This year’s festival will feature an exciting collaboration between two Communikey favorites; Portland’s AU and Denver’s Dovekins.  Luke Wyland (LW; AU) and Laura Goldhamer (LG; The Dovekins) filled us in on some of the details of their project together and what we might expect from them on Friday night.

LG: The plan for the performance had been to bring in an international electronic musician and have him guide the performance.  But when that ceased to be the case, I suggested to Kate Lesta (Creative Director of Communikey) that we bring AU to town because it seemed like the perfect fit for the project, the collaboration, and the night of music.  AU bridges electronic (digital) and acoustic (analog) elements in such an explosively energetic way, the likes of which I had never seen before.

LW:  Lucky for Dana and I (of AU) those plans fell through and we were asked to come and collaborate with our good friends Laura Goldhamer and the Dovekins.  We’ve known Laura for a few years now and have played show with both her solo group and the Dovekins, to much success I might add. Our last show in the area was actually for Communikey at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art last fall, which is when we first met Kate Lesta…things unfolded from there. Laura and I have been talking for years around doing something of this sort, and had just been waiting for the right opportunity.

LG:  We had originally talked about collaborating on a residency at the ATLAS building on CU campus, but this seems like the best of many and all worlds that we get to participate together on a crash course collaboration that culminates in a live performance on April 16th with the Books!

LW:  For AU, it’s just Dana and I coming down to Denver/Boulder. Add in the Dovekins and most likely a few others and the group will most likely fill out to a healthy 8-12 people. Thus far, most of the set will be comprised of AU songs from previous albums, though there will be the debut of an epic 3 part suite that has yet to be released on an official AU album. All in all my songs are pretty malleable and can be performed as a duo or at their most with 20+ people on stage (choir and all). We’re also be working with Laura’s unique approach to the use of speakers (removed from their cabinets…etc) as both sounding devices and as microphones to bring a more spatial and sculptural presentation to the evening… she’ll do a better job of explaining this than I.  And of course we’ll also work in some of the Dovekins songs as well. It’ll be a glorious celebratory mess I’m sure. Can’t wait.

LG:  I have been working on getting 8 speakers (used with a switch box that changes their functionality from being speaker outputs to being microphone inputs) to all emit individually looped rhythms.  I set them on drums (snares, toms, even bass drums), and the percussive sound coming out of the speakers actually resonate the drums… It is something that is coming together quickly but is still very much a machine in process!!!!  It will be exciting to see how we can all use this nutty instrument machine in a song structure.  Glorious celebratory mess indeed!

AU + Dovekins will be performing after The Books at the Future Folk showcase on Friday April 16th at the Fox Theater. We hope you can join us for this special performance. The show will also be LIVE BROADCASTED from KGNU Boulder 88.5 radio station. If you can’t make it to the show, tune in to check it out!

Support for this collaboration comes from Theory + Practice, a Denver gallery/venue space in the Santa Fe Arts District. They are really helping make this come together by providing the space for all the artists to stay, and for the bands to practice and explore this unique opportunity to create something out of working together. More information on this collaboration can be expected as we gather pictures and talk to the bands as they work… And then we will all see what they come up with on Friday!

The traveling exhibition of prints will feature work on display from the Dis-patch Festival resident designer and art director Nebojsa Cvetkovic. Nebojsa is one of the most respected young designers in Serbia and the region. He has been awarded several times locally and internationally, very often for the work he has done for Dis-patch.

Although he has held several art director and senior designer positions at several marketing agencies, Nebojsa is still dedicated to freehand drawing, comics and character design, and has proven to be a real trendsetter when it comes to illustration and design in Serbia. He has been developing the noted Dis-patch visual identities since the first edition.

GRAPHISMS is a project he has started two years ago, and has been exhibited several times in Serbia. Now, through the ViceVerse network, it will reach out to far audiences all around the USA. Exposure that he definitely deserves! Since April, Nebojsa is also a part of the special creative team at the Bruketa&Zinic agency in Zagreb, the most respcted innovative design agency in the region of SouthEast Europe.

The exhibit is presented as a series of 10 hi-quality prints which will be setup in proper gallery context wherever possible. Nebojsa has also contributed all of the illustrations for the ViceVerse tour identity. Do check his other exciting work as well, just follow the links!

