It's a sonic blast! (But you can't drink it!)

A new favorite artist of mine is Pogo.  This guy takes cartoons and remixes the audio, making songs that find a happy little corner in my mind to play their trickster style sounds that even I can appreciate - and that’s saying something coming from a guy who doesn’t have a musical bone in his body.  But one of the things I find most interesting about this artist is how the sounds already existed.  He’s just remixing them to make something unique and new.  Being able to mix sound to me is like watching a magician perform.  I have no idea how it's done, but I am mesmerized with each beat.

So when our class had to dress up in costumes and sonically battle it out in front of an audience, I was terrified. In the book “Arts Education and Literacies” is a chapter on performing.  In it, twelfth grade Media Arts teacher, Mr. Amerika, and his school’s principal, Miss Bliss, got dressed in costumes, and had what they dubbed a Webspinna battle.  Instead of throwing sticks or chineese stars at each other, they would play live sounds in a sonic fist fight.  This is exactly what our assignment was.  Pick a theme, remix some sounds, perform! (or so I thought)

Most groups in our class were made up of two people who would pick opposing sides of a theme – Mac vs. PC, Hook vs. Peter Pan.  I came in to the class late this semester, making up for missing classes from my accident last winter.  So I was the odd man out, and our group was made up of three.  There was Luis, Stephanie, and myself.  Our theme was nature, beast, and man with Luis being beast, Stephanie being Nature, and myself perhaps going a bit overboard as a sort of war god like the character Ronan, from the film Guardians of the Galaxy.

Our plan was simple enough.  It was to start out with sounds of nature, followed by Beast grazing on the grasslands, followed by Man hunting and killing beast.  Our performance was to escalate further and further.  Man kills beast, nature strikes back with natural disasters, beast eats man, man chops down forest in the name of progress and expansion.  Cities are built, and beast releases Godzilla to wipe man out.  Man and beast go at it when nature has had enough and sends forth a meteor destroying the world.  This story was to be told with live sounds streaming from the internet at the appropriate time.  We each had our own google doc with links to the sounds we found online, and were supposed to play them at the right time.  That was the plan.

What actually happened was a cacophony of sounds that I assume would have been difficult for the audience to make any sense of.  I found an online repository of sound effects, that I think would have been better suited for downloading and mixing into an effects track of a movie.  I don’t feel that it played as well as I had hoped.  That being said, I’m lucky to have been in a group with two very creative and talented people who in my opinion saved our performance.  

Regardless of how I felt about the execution of the Webspinna battle, I had a great time.  I’m not a performer, but found myself having to stretch out of my comfort zone and explore mediums of creativity I would not have dared to otherwise.  It was great to see how others did their battles, and overall I loved it.  Can’t believe I said that!  Be sure to watch the video of our performance.  It was a blast, sonically speaking of course.