My review of the last two nights of the 2023 Other Minds festival is in the brand new issue (the one with the Haxan Cloak on the cover) of The Wire. I’ll post the full article online when the next issue of the magazine is published.
The final two nights of the annual Other Minds festival were split between two quite different venues: the tony Taube Atrium Theater, which is secluded deep inside the stately War Memorial building across from gleaming City Hall, and Gray Area, a revivified, hollowed-out, long-defunct movie theater on a commercial stretch of Mission Street. It’s a half hour walk between them, but they are worlds apart.
Other Minds ran for six nights total, its opening evening dedicated to a screening of a Morton Subotnick documentary, Subotnick: Portrait of an Electronic Music Pioneer. This all occurred in mid-November, from the 14th through the 19th, those dates placing it in neatly between the Recombinant Festival the month prior and the Tape Music Festival, which fleshed out the first week of 2024. The rapid-fire collection of multiple multi-night, international series gave lie to the monotonous death knell that media outside San Francisco keep ringing, whether lasciviously or with rehearsed concern. A testament to longevity and fortitude, the November events marked the 27th festival for Other Minds, which remains overseen by Charles Amirkhanian, who co-founded it back in 1993.
The Taube show featured works by composers Neil Rolnick, Bora Yoon, and Eivind Buene performed respectively by pianist Geoffrey Burleson (with support from Rolnick), Yoon herself (with visuals by Joshue Ott — whose Thicket app I wrote about a lot back in 2010, including an interview with his collaborator on it, Morgan Packard), and the Friction Quartet. The Gray Area show featured Carl Stone in collaboration with Japanese vocalist Akaihirume.