LINK / LINK / LINK

It’s Wednesday which means festival happenings officially begin TODAY!

Our beautiful CMKY headquarters will be open today at 4pm until 9pm. Located in downtown Boulder at 1825a Pearl Street, HQ provides a full information hub with festival staff present to answer your questions. You can pick up and purchase festival passes there, as well as tickets for the Bus to the Bunker Party. If you have already purchased a ticket from one of our retail locations, you can bring it to HQ to get your photo taken for a pass. At headquarters you can also find out about renting one of our bikes, just check out the bike station with Andrew Sieving! Other things that can be found at HQ: merchandise, Boulder tourist info, and excited bunnies!

On Thursday, Friday and Saturday, we will be running DJ Boutiques from 2 to 7pm which feature other local crews of electronic artists. In staying with our namesake, we think it’s important to include as many of our fellow artists as possible in the process of throwing such a huge event, so we’ve invited three local Denver crews to come spin records at HQ while people are there to pick up passes and information. On Thursday we’ve got Spellbound Music joining us with music provided by Ejay, Mathyou and Khalib. Plastic Sound Supply, one of the sponsors of the 2009 festival, will be rocking it on Friday night with Scaffolding, c.db.sn, and Cacheflowe. And on Saturday, Mother Earth Sound System, a sometimes collaborator with CMKY, will provide the beats with Scott Everett and Trip Coffin. We’re psyched to have these crews keep the beats coming throughout the weekend!

Headquarters Hours of Operation:

WENESDAY APRIL 14: 4:00pm – 9:00pm

THURSDAY APRIL 15: 11:00am – 9:00pm

FRIDAY APRIL 16: 11:00am – 9:00pm

SATURDAY 17: 11:00am – 7:00pm

SUNDAY 18: closed

We also hope that you will join us tonight for a warm up to the week’s festivities, with the Wednesday Nightcap at the Bombay Bistro in downtown Boulder! It is free and open to the public, intended to warm everyone up for the Communikey Festival launch that begins tomorrow night at BMoCA! Join us for a night of disco grooves and dubby techno with Ivy (Blackbridge), Roy England (Make Mistakes, Denver), and Ejival (Static Discos, Tijuana) who played for us last year at the Unsung Heroes showcase at the b.side Lounge. Come out and meet the Communikey crew, mix and mingle with other festival goers, and prepare for the crazy festival week ahead!

One of the exciting installations that we’ll have at the festival this year is called LISTEN. It is a three part experimental project in sound and sculpture, prepared for the 2010 Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts. Rob Fitzgerald of Boulder, Colorado is working with Denver artist Jess Webb to create an interactive ambient music experience based around introducing people to music that focuses on active listening and awareness. In the lead up to the festival, there will be listening stations placed around Boulder that are examples of works of music that employ creative use of audio sampling and field recording. Each listening station podium was hand-built and designed specifically for it’s location by Jess, with headphones attached so that one may listen closely to the piece of music selected for that station. Three out of the four stations will be playing experimental/ambient musical pieces by artists local to Boulder/Denver, with the fourth coming from a well-established San Francisco-based ambient sound artist. These stations will be located at Espresso Roma, the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder’s Public Library and the ATLAS building on the CU campus – so make sure to stop by and take a look at these podiums and listen to the music! They will be running all week during the festival until Monday April 19th.

On Saturday April 17th from 1pm to 5pm, festival goers are encouraged to come down to CMKY Headquarters at 18th and Pearl for the second part of the project, Listen: Soundwalk. Rob will be giving introductory lessons on using field recorders to record found sounds from around Boulder. After a quick tutorial, we’ll take the field recorders out on a walk around Boulder to find natural/street sounds and ambient noise. This workshop is based on participatory involvement, and the idea is that average people can find creativity in the ambient world, when they stop to listen to all that is around them. The sounds that are captured on Saturday’s Soundwalk will then be incorporated into a loose musical structure to create an ambient loop of Boulder’s sounds.

