What is Experimental Music? The
Olympia Festival of Experimental Musics
does not concern itself with answering this question directly,
but each year presents a very diverse group of performers, each
with their own very different approach to working with sound and
performance.
The Olympia
Strange Music Society was founded in 1995 by Arrington
de Dionyso and Jim McAdams, two KAOS
DJ's who agreed that while Olympia was certainly a fertile ground
for independent rock music, there were other genres of very visceral
music that were under-represented in the "scene".
As the festival grew over the years,
we attracted the support of the NonSequiter
Foundation, which has allowed us to invite selected artists
from outside the Northwest and even the USA. This year we are
very pleased to present Tori
Kudo’s legendary Maher Shalal Hash Baz, a nine
person orchestra from Japan. This is one of only a handful of
very rare appearances this group has ever made in the USA. Kudo
is known for composing entire sets of music the very day of a
concert, and cultivating a particular aesthetic of fragility in
his compositions, music teetering on the edge of falling completely
apart, at turns raw and naïve, mysterious and captivating. |
