Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

SpringFest 2013: a week of experimental music

UCSD hosts multi-venue experimental music and performance art festival.

A couple of years ago, my former roommate Eli took me to a party on a fire road in the hills of Descanso, where a handful of UCSD kids had built a small stage and projector screen to showcase a night of experimental, atemporal, noisey, and just plain unusual music.

I had a vague idea of what to expect knowing that Eli, a circuit tinkerer and dedicated sonic insurgent, would be performing under his noise alias ’60s Residue.


But my mind was blown anyways by spazztic bass and drum duo Penis Hickey and, later, circuit burning group Digital Sound Lab Orchestra, who melted a rare Casio Symphonytron 8000 keyboard with blowtorches while playing it, just to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvHaRzyu1Aw


http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2013/apr/03/43108/


Starting on Thursday, April 11, some familiar faces from the Unusual Encounter noisefest in Descanso will be putting on Springfest 2013: a week of experimental music at UCSD venues including the Birch Aquarium, Che Café, and the Conrad Prebys Music Center.

Half of Penis Hickey (and tuba/vox dragcore duo Aquapuke), Clint McCallum will present his final composition as a UCSD student on SpringFest’s last day - Thursday, April 18.

“It's a major work incorporating classical and rock instruments,” says SpringFest organizer Adam Tinkle, “and features many of Clint's trademarks: punishingly physical sounds, performance art aesthetics, and generally creepy weirdness, this time in the context of an evening length ritualistic cabaret.”

Tinkle notes that other out-of-the-concert-hall weirdcore events include an immersive walk-through concert/installation at Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, which will feature live performers spread throughout the aquarium responding to the sea life inside the tanks, and ambient music collaboratively realized between electronic musicians and Scripps Institute of Oceanography researchers.

The aquarium event will be followed by a showcase of exotica, smooth jazz, and noise projects at the Che Cafe (both on 4/14).

Also, don’t miss the sock puppet show about a bee with a leather daddy, in which all the voices will be electronically processed (4/11).

Admission to all SpringFest events are FREE, except the Aquarium concert ($10).


Thursday April 11

Songs in Ulterior Time

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

A program of new and recent vocal chamber music composed and performed by UCSD graduate students and friends. Texts from Chaucer, Laxness, and sundials.This concert, with reception to follow, inaugurates the Department of Music’s annual Springfest, a showcase for the innovative work of its graduate composers, performers and interdisciplinary artists.

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Pop Suckets

9 p.m.

Experimental Theatre

Cute and unpredictable animal puppets, portrayed by musicians pushing at the extremes of vocal expression, try (and mostly fail) to stay out of a series of recursively nested Hells. The show will function as a series of episodes for children's television, investigating themes such as: how flowers mimic the shapes of sexually desirable insects to fool the insects into pollinating them through attempted mating; how the development of telecommunications electronics is the result of aliens programming us to extract and collect rare earth metals; the alienation and disempowerment of the information age.


Friday April 12

Posing Nothing

8 p.m.

Concert Hall

Posing Nothing is a recital featuring pianist, Todd Moellenberg, in collaboration with Matt Savitsky, a visual artist in the UCSD Visual Arts MFA program. According to a script of stage commands, Moellenberg will perform calculated movements between pieces within built stage elements created by Savitsky. The collaboration explores the semantics of symbolic gesture, and the role it serves in communicating the self and its absence in a musical and theatrical context. The recital includes the music of composers Chris Dench, Jonathan Harvey, George Benjamin, and Harrison Birtwistle.

Sunday April 14

Springfest @ Birch Aquarium

6:00 p.m.

2300 Expedition Way, La Jolla, CA 92037 (To get to the Birch Aquarium, Take I-5 to La Jolla Village Drive. Go west one mile. Turn left on Expedition Way. ) An evening of electronic, ambient, and live music in the varied environments of the Birch Aquarium. Wander through the galleries and enjoy the dreamlike atmosphere created by musicians responding to the varied sea life. $10 cover includes aquarium admission ($8 members and UCSD Students)


Springfest @ Che Café

8 p.m.

Che Cafe, Scholars Drive, just downhill from La Jolla Playhouse Complex UCSD’s music department is known for producing contemporary music with cutting edge aesthetics and technologies. But many of its students moonlight as DJs, noise and punk musicians. Free vegan food, handbills, graphic scores, and twisted beats for you to writhe to!


Tuesay, April 16

Lightness and Darkness

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

9 settings of Lorine Niedecker and the 9 settings of Celan, by Harrison Birtwistle, paired with a world premiere by graduate composer Ryan Welsh.

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Maiden Voyage

9 p.m.

Concert Hall

Pianist/composer Kyle Adam Blair presents a night of world premieres: his own 12-movement "Microscope" suite, and other solo piano works by his collaborators and friends


Thursday, April 18

Language, as a music / six marginal pretexts for composition

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

Benjamin Boretz's seminal 1978 text/music work invokes relationships between the written word, the language(s) of music, and the music of language. Composed in six sections, this 90-minute multi-media work features original piano music by Boretz, alongside his spoken text and Irving Berlin's 1925 song "Remember".

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Devotion of Union, Collapse of Pleasure

9 p.m.

Experimental Theatre

Part cabaret, part sound installation, part religious ceremony, this new concert length piece explores ecstatic experience in the context of contemporary social and political identifications.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all

Previous article

San Diego Holiday Experiences

As soon as Halloween is over, it's Christmas time in my mind
Next Article

Live Five: Songwriter Sanctuary, B-Side Players, The Crawdaddys, Saint Luna, Brawley

Reunited, in the round, and onstage in Normal Heights, East Village, Little Italy, Encinitas

A couple of years ago, my former roommate Eli took me to a party on a fire road in the hills of Descanso, where a handful of UCSD kids had built a small stage and projector screen to showcase a night of experimental, atemporal, noisey, and just plain unusual music.

