Since its launch in 1989, the Subtropics festival has offered South Florida a multi-day event focused squarely on experimental music and sound art. This year the two-week Miami Beach festival starts with a symposium on sound and architecture, then relaxes into a series of concerts.

Most of these will feature improvisation, custom electronic instruments, or unusual acoustic techniques. For example, Paula Matthusen notes only that her performance “involves a candle.” The ensemble Frozen Music explores the acoustic environment of the Botanical Garden while you enjoy a picnic. Alvin Curran opens for a film at Cinematheque, and drummer Abbey Rader interprets the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths with his avant-jazz quartet. And in keeping with its own tradition, the festival closes with the Subtropics Marathon, two afternoons of performances by a range of artists.

We sat down with festival director Gustavo Matamoros last week at his white-walled studio on Lincoln Road for a talk about the origins of the festival and the role it plays in the South Florida arts scene.

We started at the beginning.

The seeds for Subtropics were sown by the New Music America Festival, a nomadic event that originated in the “Downtown” New York scene in the late 1970s. In 1988 it came to Miami, bringing 150 artists to the city over nine days, “from John Cage down.” A young Matamoros served as the technical coordinator. After that experience, the organizers — also including promoter Mary Luft, oboist Joseph Celli, and composer Orlando Garcia — pulled together enough grants to launch an experimental music festival of their own.

“From the beginning, the idea was that the festival would feature mostly composers who perform their own music,” he says. In the early years, Subtropics brought in national luminaries such as Cage, David Tudor, and Pauline Oliveros, but it also served as an important outlet for regional artists.

“What happens with the Subtropics festival, it’s become a venue for people to experiment, and to have an audience, where we pay great attention to how things sound,” says Matamoros. “Its mission has been to support the artist who makes this music and give them a venue that helps validate what they’re doing. You know, we want to be in on the exploration. We want to know what people are doing, and we want the community to find out.”

He elaborates: “With experimental art, or experimental music, the premise is that when you begin, you begin at a place where you feel as though you don’t know anything about what you’re doing, because the whole point is to learn something. In other words, you engage in an experiment.” Like scientists, the artist formulates a hypothesis and takes a risk “with the intention of discovering something that becomes a contribution to society, something that helps us understand better who we are in the world.”

Matamoros views sound as a unique avenue into understanding the world, a perceptual gateway that is underdeveloped in our visually oriented culture. “For instance, someone that can’t see, but can hear, is perfectly capable of understanding the world — not only that, but navigating without having to bump into things. The only thing that is necessary is for that person to learn how to decode the audible signs that things are in front of you.”

Those signs are an important part of what Matamoros explores in his own installations. His ensemble Frozen Music, with Renee Barge and David Dunn, will be featured one afternoon at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.  They will set up speakers around the garden, each of them bringing his “own system of sound production” and plugging in. “We think of the systems as ecology. Sometimes what we do is collect sounds in the environment that we’re in. We have hydrophones to collect sounds underwater, insertion mics that we can plug into trees.”

The multi-hour performance emphasizes careful listening. It could be a microcosm for the entire festival: “The music functions as a way to help you understand how sound speaks about what’s around you, help you connect with your environment, in ways that we don’t when we’re simply being intellectual or visual. The ear is our gate towards connecting with things. Of course there’s touch and there’s smell, but the ear is particularly interesting in what it gives us as information, and the way that we can still be mindful of things and aware and then incorporate that into our life.”

Subtropics XXII runs March 1 to 17 at various Miami venues. Most events are free. Visit subtropics.org for more details.

Image of Russell Frehling

[This preview can also be viewed on the WLRN website.]

A gong hangs suspended from its stand, light dancing across its bronzed surface, each hammered dent hinting at some mysterious overtone waiting to be released. If you grab the right mallet and strike it, that light turns into sound, the complex interplay of indentations drives the air, caresses your eardrums, and vibrates your body. The sound swells, fills the room, and gradually dissipates.

If you pick up a cello bow, say, and draw it along the edge of the gong, something else happens. You may find that you can suspend time: isolating frequency clusters from the rich sonic wash, convincing them to loiter a while, so that the gong sounds on and on and on.

If you are percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, you take ten gongs, make your own bows, truck them around the country, and assemble an ad-hoc ensemble in each city to magnify that experience into something acoustically mind-blowing. Nakatani has been performing solo percussion for the past 15 years, earning a reputation for his experimental approach to bowed metal. This Saturday night, he brings his Nakatani Gong Orchestra to the Miami-Dade County Auditorium, courtesy of Tigertail Productions. The orchestra will be assembled from associates of the local improvisational group Fridamusiq. I’ll be one of the musicians. To clarify what I had signed up for, I spoke to a cordial Tatsuya by phone as he prepared for a concert in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Nakatani explained that he conceived the Gong Orchestra as a way to extend the sonic range of his solo work: “You know, I have two arms and two legs, but how about if four arms play the instrument? That kind of thing, adding the passion, making so many gongs sound: that’s how I started thinking about this project.”

