Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival (MOXsonic) (review)

During the first weekend of March 2020, the University of Central Missouri (UCM) hosted the third annual Missouri Experimental Sonic Arts Festival, otherwise known as MOX-sonic. Although some participants were unable to attend due to coronavirus exposures in United States airports that resulted in canceled flights, the festival successfully presented most of its planned concerts, installations, talks, and demonstrations. Even so, the contributions of the people whose travel plans were affected, such as New Renaissance Artist Elizabeth A. Baker's performance of Gabrielle Cerberville's "Phases," were deeply missed.

On 5 March, MOXsonic kicked off with the first of its Nightlife concerts in UCM's Gallery of Art and Design, with performances by Benjamin Penwell and Izi Austin, Brian Riordan and Jake Sentgeorge, and Daniel McKemie. Where Penwell and Austin's "Look Love, See How Each of Us Is a Wilderness" reveled in expansive, luscious stasis, "Elk Splat" by Riordan and Sentgeorge explored breaking points and collaborative moments between extended vocal techniques and live processing. I was particularly taken by how Penwell and Austin pushed each other even within the sheer musical surfaces they traversed.

McKemie's "Live Code Synthesizer Control Etude #1" used laptop and a modular synthesizer, improvising with feedback loops inspired by Pauline Oliveros's tape delay feedback setup. He presented a paper about this during the following day. Although each set was distinct, the different ways they combined elements of composition, improvisation, and experimental technology epitomized what made this year's festival exciting and suggests what the future of MOXsonic could look like.

By design, MOXsonic is not necessarily only an electronic music festival per se. Instead, it has interests that run across disciplinary boundaries. According to the festival's website (using their uppercase bolded letters): "MOXsonic focuses on programming concert events with experimental music involving LIVE performance with LIVE interactive technologies, fixed media events, live coding, and more. Improvisers, composer/performers, and teams of composers and performers are especially welcome, as are performers who would like to present new or recent works. MOXsonic is interested in a variety of musics, installations, and research presentations. In addition to our daytime activities, there is a nightlife component where musicians can stretch out and explore longer forms while other participants socialize."

After the first night's "stretched out" explorations, MOXsonic resumed on Friday with paper presentations, a workshop by Seah, Dave Seidel's installation "Involution," and a full day of concerts. Jason Palamara and Elaine Cooney's presentation "Destructive and Inventive Instrument Development with IUPUI's DISEnsemble" was a particularly intriguing survey of how this unique ensemble, comprising musicians and engineers, spends each semester making new instruments from scratch and performing new works for them.

Palamara, who was present to give the talk, is a professor of music and art technology, and Cooney is a professor of electrical and computer engineering technology. Through their combined efforts, the last few years have seen their students at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) return to the ensemble more comfortable and curious about building, breaking, and modifying different software and hardware packages. Although there is much to be said for these kinds of explorations, the opportunity to dive deep into the often finicky, but fun, world of these practices in a stable, collaborative space sounded wonderful.

Seah, meanwhile, presented a workshop entitled "Body Resonance" that drew on their research in Butoh, Body Weather Laboratory, Noguchi Taiso, and Somatic Movement. As they explained to me, the goal of the workshop was "to introduce musicians to somatic movement practices, potentially opening paths to experience sound somatically (through the tissues) as opposed to intellectually or specifically through the ear." These same ideas about sound transmission similarly arise in their work "Like Water," which uses video of waves, enveloping low drones, and meditative live processing on stage. It may be presumptuous to insist on more...