I just went to a little rehearsal at the "Soundbridge" at Benaroya. It was to be electronic music by Cornish students and alumni. When I got there, I found out it was actually called "Cat Photos", and was a series of short works with interactive visuals.

Cat Photos, yup. Imagine photography students at a private art college who have been given an assignment requiring them to take pictures of their cats. Now apply this to music students. Every piece was "about" cats, used cat noises, or that one quasi-goth did this thing with poetry and snakes, but I guess snakes are cats when you're gothic enough. ("Creature of darkness / I open myself to thee"...)

I was half expecting it to be like "Jingle Cats" except with modern compositions instead of christmas carols, but it was more like the technical demonstrations that come with the computer music journal by llll|l (MIT Press). The alumnus that turned in a CD at the last second on had obviously put the most work into his hypnotic purring-oriented piece. Then there was the french techno guy who didn't really incorporate cats at all. Techno! Probably the hardest to listen to was the woman who used a lot of Metasynth (a spectrogram program, into which she fed pictures of her fluffy cat, Schuman). Her sound design really showed off how harsh those mackie powered PA cabs can get. Ow.

Hey... was I just a music critic? Man, that was fun AND easy!