Alternating mishmashes of sound and image are on the program this weekend for Cube Fest 2024 at Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center.
Performances planned at the Cube — which the university describes as “a completely reconfigurable immersive environment” — include “Sounds in Motion.” Friday’s show’s four sets will include a swarm of experimental jazz music, an electronically manipulated synthesizer choir, a performance using tribal beads to provide rhythm and visual elements, and a narrated text with choreography that explores migration due to mistreatment.
“Sounds in Motion” is part of this year’s Cube Fest theme of “Immersive Indigenous Experiences.” The variety that Cube Fest offers to the senses is like no other place in the world, says Eric Lyon, one of Cube Fest’s three organizers. The versatile four-story black box-style theater with a complex projector system can literally surround the audience via 140 speakers while also providing technological accompaniment that includes motion capture video.
“In terms of the actual experience, you can just have this … in some ways more naturalistic experience of electronic sound,” said Lyon, a composer, professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts and lecturer in the school’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology. “When you’re out in the real world, the sound is really coming at you from many different places, near and far.
“The exciting thing about the electronic world is that in a high-density speaker arrangement you can experience the full richness of a naturalistic environment with all the wonderful possibilities of artistic creation that take you beyond the natural world.”
Cube Fest, which began as an experiment in presenting entertainment using high-tech methods, has been open to the public five times since 2016. In 2021, with COVID-19 still limiting people’s ability to gather, organizers opted for a combination live and live-streamed event focused on Afrofuturism, a Virginia Tech spokeswoman said. Organizers repeated the theme in 2022 for a full audience.
In both years, co-organizer Tyechia Thompson was instrumental in assembling the artist lineup, which consisted of former members of the Sun Ra Arkestra. This year, co-organizer Brendan David-John, a computer science professor and member of the Seneca Nation, led the effort to assemble the program, Lyon said. Cube Fest will now be held every two years.
Cube Fest, a collaboration between the main venue, Moss Arts Center, and the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology, runs Friday through Sunday. Tickets cost no more than $10 per performance, but admission is free for Virginia Tech students.
Around 2018, Lyon, Thompson and David-John started thinking that it was really worth doing a little bit to combat the relative lack of diversity in the academic/electronic music communities,” Lyon said. “We wanted to see if we could really present a model for a festival that would spice up that range of programming diversity, because, among other things, we just thought that would be great for our audience. There are all kinds of different kinds of music and you’re sure to find something you like.”
“Sounds in Motion” is the brainchild of Boston-based saxophonist DA Mekonnen. Mekonnen, who leads the Ethiopian pop group Debo Band, among others, is bringing an analog element to the digital event – four single-sided LPs from his 2023 project “dragonchild”. At Cube Fest, he and his colleagues will adjust the record needles on all four records so that they play simultaneously. The result will be one song: “BLACK: Constellation X”.
On drums will be his former Debo Band colleague Adam Clark, a Roanoke Valley native and drum instructor at Virginia Tech. Clark recommended Mekonnen submit his “Dragonchild” concept to Cube Fest. Clark is always on the ball behind a drum kit, and that will serve him well, because Mekonnen says there’s no way to time the needles so that the four records are in the same sync every time.
Born in Sudan to Ethiopian refugees and moving with them to Texas, where he grew up, Mekonnen said he developed a broad understanding of what it means to be Native American while writing and recording “Dragonchild.”
“I consider Ethiopia as my heritage, as my homeland… where I was not born, it was taken from me, so to speak,” Mekonnen said. “I wanted to think about Ethiopia… to consider the country itself as a dragon and the people of this country as the children of the dragon….”
“I really explored who the Dragon Children are. And I thought they were indigenous to this land before it was called Ethiopia. So that kind of reclaiming indigeneity interested me. When you talk about indigenous people… we are all indigenous to a place. We are all indigenous to the place where humanity began. And that’s what I explored with ‘Dragon Child.'”
Shawn Greenlee, Arvcúken Noquisi and Aline de Souza will also perform with Brandon Hale as part of “Sounds in Motion”.
Greenlee will perform “Sluicer,” which he describes as a performance system for electroacoustic improvisation. In this case, the audience will hear two 20-voice irregular synthesizers that Greenlee will operate as a wandering “choir.”
Noquisi, a member of the Muscogee Nation and native of Arkansas, will use seed beads and hand-crafted beadwork to develop microsound samples while also visually examining them with a microscope camera.
“I hope to play with the relationship between a non-Indigenous audience and myself – thinking about the history of waxing Indians in museums and the desire to observe, record and make accessible the Indigenous knowledge that underlies so many contemporary interactions with settler institutions,” he said on the Cube Fest website.
De Souza, a lecturer in humanities and arts at Virginia Tech’s School of Religion and Culture, has performed at the Cube several times. In her piece “Aline RSS de Souza,” she will use text, narration, choreographed movements, and images to address violence, rejection by her family, and her migration from Brazil. She will be accompanied by sound engineer Brandon Hale.
For more information and a list of artists, visit the Cube Fest website. They include painter and sculptor Bill Crouse of the Alleghany River Seneca Dancers from New York, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a digital artist and professor at the University of Florida, and audio/video/sculpture specialist Casey Koyczan, a member of the Dene Nation.
