Music fest committed to exploration, experimentation

In the fifth-floor headquarters of the Cluster Festival, Ash Au is nerding out a little bit over a piece of West German machinery that’s still humming after all these years — a 1967 Nordmende 3004-C.

“The (original) warranty card on it says to get it serviced at Columbus Radio,” Au says, referring to the one-stop repair shop opened in 1968 by Bill Yaworsky, Winnipeg’s doctor of audio.

Au, the artistic director of the festival — officially titled Cluster: New Music and Integrated Arts — visited the shop at 1151 Sanford St. to get the Nordmende up and running.

With the fest settling into its Exchange District studio apartment, Au — a prolific sound designer, bassist, music educator and queer creative — figured it was about time to invest in a sick soundsystem.

Since November, the walnut-encased “steurgerat” — or control apparatus — has been the sonic centrepiece of Cluster’s Long Play events, a listening series dedicated to offering “deep listening for deep listeners.”

Perched upon the oldest piece of furniture in the room, it is further evidence of an ethos of adaptive reuse, structural integrity and commitment to experimentation and discovery that’s channelled Cluster from a GroundSwell offshoot into its own area of daring creation.

Atop the antique audio equipment sit a vessel of water, a peperomia clipping and a wood-block structure from the former Corydon cafe Make; when Au bought a set of lights from owner Jae-Sung Chon, he added the regenerative sculpture as a bonus.

“Every year is quite different from the year before,” says Au, who’s been programming Cluster since 2021. “The thread that goes throughout (each festival) is that (we’re) representing work that is either brand new or made within the last five years. So it’s often a surprise for me as a curator to be there at the festival, finally doing the work.

“Leading up to it, I have kind of a fascinating idea of what it might sound like — a framework that comes from the artist as they’re in the process of the making, or even just before. I will find myself working with artists years ahead of their performances here, getting kind of a sense of what they’re trying to do.”

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Gage and Kerrigan Salnikowski’s musical appetite was doled out in triplicate to them and their video artist sister Chanel.

Born in January 1994 to a photographer-percussionist and a textile artist, the siblings weren’t spoonfed a diet of sugary pop.

“My dad is, you know, a proto-hipster and was into weird music, so we were kind of raised on weird music like Ween and Tom Waits as kids,” says Gage.

Starting in middle school, the Salnikowskis were playing weightier rock as side dishes to what Gage calls a classic music student entrée. “There’s a heavy metal to experimental music pipeline that we went down,” the multi-instrumentalist says.

Tonight, some more kitchen-sink experimentation from the Salnikowkis will launch Cluster at Video Pool’s Poolside Gallery (100 Arthur St.) when the first episodes of their web series Will It Bow? are slated to screen.

“You’ll often find people bowing, especially percussionists like my brother, on objects that aren’t violins,” says Gage. “So he came up with this idea of almost a mock ‘90s kids show or public access show where we’re the hosts, like a twin YTV-esque show where we go around bowing random objects.

“In an episode entitled Streets, we discovered you can bow a felled stop sign quite well,” says Gage. “In our kitchen episode, we discovered that the common lemon does not bow too well.”

Bows will be plucked and sounds explored on Thursday night at the West End Cultural Centre when the Sundog Ensemble opens for A Moon Shaped Noise.

The former group, led by pianist Theresa Thordarson, will perform new works by Dominique Lemoine, Luis Ramirez, Marika Galea, John Himes and others. Inspired by his rural Manitoban upbringing, a reclamation of Métis identity, the mysterious return of an heirloom fiddle and possibly Radiohead’s ninth studio album, the lunar project of Brandon’s Brendon Ehinger was shaped on Treaty 2 territory.

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Fellow Thursday night performers Keri Latimer and Tanja Faylene Woloshen’s collaborative performance was ushered into reality during a butoh movement class at the Winnipeg Holistic Expressive Arts Therapy Institute.

“In the world of dance and performance, butoh is a puzzle that really defies defining,” says Woloshen of the avant-garde dance form. “It was born post-World War II in Japan, but also inspired by German expressionism as a way to find truth in the body.

“Most importantly, it’s a dance that’s often connected with imagery through the natural and cosmic worlds. The movement can be slow and stretching,” adds the dance artist, who’s been studying the form “for centuries.”

Latimer is newer to the game. Best known for folk groups Leaf Rapids and Nathan, Latimer found the Japanese dance theatre form quite emotional and transportative: it gave the songwriter a similar feeling as the ambient buzz of a household appliance and of a favourite instrument.

“I often have been standing in the kitchen for 10 minutes listening to my fridge,” says Latimer, who endeavours to “draw melody out of machines,” birds, winds and oceans. To translate those sounds into instrumentation, for over 20 years, Latimer has used a theremin.

Latimer says the unique electronic instrument played without physical contact is “the one instrument I can play intuitively,” which flicked a similar switch when combined with butoh expression.

Taking the stage with Woloshen, Latimer will perform Thursday at the WECC under the moniker O’Fukami — a loving play on her shared Japanese-Celtic ancestry. “The O’ is from a name like O’Sullivan,” she says. “Fukami was my great-grandmother’s last name.”

While future O’Fukami performances are on the horizon, Latimer says Thursday’s performance will offer a glimpse at the artist’s first full theremin album, When the Future Tried to Take Me.

Inspired by science fiction, Latimer says the project took on its own personality. “I tried to fight it at first, but the personality won,” she says.

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