ASHEVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — The 24th Asheville Fringe Arts Festival commences this week, bringing dozens of artists from all kinds of disciplines to town for a celebration of the weird, wonderful and out-of-the-box. Before the festival begins in earnest this Thursday, meet a few of the artists in our show spotlights.
First up, MOD and Sweat Transfer, the musicians behind “Cybersyn.”
“Cybersyn” will be held at 7 p.m., Thursday, March 19 at Sovereign Kava, 268 Biltmore Ave. Tickets are free. Reserve yours here.
“Cybersyn” and the data of sound
Dylan Ward is a musician and sound artist based in Charlotte, N.C, and one of the members of MOD, a saxophone quartet featured in “Cybersyn” alongside Sweat Transfer, a project by electronic musician and percussionist Ryan Persaud. Together, the musicians will perform with Cybersyn, a machine developed by composer and music technologist Seth Andrew Davis.
“Cybersyn itself is an interactive improvising machine,” Ward explained. “It’s based on a cybernetic approach to improvisation. So, the acoustic musicians improvise and play together, and the machine, that’s being run out of different, various computer software programs, is taking that data in and then responding and generating new data. The whole premise of the work is this cybernetic interplay and feedback loop between the acoustic improvisers and the machine.”
During the show, MOD and Sweat Transfer will play music, which Cybersyn will interpret into data before generating sounds and a visual representation of the improv session.
“Cybersyn is a multimedia sort of experience. In addition to the acoustic improviser sounds informing what the machine is generating from a sonic perspective, there are going to be interactive visuals as well,” Ward said, “It’ll be a whole surround-sound type of experience, and we should be projecting, I think, directly onto the rock at Sovereign Kava. So, that should be a cool, immersive effect.”
The visuals will be an abstract representation of the sound and data.
“You don’t see precise images or anything,” Ward clarified. “It’s more of these dynamic improvisations across different domains of texture, color, density. Those types of things.”
While the science behind “Cybersyn” might sound complex, Ward said that the show is for the casual listener and hardcore musician alike.
“It’s going to be quite immersive and abstract and, you know, not a typical type of concert. So, in that sense, I think it’s for everyone in the same sense that a contemporary art museum and contemporary dances for everyone,” Ward said. “But, it’s definitely for music diehards in the sense that it strips away standard markers of melody, predictable rhythms, and form and structure for a completely dynamic interactive structure.”
For more information about “Cybersyn” and the rest of the Asheville Fringe Fest lineup, visit tickets.ashevillefringe.org.
