- "A festival of ambient music" isn't a phrase you hear every day. Nomadic Streams is a new endeavour from a non-profit group called Vancouver New Music, who host a series of experimental concerts and community events throughout the year. I found out about their festival almost accidentally, just two weeks before it happened. As you'd expect from an event with so little promotion, the whole thing was very humble and DIY.
Nomadic Streams took place over three evenings at VIVO Media Arts, a new community centre, school and occasional venue in a part of East Vancouver increasingly known for its tech businesses and learning centres. The venue is essentially a small warehouse or a large gallery space, depending on how you look at it. The world-class talent that Nomadic Streams brought in included Lawrence English, the FLUX Quartet, Crys Cole, Rafael Anton Irisarri and "illbient" pioneer DJ Olive.
As organizer Giorgio Magnanensi explained at the beginning of each night, the festival intended to stretch the definition of ambient music. "Experimental" would probably be a better term for Nomadic Streams, especially given the first evening, with cerebral performances from Crys Cole, who excelled with subtle, near-silent sounds and whispered vocals, and Nick Storring, whose fussy clicks and cuts eventually devolved into electric cello. Friday offered more to chew on: Vancouver local Souns, AKA Michael Red, improvised with field recordings and subaquatic atmospheres, while Loscil played a modified version of his stunning Sea Island set, complete with gorgeous visuals from the Pacific Northwest region.
The captivating visuals behind Loscil highlighted an inconsistency in the festival programming: several artists simply had none, leaving nothing but a blank wall behind them. Marina Rosenfeld, whose minimal turntablism was one of the most intriguing moments of the entire festival, inevitably felt a little bare following Loscil's performance. The move also underlined Nomadic Streams' odd sequencing. On the final night, a physically intense drone set from Rafael Anton Irisarri was followed by a gruellingly long performance of Morton Feldman's "String Quartet No. 1" by the FLUX Quartet. The group, who later invited other performers to join them in a rendition of John Cage's "Four," played exceedingly well, but the piece felt ponderous and dry following three evenings of electronic music; their acoustic sound couldn't envelop the room like the other artists had been able to.
The best moments of Nomadic Streams were the most ambient—in other words, performances that changed the way your surroundings felt, or made you hear sounds in a different way. No one embodied that more fully than Lawrence English, who requested that everyone put away their chairs and lie on the floor for a sensory experience that turned out to be anything but the quiet and polite notion so many people have of ambient music. English spent 45 minutes lashing us with brutal low-end frequencies that rumbled through the cement floors, pulling into moments of calm before descending back down with roller coaster intensity. It was a transformative physical experience that not only altered how the room felt but how the audience felt too, lying there and staring up at the ceiling, imagining new notes and wrinkles in English's avalanche of sound (I was physically shaky and light-headed for a good 30 minutes afterward). If there was any moment over the weekend that made it feel like Nomadic Streams succeeded in their mission, it was that one.