Ostrava Days and Gaudeamus Muziekweek

[some guy]

Balthazar,

I recall you asking me in some thread or other to report back about the Ostrava Days festival, but I can't find the post.

So I hope this is right!

Anyway, I think that if you want to hear some good live performances of sixties avant garde, then Ostrava's the place to be. (Odd years only. Be nice if they could do an annual festival, but they don't.) Even seventies avant garde.

After all, most of those people are still alive. And Petr Kotik is one of them. He's the leading spirit of the Ostrava Days.

Phill Niblock was there, as usual, as was Thomas Buckner, who gave an absolutely riveting performance of Robert Ashley's Odalisque. Bernard Lang was there, too. He's a great guy.

A lot of good stuff there.

But now I'm at the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht (formerly in Amsterdam). And I must say, the new music by the composers in their twenties is more consistently interesting (and more various) than I've heard in a long time. Two really fine Russian composers, Sergey Khismatov, whose piece "to the left" should have been an indeterminate piece (but was still OK as a written out piece), and Vladimir Gorlinski's Ultimate Granular Paradise, which was outrageous. In a good way.

In the words of the motto of Groundfault Recordings, "Good Noise."

Next week, Lisbon!

[Balthazar]

Thanks for the update! Enjoy Lisbon!

And a bit of Petr Kotik:

[some guy]

I'm enjoying Lisboa.

I didn't at first. And I still don't understand what makes it such a popular tourist destination. But it certainly has grown on me.

And the festival's been fun, too. Not very rowdy but still good, clean fun. (Nothing so far this trip has come up to the level of Andrea Neumann's set in Ostrava. That was spectacularly good. Those two Russian guys in Utrecht came the closest. This festival in Lisboa isn't over yet, of course, but it doesn't look like there'll be any of those outliers I so crave.)