INTERFACES
Cluster Festival
290 McDermot Avenue
Winnipeg
27 March – 3 April 2015
Opening 27 March . 20h
Cluster 2015 marks two extraordinary new collaborations: the first with Toronto’s Vector Festival 2015 in co-presenting the Impossible Architectures video game art exhibit (guest curated by mrghosty aka Skot Deeming), and the second with former Winnipegger Eliot Britton becoming Cluster’s third co-Director.
“Cluster continually forces me to confront assumptions about art, and to reconsider what is feasible regarding community and collaboration. Every year I am genuinely surprised and this is a rare and special thing,” says Eliot Britton.
This year will be no different.
Interfaces are shared points, boundaries, or continuums where multiple systems or individuals meet and interact. Cluster has taken this to heart, investigating the intersections between communities, humans, bodies, avatars, systems, psychologies, histories, models, musics, instruments, surfaces, and textures — to name a few. In short, INTERFACE is a celebration of everything Cluster has been about since year one: optimistically forging a new path forward through joyous exploration of endless possibility.
Eliot Britton, Luke Nickel, and Heidi Ouellette, co-Directors
Click here for tickets and here for map.
CLUSTER 2015 // INTERFACE // EVENTS
PLUMES
Friday, March 27, 2015
Doors: 7:30pm, Show: 8:00pm
co-presented by núna(now)
Cluster 6 opens with two acts that flirt with, hop across, and ultimately breach the boundaries of countless musical genres.
First: Cellist and composer Fjóla Evans presents a solo set of ambient experimental sound based on field-study of Icelandic folk songs and a vocal intoning of epic poetry called Rímur.
Second: Plumes Ensemble, a hybrid pop/classical group originating from Montreal, performs a set of mostly original songs with detours into the oeuvres of Bartok and Berio. Expect extended techniques, gleaming electronics, and complex layers of minimal melodies.
SELF
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Doors: 7:30pm, Show: 8:00pm
SELF: amplified, visualized, digitized, reified, problematized, analyzed, dualized —
First Half: Winnipeg’s darling chanteuse Sarah Jo Kirsch sings a new composition by Zach Bales while being sonically and visually transformed into a digital avatar. New York duo foci + loci bring video games off the couch and onto the stage, leading an army of technology-bearing improvisers (including the XIE) in an epic showdown between the real and the imagined.
Second Half: Gabriel Dharmoo, a Montreal composer, singer, and improviser presents his Anthropologies Imaginaires showcasing the virtuosity, versatility and strangeness of the human voice. This significant 45-minute work pits the real world Dharmoo against a projected mockumentary of experts while he sings in countless virtuosic voices from imagined cultures and folklores.
PLAY
Thursday, April 2, 2015
Doors 7:30pm, Show: 8:00pm, PLAYTIME: 9:30pm
Part concert, part electronic playground: PLAY allows you to hear artists working with unique electronic instruments and then try them out yourself in a friendly, casual atmosphere.
Concert: Solo electronic set by Winnipeg whiz Kerey Harper // Sweden’s Fredrik Gran mixes the Reactable with Montreal’s Architek Percussion // Myriam Bleau spins her beautiful hand-made turn-table-tops in Soft Revolvers // foci + loci uses video game map editors as virtual stages to create playable immersive soundscapes. They will perform the premiere of ‘Another Kind of Spiral’ by Tamara Yadao which is made possible by a commissioning grant from the Jerome Fund for New Music through the American Composer’s Forum // Ghostly, a short video by Montreal’s Maxime Corbeil-Perron
Playtime: Take your turn at the Reactable (made famous by Björk on her Volta tour), give Myriam Bleau’s Soft Revolvers a spin, jam with foci + loci (or just play video games for a while in the Impossible Architectures exhibit next door), and explore Maxime Corbeil-Perron’s video Ghostly in a new interactive version: House.
METATRON
Friday, April 3, 2015
Doors: 7:30pm, Show: 8:00pm
co-presented by GroundSwell
Metatron is a technological tour de force that rampages through the audible past. From 1920 to 2015, each movement explores a significant period in the progression of consumer music technology. Architek Percussion returns to Cluster in a virtuosic feature-length concert, finishing the 2015 festival not with a whimper, but a bang!
Featuring: Antiprism – Jennifer Bachynsky (Precursor Residency) // Residual Productivity – Fredrik Gran // Please rate the success of this call – Fjóla Evans (winner of GroundSwell’s 2014 Emerging Composers Competition) // Tempo Deluxe – Myriam Bleau & Architek Percussion // City? – a film by Patrick Saint-Denis // Metatron – Eliot Britton
CLUSTER 2015 EXHIBITS
Impossible Architectures: Glitch, Decay and Structure in Digital Worlds
March 27-29 and April 2-3, 2015
Urban Shaman Gallery
Curated by mrghosty aka Skot Deeming and co-presented by Vector Festival 2015.
Pop-up Performances by Christopher Willes
March 27-31, 2015
Various Locations
Specimens Gardens by Barb Flemington
April 2 & 3, 2015
ace art gallery [Flux Gallery]
Installation by Rich Jeanson
March 27-29, April 2-3, 2015
Urban Shaman Gallery
[Marvin Francis Media Gallery]
Presented as a part of the ACI Mentorship Program 2014/15
sasha amaya 