This music will be exhibited on Sunday night at the Fiske Plantetarium, during the third part of the project, Listen: Headroom. Attendees of the the Dub Galaxies Finale showcase are invited to take a moment during this show to relax on beanbags and cushions in the lobby of the planetarium and listen on headphones to the ambient piece of music created by Rob Fitzgerald and attendees of the Soundwalk, incorporating the field recordings from Saturday. The collaborative recording experiment will be re-interpreted with harmony, rhythm, and spacial character in a seamless, continuously evolving music piece. The soundscape environment will provide a contrast and complimentary space to the Dub Galaxies Showcase. As listeners, when we are given the opportunity to re-examine these recorded moments in a separate listening environment, our minds can freely associate our memory with fresh perspective and new context. Headroom is intended to be a relaxing way to end the festival, perhaps providing a moment of contemplation for all you’ve heard throughout the festival in Boulder.

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Listening Station Locations:

+ KEYS @ Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts
1750 13th St.

offthesky (Denver, Colorado)
Title: CommuniKeys
interactive sound sculpture

+ BOOKS @ Boulder Public Library
1001 Arapahoe Ave.

Kim Cascone (San Fransisco, California)
Title: anti-musical celestial forces (27:47)
from the 2009 Anechoic release, anti-musical celestial forces

+ RECORD PLAYERS @ Espresso Roma
1101 13th St.

Hallopatric (Denver, Colorado)
Title: Last Dance (5:11)
unreleased 2010

+ VHS @ ATLAS Institute
1125 18th St. at CU campus

Morgan Packard (Denver, Colorado)
Title: Moment (8:24)
from the upcoming Anticipate release, Moment Again Elsewhere

Listen is made possible in part by the Boulder Arts Commission Mini-Grant and the Boulder County Arts Commission Mark Addison Mini-Grant.

ADDED ARTIST TO THE LINEUP: Xavier van Wersch

Recently showcased at both the Polish and New York editions of the Unsound Festival, Xavier van Wersch from the Netherlands will be joining the lineup for the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts 2010.

“Comparing himself to Frankenstein, Dutchmann Xavier Van Wersch employs deceased and discontinued devices to create music, exploring the relationship between man and machine. Erratic behaviour is the principal condition for interaction. A rarity in the often too-serious world of experimental art, Van Wersch also employs humour during his live appearances, often donning a white professor’s coat as he works intensely to control the chaos that emerges from the end of his fingertips. Van Wersch has performed at major festivals across Europe, including Unsound Krakow, Club Transmediale, Dis-Patch, Ultrahang, and many others.” (from the Unsound Poland website)

Our A/Visions showcase is sponsored by the performance series of the same name at the MUTEK festival; dedicated to the exploration of cutting edge new media and audio-visual arts, A/Visions spotlights some of the best international talent in the experimental art world.

Also on the roster for the evening is Artificiel’s POWEr project, which comes courtesy of MUTEK Montreal:

Alexandre Burton and Julien Roy are two of the artists that make up Artificiel (along with Jimmy Lakatos), a group based in Montreal, Canada that operates in the new media realm. The duo will be bringing their latest project, POWEr, to the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The world-premiere of POWEr took place at MUTEK 2009, and it was one of the most memorable audiovisual performances of that festival.

POWEr is a performance based on high-voltage electromagnetic perturbations. Using an audio-modulated Tesla coil as a live instrument, electrical arcs are generated and transformed in an ongoing, realtime audiovisual process. Electricity is used as a subtle yet intense material, manifested as an instrinsically synesthesicphenomenae . Building on a context that is halfway between a musical presentation and a media arts installation, POWEr takes its place by raising the stakes of spontaneity and working with evermore complex musical and visual structures.

On the visual side of this showcase is Lissom (aka Tana Sprague), a sound + video artist, transfixed with micro details. With focus fluctuating between digital and organic, her work creates a space where one complements the other. Inspired by the elegant complexity of organic forms, she utilizes various electronic and digital devices to synthesize a similar enveloping intricacy. A skilled producer, programmer, sound engineer, electronic hardware artist, video editor, and live visualist, she has worked closely with Recombinant Media Labs founder and Director Naut Humon, and currently she is involved with the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) in San Francisco, serving as the director of operations.

We hope you can join us for this special night of cutting edge audio-visual performances! The show will begin at 7pm at the Black Box Theater, in the ATLAS Institute @ CU Campus. Tickets for this show are $20 and are NOT INCLUDED in the festival pass! You can purchase tickets online or at the door before the show.

