"The future of creativity lies in its birthplace, the human mind,” says Dr. Martine Rothblatt from the stage of the Carolina Theatre in downtown Durham, North Carolina this past weekend. The 60-something lawyer, author, and creator of Sirius XM appears to be giving a spirited lecture to a packed house of attentive students, artists, entrepreneurs, journalists, coders, and other curious and creative folks. But as she continues—invoking the ideas of Alan Turing and Arthur C. Clarke, Bernie Sanders' plight to make college free for all, and an inevitable transhumanist future—the crowd explodes into applause and shouts of agreement. It becomes clear what's actually happening: She's attempting to incite radical change.
Rousing speeches like Dr. Rothblatt's aren't necessarily uncommon in the world of TED Talks and tech symposiums, but hers was the opening keynote of Moogfest, a four-day event that could be broadly categorized as a music festival. Founded in 2004, Moogfest has always been a tribute to its namesake, the late synth pioneer Dr. Robert Moog, building on his legacy of “the synthesis of music, art, and technology.” Each iteration, whether in its early home of New York or in Moog Music's hometown of Asheville, N.C., has brought together future-facing musicians and artists with innovators of the past and present, with an increased tech focus over time. In this sense, Moogfest is part of a growing trend—along with SXSW Interactive, the Creators Project, London’s Convergence festival, and more—that explores the themes of technology and futurism in the context of a live music setting (or at least parallel to it).
Following an unfruitful relationship with Bonnaroo organizers AC Entertainment and a financially unsuccessful rebrand in 2014 (with a reported loss of $1.5 million), Moog Music took a year off to rethink things and make the move to Durham. As a result, this year’s 11th incarnation took Moogfest beyond the typical addition of interactive art installations and panels of talking heads. It was something too well-organized to call a happening, too energetic to call a conference. And yet “festival” seems too modest a term for the insurmountable spread of workshops, discussions, performances, exhibitions, and general fits of thinking that transpired. This is the new model for these (at times exhausting) kinds of event, which try to force a dialogue between music and technology; for the most part, nothing felt all that forced about the dialogue.
Laurie Anderson at the Carolina Theatre; photo by B. Saren.
From the look of its quiet streets and historic architecture, Durham doesn't seem like a natural place for talks on technoshamanism, 3D-printed instrument prototypes, and artificial intelligence demonstrations, let alone monolithic drone music and blistering techno. Nestled three and half hours east of the Moog factory in Asheville, the somewhat hilly city, with a population upwards of 250,000, had a thriving tobacco industry tracing back to the late-1800s, and is now home to the major research centers of Duke University and Duke Medical Center, as well as indie rock beacon Merge Records. Recently the city has experienced a tech boom, with many startups renovating the old tobacco factories for their offices. A local volunteer I spoke with told me that downtown Durham only began to thrive about seven years ago, gradually expanding its skyline. Moogfest set up shop this year in these buildings around the American Tobacco Historic District, and it's where they plan to stay, in an attempt to engrain the festival into the city’s changing culture.
"How do you balance a conversation about the future that's going to be informed by technology, and make sure that culture and art and music is part of that?” wondered the fest’s CEO and creative director Adam Katz, when we spoke over the weekend. “I think that as the community comes up, Moogfest will be an important part of building on that conversation. So that as somebody is making an app and talking about the next Silicon Valley, they're also talking about the next Berlin underground."
Grouper at the Carolina Theatre; photo by B. Saren.
Maybe this sounds like the kind of gratingly big thinking pedaled by, for instance, startup CEOs, but this year’s beefed-up Moogfest made Katz's idea seem somewhat plausible. Talks like “Mastery Is Dead,” fromArtiphon creator Mike Butera, invited audiences in a tech incubator to shed concepts of virtuosity in exchange for a more open-ended view of creativity. The Duke I&E building hosted an in-depth discussion on the future of digital music sales with industry vets Steven M. Marks of the RIAA and Richard Burgess of A2IM, just after electronics companylittleBits gave a workshop for building your own optoelectronic sequencer. Bespoke experiences likeFlatsitter's virtual reality spa—in which you sit in a silver isolation booth and unwind through guided meditation in a sparse, ever-shifting digital environment—were installed in hotel art galleries. Maybe some of this sounds slightly dry on paper, but most of the daytime programming seemed to whiz by in the hours allotted, with the conversation afterwards lingering still. If you wanted to have a serious conversation about the democratization of music tools—like Onyx Ashanti's plan for a completelydownloadable instrument—this was the ideal zone to do it, though admittedly that sort of thing is not for every music fan.
Moogfest’s workshops grew from roughly 12 in 2014 to about 78 this year, so it could feel a little like there were three distinct festivals all happening at once. On one occasion, I actually ran back and forth between the Carolina Theatre's Fletcher Hall and Cinema 1, attempting to see both a talk by Laurie Anderson and a screening/Q&A with It Follows composer Disasterpeace. (Though I missed most of the film's first half, hearing Anderson's stories from her artist residency at NASA was charming and surreal.) Having to choose between seeing legends like Gary Numan and GZA in a small club and seeing brilliant electronic up-and-comers Karen Gwyer and VIA APP was especially difficult. Some might call it over-booking or poor organization, but Katz sees it differently. “I know that frustration of not seeing everything,” he says. “But I think even if you don't get to see it, there's still this effect that it has on [everything else]. And so it's not about an individual being able to participate in everything, it's about the whole thing as a system kind of operating."
Reggie Watts at the American Tobacco Campus; photo by Carlos G.
Given the high price point of tickets ($249 and up), making such decisions often seemed cruel, as if attendees had paid hundreds of dollars for days of unavoidable FOMO. But accessibility was still an emerging theme of Moogfest. Free daily events were available to anyone in town, including a Reggie Watts show, an exhibit of synth innovator Don Buchla's work, and more. Microsoft’s Grimes installation—which essentially entailed pushing and prodding the tent’s illuminated interior to “remix” her endlessly looping music—was probably entertaining for some, but in the larger context of Moogfest—where experiences were meant to edify more than amuse—it looked like a weak gimmick (and one that has been making the rounds). Grimes herselftweeted that she hadnothing to do with itsconception.
Looking ahead, Katz and his team are already working with Duke to form a student initiative for 2017, and generally trying to align Moogfest more with fans and locals (“We don't it to be all industry, and we don't want people coming just to network,” he says). “I think it's a smart crowd, but it's more about that other idea of being curious, engaged, questioning,” he adds. “Because there's certainly a lot of people—who I personally know, who are here in Durham, who have been really instrumental in helping this festival come about—who, you know, they're not fans of Sunn O))). But they went to the show, they wanted to see it, they're curious. And then they wanted to understand what people liked about it, and then they wanted to have a conversation about why you liked it and what they liked and didn't like about it.”
Sunn O))) at Motorco Park; photo by Ryan Snyder.
Perhaps Moogfest’s appeal was captured best by something Laurie Anderson said during her talk on the final day. She explained that when she would conceive of a new instrument to invent for one of her performances or art pieces, her goal wasn't to create something that looked and felt uncanny, even though it would operate unlike anything else. She wouldn't want to make a new shape, claiming we've already got enough of those, but that she'd rather “use old shapes differently."