Noises Underground

It must be something in the water. One hundred years after Saint Paul experimental composer Arthur Farwell dissected Native Indian melodies and piled up unrelated tonalities, a core of dedicated underground Minnesota sound explorers is still sampling, mashing-up, and otherwise taking musical liberties. Although largely unsung in this state of above-ground musical champions, there is a rich vein of experimental music that runs from Sauk Rapids to Duluth and Rochester, and through both of the Twin Cities.

Music lovers often assume that such nonconformists are simply out to be belligerent, making unlistenable noise in order to annoy and make a mockery of the true musical family. Actually, thumbing our nose at all that is good, tonal, and Pulitzerian is rarely in our minds; experimental musicians are just curious about sound and will stop at nothing to hear where that might lead.

Thanks to the invention of the laptop, a costly conservatory education is no longer necessary for a so-called career in music. Everyone can be equally ignored or celebrated. But, just as there’s more than one way to skin a piano, no two machines will spit out the same music. That’s because in the end, it is up to the human imagination to determine what goes in and what comes out. Preston Wright, Scott Miller, and Brian Heller, to name three examples, are each blazing entirely independent digital trails.

Being emancipated from the orchestra also sets one free from the orchestra’s usual habitat, the concert hall. The place you choose to insert your music into society, the venue you select for your compositions, can be as creative a decision as the sequence of waveforms you choose. Sound has become one of the public arts, a way to shape the environment in which people live and move—just take a shadow-walk with Viv Corringham.

^{Viv Corringham on one of her “Shadow-Walks”}

Minnesota’s musical ecology is fragmenting nicely into multiple niches; while the mainstream media can’t imagine life beyond the tightrope that runs from classical to pop, the people actually making the stuff couldn’t be less bothered about such irrelevancies. Even within the body of work of a single artist, like Abinadi Meza, variations extend beyond any single genre, technique, or aesthetic: A list of pieces may include glitch, sound poetry, circuit bending, improvisation, scavenging, theatrical music, performance art, and even work for orchestral instruments… In other words, we have all had to become format-hopping digital-media sluts (“What has music got to do with sound, anyway?” asked Charles Ives).

Every tribe needs people to fill a variety of functions—makers, techies, critics, consumers, and bill-payers. Several artists have discovered the joys, benefits, and headaches of being presenters as well. From the Acadia Café to Studio Z, from the online Some Assembly Required and the lavish campus-based Spark Festival to the Strange Attractors series in a former funeral home, we underground musicians are everywhere if you look and listen closely. But without these saints and other supporters of our offbeat work we’d be even deeper underground without a paddle.

As the bandwidth widens, we are less bound by state lines and can continue to expand our communities online. There is no locus like home though, and one day our beloved state may be known as much for the Minnesota Noise as it is for the Minnesota Sound.

^{Fantastic Merlins take improvisation beyond jazz}

Originally appeared in issue 18.2 of access+ENGAGE. Subscribe to this free arts e-magazine.