(As a side note, if you are planning to attend The Bunker show on Saturday night, you can catch the Basics Fund Techno Bus to Denver from the ATLAS building, after the A/Visions show. For more info on the bus party or to purchase a ticket to ride the bus, go here.)

(Both photos are of Xavier van Wersch at Unsound Festival New York, February 2010. Credit: Stephen Cardinale)

We are truly excited to be hosting our own Bunker party on Saturday April 17th. The Bunker is a monthly party in Brooklyn focused on quality techno and house, keeping people dancing all night until the staff turns the lights on (sometimes even longer). In the hands of longtime ringleader Spinoza and resident DJ Derek Plaslaiko, with Seze Devres handling the photography and hostess duties, the party will go down from 10pm to 6am, in true Bunker fashion. For this special event, we will be hosting the show at Cluster Studios in Denver, Colorado. This beautiful warehouse space features high ceilings, polished concrete floors, wood timber construction, and plenty of space for dancin’. Check out Cluster’s website here.

Coming together for this event are two major supporters of Communikey. The main sponsor of this showcase, Brooklyn’s The Bunker, has been a long time friend and supporter of Communikey. For the 2009 festival, we brought Bryan Kasenic, the man behind the Bunker, also known as Spinoza, who performed at the ‘Unsung Heroes’ showcase, a night honoring curators who have acted as cornerstones of the North American electronic music movement, yet are talented artists in their own right. We have decided to share the recording of his incredible set that night, and a podcast of this perfomance can be found here. In August of 2009, the Bunker hosted Communikey artists in a showcase featuring Attentat, Normal Ones, Smirk, Naudio, and Kate Lesta, alongside a MUTEK showcase in the other room at Public Assembly, which included Akufen, Stephen Beaupre, Vincent Lemieux, and Alka Rex.

And then there is of course MUTEK, another one of our major supporters and a partner of the Communikey Festival of Electronic Arts. Akufen’s premiere Colorado performance at the Bunker comes courtesy of the Avant_MUTEK preview tour (which also includes Stephen Beaupre, who will be playing at the Park Party on Sunday afternoon).

Which leads us to this Friday in Brooklyn NY, the Bunker is hosting the Avant_MUTEK preview tour for it’s monthly party at Public Assembly. They will be showcasing MUTEK artists Akufen and Stephen Beaupre, as well as Efdemin, Cheap and Deep, experimental project GamelaTron, as well as Derek Plaslaiko and more. For more info, check out the Bunker’s website here.

A little background on the Bunker:

Currently, The Bunker is a monthly electronic music event at Public Assembly in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the quest to entertain ourselves and meet the artists we admire who no one else would bring to New York, we’ve hosted over five hundred guest DJs and live acts over the past seven years. The Bunker is a party for music-obsessed people who want to dance to interesting sounds in a room full of like-minded folks, thrown by people who live to do just that, and strive to perfect the experience.

The lineup for Saturday’s showcase is pretty hot if we do say so ourselves:

Opening the night is Beyond Booking front man Bryan Kasenic, aka Spinoza, who has been one of the most proactive electronic music curators in New York City, not to mention a pretty fine DJ. Montreal’s Akufen will be hitting the stage at midnight with his Colorado debut, presenting live material that has only been presented a handful of times – a performance that has been long awaited by the local audience. Next is up and comer Cheap and Deep; with his live hardware based sets, he develops dark and complex structures while bending minds and hips on a late night dance floor. And then we’ve got Detroit native and New York resident, Derek Plaslaiko, who is known for his versatile, high-energy sets. Closing the night out is Communikey’s own Attentat with his debut live set, a locally acclaimed DJ who has performed a number of times for the Bunker at it’s home in Brooklyn, and one of the founders of Denver’s monthly Make Mistakes parties.

Individual tickets for this show are $20 and can be purchased here.

And – you don’t even have to worry about getting yourself to the party:

Taking you from Boulder to Denver for the Bunker party are the Basics Fund buses. Buses running on environmentally friendly biodiesel (with music provided by Grave Ravers) will take festival-goers from CMKY HQ to Cluster Studios all night. Tickets for riding the bus are $6 one-way and $10 round-trip. For more info or to buy tickets for the bus party, go here.

Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, the two founding members of The Books, are returning for their second Boulder performance with a new member in tow. On Friday April 16th at the Fox Theater in Boulder, Colorado, The Books will have their premiere performance with new addition Gene Back. Hailing from Brooklyn, New York, Gene will be bringing his skills as a violinist, guitarist, songwriter, composer, and producer, and will without a doubt be bringing an additional source of light to this already brilliant ensemble.

For those unfamiliar with The Books, the project began as a musical collaboration in 2000 between de Jong and Zammuto while they were living in the same building in New York City. Their music has been described as a mix of folk, acoustic, and electronic elements, including plenty of samples of found-sound, speech and field recordings, all combined to create a collage of sound and music.

And there’s more to be excited about: The Books are finishing up their fourth full length studio album, “The Way Out”, which will be released through Temporary Residence Limited sometime in July 2010:

‘Lately [The Books] have been picking up self-help and hypnotherapy cassettes, which they say have inspired much of the upcoming album’s new age-y themes. “You’re getting verrry sleepy,” Zammuto says when asked what the album sounds like.

As with all the Books’ albums, most of the initial work was deciding which sounds would inspire Zammuto and de Jong to create anew. They’ve got plenty to consider.

“It’s a very active kind of looking when you’re looking for samples. It’s a great kind of meditative exercise because you really get to see American culture from this very strange perspective,” Zammuto says. “It’s not the mainstream that we’re looking at, it’s the fringes – things that are trying to be the mainstream but somehow just never really got there.”

De Jong nods his head. “There’s something about going out there and finding it yourself and rummaging through all that stuff,” he says. “It’s kind of a harvesting, a social-cultural farming.”’ [excerpt from James Reed for the Boston Globe, 2009]

We hope you’ll be able to join us for this exciting performance by one the most ground-breaking electro-acoustic groups in the U.S.!

To buy tickets for the Future Folk showcase on Friday April 16th, visit the website for the Fox Theatre.

KIDS-PATCH is an interactive audio-visual program for children presenting a completely intuitive, inventive and forward-thinking approach to children’s education in the context of arts and culture. Each event consists of a series of workshops for kids aged 5-12, related to the fields of music, graphic art, performance, creative processes and new media. It is a 100% participatory program. Closely working with established and experienced artists, children are discovering numerous new skills and are developing sensibilities in regard to the processes of creation and presentation of creative content. Results are immediately visible and are presented at the end of each edition through an event consisting of concerts, exhibitions, activity areas, installations, performances and screenings. The performance is produced by the young participants and their artistic tutors.

The program was started in Serbia in 2008 and has reached a large number of young participants in Belgrade, and is also spreading fast around Europe and the U.S. through guest appearances at festivals and commissioned co-productions. It includes additions to festivals such as TodaysArt in The Hague, Netherlands, and Unsound New York, as well as the Communikey Festival 2009. Kids-patch is also one of the features of the Communikey / Dis-patch collaborative tour, Vice Verse. As a feature of the tour, workshops will be held at 5+ locations across the U.S., including the Missoula Children’s Museum, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts in San Francisco, the Joshua Tree Music Festival, and Bright Lights in Philadelphia, among others. It will also be featured at the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, July 2010.

Kids-patch is about learning through play, collaboration and exploration. It offers a space for kids to be creative and explore that side of themselves in a structured but holistic environment. By having multiple workshops in one setting, the kids can exercise freewill by choosing whichever workshop they are most interested in, and thereby can discover what might be their creative calling. Kids-patch was designed to appeal to all ages; leadership and community is built through having the older kids work with the younger kids. It is also helping bridge the generations by having such an event at a festival for electronic arts that is mostly geared towards adults. Kids-patch highlights the importance of having children be a part in the creative process that all humans experience.

This year’s Kids-patch @ Communikey will feature a series of workshops focused on different aspects of new media: animation, music, visual arts, and performance. It will be led by different artists associated with the festival, and with members of the Denver-based band Dovekins leading as hosts and coordinators of the workshops. They will lead snack and song breaks, help the kids get comfortable in their creative spaces, and provide performance guidance for the performance aspect of the workshop. Several of the main features of Kids-patch are listed below:

+ LUCKY DRAGONS INSTRUMENT MAKING WORKSHOP: The kids will create, design and craft out their own instruments and they will learn about amplification through applying contact microphones to the instruments. In the spirit of the way that Lucky Dragons approach their own music-making and performances, this workshop is about redefining power structures and enabling empowerment. Workshop and performance being the same thing, it breaks the barriers between performer and audience. The kids will have a chance to bring in their parents and share the experience in the same way that Lucky Dragons call on their audience to add to the performance. Making music through improvisation and fun is the main aim of this workshop. The idea is to provide insight into the possibilities for creating music with simple and inexpensive electronic instruments and devices.

+ TAGTOOL WORKSHOP: An animation workshop presented by mr NANA that uses tagtool (a drawing tablet), video game style controls, a video camera and video projector, and an array crafting materials. The kids are given the opportunity to make a hands-on animation short film and learn about tagtool. Tagtool is a DIY instrument accompanied by an open-source software and is intended for live performance drawing and animation action. This performative visual instrument is fun and easy to use, enabling anyone to create live doodling drawings and/or animation story telling. Through collaboration, team work, fun, doodling and drawing, the kids will experience the possibilities of a simple audio/visual setup by creating magical new worlds of the moving image, by combining illustration, animation and music.

+ COLOR ME! WALL: This activity features an oversized drawing wall, based on the “Color Me” book by Pictoplasma, including character drawings provided by some of the best-known illustrators and character designers from all over the world. Kids will be able to color, join dots, fulfill and finish a selection of the designs and illustrations selected for this occasion. The other option is printed papers formats A4 or A3 that kids can also color on during the breaks between the workshops. Pictoplasma is Berlin based organization that explores and celebrates the phenomenon of contemporary character design; they have collaborated with the Kids-patch program since 2009, on presenting screenings suited for young age as well as graphic programs based on their book publishing projects.

+ PERFORMANCE: This is the culmination of all the workshops, and will open the Play Date Park Party on Sunday April 18th. The kids who have participated in the instrument making workshop will come together to create the Kids-patch Orchestra, with the kids who participated in the tagtool workshop joining the orchestra if they want. They will perform for each other and for the festival audience using the instruments they made and incorporating the other elements of the workshops. It is a way for them to share their creative accomplishments with the community, their families and each other.

The program is $20 and will take place at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday April 17th, from 9am to 1pm. You can enroll your child or children by sending an email to: workshops@communikey.us

To learn more about Kids-patch, visit the website here. And to find out more about Kids-patch as a part of the Vice Verse tour, check out the tour website.

Since our inaugural year in 2008, Communikey has featured a festival-wide Zero Waste Program. This program allows festival attendees to easily separate landfill trash, recycling and biodegradable (compostable) materials at each of our Zero Waste Stations throughout the festival. It is Communikey’s goal to come as close to 100% diversion of the festival waste stream away from the landfill. The Sustainbility Team strives to meet this goal by directly working with each venue to facilitate the use of compostable/biodegradable and recyclable products in the bars, bathrooms and food service areas and encourages the use of reusable items whenever possible.

Zero Waste programs reduce stress on our natural environment, divert materials from landfills and encourage reuse, recycling and composting of materials. Music festivals in the US alone generate hundreds of tons of waste that is sent to landfills each year. In fact, according to the US EPA “the average American generates 4.6 pounds of trash per day”.

We encourage you to look out for our Zero Waste stations in each venue and make use of them throughout the festival!  Click here to find out more about Communikey’s sustainability initiatives.

“Zero waste is a philosophy and a design principle for the 21st Century; it is not simply about putting an end to landfilling. Aiming for zero waste is not an end-of-pipe solution. That is why it heralds fundamental change. Aiming for zero waste means designing products and packaging with reuse and recycling in mind. It means ending subsidies for wasting. It means closing the gap between landfill prices and their true costs. It means making manufacturers take responsibility for the entire lifecycle of their products and packaging. Zero waste efforts, just like recycling efforts before, will change the face of solid waste management in the future. Instead of managing wastes, we will manage resources and strive to eliminate waste.”

- Institute for Local Self Reliance (Washington DC)