Commonwealth Sound Exchange is a celebration of experimental music taking place this weekend. This new festival honors the long tradition of Richmond’s noise community. It’s artist-founded and led, and pulls in national and regional acts similar to Europe’s Unsound Festival.
This might be news to a lot of people not following the genre, but Richmond’s kind of a big deal in that global scene. It’s exciting to see the community step up to the plate and claim the spoils of their notoriety.
The genre is hard to translate to most music lovers, as it is not based on melody or predictable chord and beat progressions. Its defining feature is in the unexpected, the new, the disarming. Just shy of chaos, noise and experimental music dwells in tones, soundscapes, moods of frustration and release. It has its natural cousins in art to Dadaism, Absurdism, and modernism.
Noise can embody the monolithic like Brutalism and the susurrus of shifting leaves and raindrops in the same track. It is not punk, but sounds like it went to the same high school. It borders next to interpretive performance art, if not expands on it sonically. It elicits reactions from a totally different channel that pop can’t reach. It is as enigmatic as it is baldfaced.
This weekend, Mimi Luse and her partners will unveil what seems to be a long time coming to RVA: our first comprehensive multi-day festival as an exhibition of the movement. Commonwealth Sound Exchange will be taking place Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at Studio Two Three and will feature 39 acts from all over the world.
This is significant for Richmond and the East Coast in general. Most of these acts have never played here before and certainly haven’t been on the same bill.
This is an incredible opportunity to expand your horizons if you’re not already in that scene. It, like most experimental art, is an acquired taste. For most with the courage and curiosity to engage on the fringes of expression, it’s the exposure to, and absorption of, the unexpected that moves us.
Check it out. It’ll be like nothing else you’ll do this year. Tickets and lineup can be found at csxrva.org or at Studio Two Three.
Photo by @gbrettvillena
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