What it's like at San Francisco's weirdest music festival

"There was a brief moment, near the start of the San Francisco Tape Music Festival on Jan. 9, when I despaired. Minutes earlier, I had lodged myself into my narrow seat at the Victoria Theatre in the Mission. Now, as the lights dimmed, the audience's chatter stopped, the room plunged into near-total darkness, and the music - more like sounds, really - blared out of the speakers."

"The San Francisco Tape Music Festival is a long-running annual event celebrating " audio works projected in three-dimensional space." This is a broad description, and necessarily so: More than traditional songs, the 10 compositions that played the night I attended were intricately composed works of sound design, sequences of noises foreign to any commercial synthesizer, much less a guitar or a piano. This year, the event ran Jan. 9-11."

"Twenty-four high-fidelity speakers lined the perimeter of the Victoria Theatre. It's San Francisco's oldest operating theater, and its small seats are somewhat uncomfortable. The audience was around 100 strong. In the dark, noises seemed to scuttle behind the listener's back and then leap across the room. This, I imagined, is how woodland critters feel, trembling in the dark, listening to rustles in the leaves for nearby predators. Sometimes, the effect was unsettling."

The San Francisco Tape Music Festival presented ten spatialized audio compositions over a 24-channel system at the Victoria Theatre from Jan. 9–11. The pieces emphasized unconventional sound design and noise sequences rather than traditional instruments, producing textures foreign to commercial synthesizers. Works included a white-noise soundscape by David Lynch and a shrill electronic rendering of ancient Chinese poems. About 100 attendees experienced sounds that moved unsettlingly through the darkened theater, with noises that scuttled behind listeners and leapt across the space. The festival prompted curiosity about production techniques while juxtaposing high-fidelity immersion with the theater's small, uncomfortable seating.

Read at SFGATE