 runs from Friday, June 25, through Sunday, June 27, live-streaming on Twitch TV. Free.