Third Night of the MATA Festival Reviewed

From I Care If You Listen:

MATA Festival artistic director Du Yun, telling the audience how she and the other directors had received 1000 submissions for this year’s week-long new music festival, went on to say that the chosen works couldn’t just “look cool—they must sound cool, too.” The five works presented at the third night of the Festival, titled “Mad Filaments and Ungovernable Shoots,” hinged on visual and extra-musical concepts, yet all managed to enshroud the audience in sound worlds that felt not just “cool” but new, even gutsy. From the crackling and clicking of lamps outfitted with tactical transducers to the meditative thunder of coils and magnets, the evening reverberated with the ideas of seven young composers who have reconsidered not only the ways in which sounds can be heard and thought about, but even the ways in which they can be produced.