DEAF

Well I'll never get those two hours back. Tonight I went to a gig as part of the Dublin Electronic Art Festival, in an old converted church. Man oh man, I dragged Keiko along thinking it would be an interesting mix of electronic music and traditional asian instruments. In fact I'm pretty sure that's what it said on the feckin website. The venue promised to be interesting - a spooky medieval church recently restored. The first player was a Japanese lady playing a traditional koto, but from the moment she started until she finished I couldn't make out anything that would resemble music. Despite the obvious passion she had, it was audio equivalent of abstract art to my untrained ears, sounding like the electronic version of a cat walking across a piano keyboard ..absolutely random. At the end of her set she set up a rig consisting of two vertical bars with lasers between them forming some sort of virtual stringed instrument. With these she moved her hands through like a conductor and produced well, more random noise. I mean it was kind of cool in that respect. The kind of I-have-no-idea-whats-going-on sort of awesomeness. But I was caught between bursting out laughing and covering my ears. I spent the whole time wincing and looking around for other peoples expressions trying to discern whether it was just me or whether this really was.. crap. The second performer unfortunately wasn't much different. This time she intersperced her..compositions with spoken chinese poetry. At least she explained what she was doing and to be fair there was even one nice number. I was eager to overhear everybodys reaction as we were leaving (some people left early so I thought that must have reflected something) but on the way out I noticed people stopping at the door to buy cds so I'm left with the awful feeling that maybe it was just me afer all. Maybe I just didn't "get it"..