PASSOVER, Easter and spring fertility rites redirected social energy into the home and family department last week – and then there was the opening night party for Sound Culture ’96.

​

Sound Culture is exactly what it sounds like – a festival of sound.  Taking place in a variety of venues around the Bay Area until April 20, Sound Culture ’96, the third biannual celebration, drew artists from all over the world to share their auditory vision of sound as art.  This year was the first time the Bay Area hosted the event.

 

Past-music, part visual-art, part-multimedia extravaganza part-experiment, Sound Culture includes performances, exhibitions, symposia, radio transmission, lectures by cultural theorists and other working with sound.

 

A kaleidoscope of the audibly arcane is what it is, where sound plays an integral part in every piece, whether it’s Montreal artist Kathy Kennedy’s radio performance art set-up that too place in Corte Madera’s Town Center shopping center on Saturday or Tacoma artist Dan Senn’s unusual installation on display at the Falkirk Mansion in San Rafael.  This piece looks like something Rube Goldberg’s envisioned, Peewee Herman built and Philip Glass orchestrated.

​

Tuesday night, the Sound Culture ’96 festival kicked off with an opening night party at Falkirk, co-sponsored by the Headlands Center for the Arts from Sausalito.  A variety of artists, patrons and local residents gathered to push the outside of the envelope of what sound is all about.