I had a vague idea of what to expect knowing that Eli, a circuit tinkerer and dedicated sonic insurgent, would be performing under his noise alias ’60s Residue.


But my mind was blown anyways by spazztic bass and drum duo Penis Hickey and, later, circuit burning group Digital Sound Lab Orchestra, who melted a rare Casio Symphonytron 8000 keyboard with blowtorches while playing it, just to see.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvHaRzyu1Aw


http://sandiegoreader.com/users/photos/2013/apr/03/43108/


Starting on Thursday, April 11, some familiar faces from the Unusual Encounter noisefest in Descanso will be putting on Springfest 2013: a week of experimental music at UCSD venues including the Birch Aquarium, Che Café, and the Conrad Prebys Music Center.

Half of Penis Hickey (and tuba/vox dragcore duo Aquapuke), Clint McCallum will present his final composition as a UCSD student on SpringFest’s last day - Thursday, April 18.

“It's a major work incorporating classical and rock instruments,” says SpringFest organizer Adam Tinkle, “and features many of Clint's trademarks: punishingly physical sounds, performance art aesthetics, and generally creepy weirdness, this time in the context of an evening length ritualistic cabaret.”

Tinkle notes that other out-of-the-concert-hall weirdcore events include an immersive walk-through concert/installation at Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, which will feature live performers spread throughout the aquarium responding to the sea life inside the tanks, and ambient music collaboratively realized between electronic musicians and Scripps Institute of Oceanography researchers.

The aquarium event will be followed by a showcase of exotica, smooth jazz, and noise projects at the Che Cafe (both on 4/14).

Also, don’t miss the sock puppet show about a bee with a leather daddy, in which all the voices will be electronically processed (4/11).

Admission to all SpringFest events are FREE, except the Aquarium concert ($10).


Thursday April 11

Songs in Ulterior Time

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

A program of new and recent vocal chamber music composed and performed by UCSD graduate students and friends. Texts from Chaucer, Laxness, and sundials.This concert, with reception to follow, inaugurates the Department of Music’s annual Springfest, a showcase for the innovative work of its graduate composers, performers and interdisciplinary artists.

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Pop Suckets

9 p.m.

Experimental Theatre

Cute and unpredictable animal puppets, portrayed by musicians pushing at the extremes of vocal expression, try (and mostly fail) to stay out of a series of recursively nested Hells. The show will function as a series of episodes for children's television, investigating themes such as: how flowers mimic the shapes of sexually desirable insects to fool the insects into pollinating them through attempted mating; how the development of telecommunications electronics is the result of aliens programming us to extract and collect rare earth metals; the alienation and disempowerment of the information age.


Friday April 12

Posing Nothing

8 p.m.

Concert Hall

Posing Nothing is a recital featuring pianist, Todd Moellenberg, in collaboration with Matt Savitsky, a visual artist in the UCSD Visual Arts MFA program. According to a script of stage commands, Moellenberg will perform calculated movements between pieces within built stage elements created by Savitsky. The collaboration explores the semantics of symbolic gesture, and the role it serves in communicating the self and its absence in a musical and theatrical context. The recital includes the music of composers Chris Dench, Jonathan Harvey, George Benjamin, and Harrison Birtwistle.

Sunday April 14

Springfest @ Birch Aquarium

6:00 p.m.

2300 Expedition Way, La Jolla, CA 92037 (To get to the Birch Aquarium, Take I-5 to La Jolla Village Drive. Go west one mile. Turn left on Expedition Way. ) An evening of electronic, ambient, and live music in the varied environments of the Birch Aquarium. Wander through the galleries and enjoy the dreamlike atmosphere created by musicians responding to the varied sea life. $10 cover includes aquarium admission ($8 members and UCSD Students)


Springfest @ Che Café

8 p.m.

Che Cafe, Scholars Drive, just downhill from La Jolla Playhouse Complex UCSD’s music department is known for producing contemporary music with cutting edge aesthetics and technologies. But many of its students moonlight as DJs, noise and punk musicians. Free vegan food, handbills, graphic scores, and twisted beats for you to writhe to!


Tuesay, April 16

Lightness and Darkness

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

9 settings of Lorine Niedecker and the 9 settings of Celan, by Harrison Birtwistle, paired with a world premiere by graduate composer Ryan Welsh.

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Maiden Voyage

9 p.m.

Concert Hall

Pianist/composer Kyle Adam Blair presents a night of world premieres: his own 12-movement "Microscope" suite, and other solo piano works by his collaborators and friends


Thursday, April 18

Language, as a music / six marginal pretexts for composition

7 p.m.

Concert Hall

Benjamin Boretz's seminal 1978 text/music work invokes relationships between the written word, the language(s) of music, and the music of language. Composed in six sections, this 90-minute multi-media work features original piano music by Boretz, alongside his spoken text and Irving Berlin's 1925 song "Remember".

Light refreshments will be provided between the shows.


Devotion of Union, Collapse of Pleasure

9 p.m.

Experimental Theatre

Part cabaret, part sound installation, part religious ceremony, this new concert length piece explores ecstatic experience in the context of contemporary social and political identifications.

Sponsored
Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

BRIM: Eve Beglarian and Mary Rowell @ Space 4 Art, May 10

Next Article

Classical music hidden in the city

Pop Quiz: Locate San Diego's classical music halls
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader