****CANCELLED TODAY DUE TO RAIN*****

The Oregon Center for the Arts at Southern Oregon University presents a First Friday art and music extravaganza featuring the Center for Visual Arts and Left Edge Percussion on Friday, June 3^rd on the Southern Oregon University campus.  The event is free and open to the public.

The CVA Galleries opening will be from 5:00–7:00 pm, and Left Edge Percussion will perform Strange and Sacred Noise by John Luther Adams from 7:00-8:15pm. 

The art exhibit will include capstone and thesis shows from SOU art students Jessi Eaton-Shields, Haley Nichols, Kayla Nichols, and Ella Park, as well as solo exhibitions from Tori Bennett, Cash Wickert, and Nicc Simmons. The last round of shows will be up until June 10th. 

Fresh off a recent performance of John Luther Adams’ epic percussion masterpiece at the Bang on a Can Long Play Festival in New York City, Left Edge Percussion will perform Strange and Sacred Noise in the Center for Visual Arts Courtyard. The four performers – Zachary Bass, Delaney Jai, Parker Stockford, and Terry Longshore – will encircle the audience, creating a sonic atmosphere that ranges from barely audible to the threshold of pain.

Noise – complex, aperiodic sound – touches and moves us in profound and mysterious ways. Strange and Sacred Noise is a celebration of noise as a metaphor for turbulent phenomena in the world around us, and a gateway to ecstatic experience.

Lasting 75 minutes, Strange and Sacred Noise is organized into six parts for six sets of like instruments:

I. …dust into dust… for four snare drums

II. solitary and time-breaking waves for four tam-tams (gongs)

III. velocities crossing in phase space for four sets of bass drums and tom-toms

IV. triadic iteration lattices for four sirens

V. clusters on a quadrilateral grid for four marimbas, four vibraphones, and four glockenspiels

VI. …and dust rising… for four snare drums

Grounded in the elemental violence of nature and the self-similar forms of linear fractals, this music is a convergence of sonic geography and sonic geometry. Each piece in the cycle is conceived as its own distinct and separate sound world, evoking the immediacy and presence of a place.

“This music is almost more like sculpture than a traditional music composition. The sounds – the noise – surrounds the audience, and is sometimes startling, sometimes eerily beautiful, and always sonically captivating,” says Terry Longshore, Artistic Director of Left Edge Percussion.

We invite the audience to move around the courtyard area during the performance, to experience the music from different locations and sonic outposts – or to lay back in the grass and enjoy from once location.