This sort of expansion would have complicated the logistics of touring if he had assembled a fixed ensemble. Instead, he simply asks the organizers at each location to find people, not necessarily percussionists: “I wanted to keep the touring artist as a solo format, so I can flexibly move around. But I wanted to share the music and do a bigger scale.” Pulling in local musicians allowed that to happen.

The orchestra will perform after only one rehearsal earlier in the day. Nakatani has designed a careful system to accommodate the tight schedule. Now in its “sixth or seventh edition,” he brings the equivalent of  “an airplane evacuation manual” that allows people to learn quickly: “basically three-and-a-half hours to learn how to bow the gong, and how to read my conducting.”

The sound of bowed metal percussion (gongs, cymbals, vibraphones) is a color touched on by a lot of composers in the last century, and Nakatani stresses his own music’s modernist roots: “There is no traditional, or no ethnic, or no culture behind it, because everything is mixture. Bowing a gong is not traditional.” There’s a deeply personal element that extends to the instruments themselves: “The gongs I get in China, and set them up a very special way. I have special parts: I weld, I cut metal, I make holes. I create custom bows and mallets also.”

Given the immersive wash of sound that emanates from the gongs, and its East Asian associations, many listeners may feel the music offers a spiritual, transcendent quality. Nakatani says that “people think of Indian music, raga,” or “meditative music.” But while he doesn’t dispute other interpretations, to him the auditory and sensory experience alone provides the full meaning: “Pretty much, there’s no background. Just the sound, sound itself. But it’s very sensitive and quiet. Vibrations, particular vibrations, are the most important things to me.”

Tatsuya Nakatani will perform solo and with the Nakatani Gong Orchestra featuring members of Fridamusiq at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium On-Stage Black Box, 2901 W. Flagler, on Saturday, Feb. 23 at 8:30 pm. Tickets, videos, and more information can be found at www.tigertail.org.

We are sometimes reminded that history is malleable. For her upcoming show at Miami Light Project’s Lightbox, Seattle-based performing artist Dayna Hanson looks back to an unlikely moment in American history: the Revolutionary War. In this project, titled Gloria’s Cause, Hansen offers an alternate take on the founding of the nation. In a text about the project, Hanson says, “beneath the overplayed version of the external facts we learn in school — simultaneously so appealing and so ludicrous — are insights on our current struggles.” The plotline of Gloria’s Cause laughs at enduring myths of America and unearths pieces of history that tend to get left out.

The cast of characters includes Deborah Sampson, the first known American woman to impersonate a man in order to join the army as a soldier. And the story diverges from the triumphant one we usually hear, to include mishaps in leadership and wrong directions. Hanson touches on the 1754 Albany Congress, where the colonies met for the first time to discuss relations with the Native Americans, and Benjamin Franklin’s plan for uniting the colonies was rejected. We also learn about an intercepted letter from Colonel Richard Lee to Colonel Joseph Reed, criticizing George Washington’s leadership.

Gloria’s Cause is rife with social commentary.

According to Miami Light Project’s Rebekah Lengel, “some parts are provocative and thought-provoking, as they reexamine the history of our country, but it’s done in a way that has a lot of humor and intelligence.” The audience is asked to consider what seeds might have been planted then that are still feeding (or warping) us today.

While Gloria’s Cause squarely falls into the category of dance theater, dance is really an architecture over which everything else is laid. Gloria’s Cause is described as a “rock & roll retelling.” Hanson’s choreography takes cues from everyday movement as much as formal dance, and the cast of dancers doubles as the live band. Layered on top of the show’s original music and movement are video and, apparently, cherry pie.

Hanson has a long history with multidisciplinary performance. She was one of the founders of 33 Fainting Spells, a Seattle-based group formed in 1994 that made its mark on the national scene with an innovative blend of dance and theater. Since then, she has gone on to produce her own work in multiple genres including choreography and film. She also formed a live band, Today!, as a way to test out ideas for new projects which eventually led to a merge of dance and music. Gloria’s Cause, her most recent endeavor, has been well received by audiences around the country.

The show will run on Dec. 6-8 at 8:00 p.m. at the Lightbox at Goldman Warehouse, 404 N.W. 26^th St., Miami. Tickets: $20 members, $25 non-members. Hanson will also be offering a master class on Saturday Dec. 8at 12:30 p.m., at the Lightbox. The class is open to professional dancers only, though members of the community are invited to watch; www.miamilightproject.com.

In these days of Facebook, YouTube, and television on demand, the opera, ballet, and symphony are all struggling to fill concert halls. So the Knight Foundation stepped in to bring classical arts to the masses. They decided to fund 1000 classical performances in unexpected places over three years. But they surpassed that goal in just two years. Artburstmiami.com’s Celeste Fraser Delgado was there for the foundations’s final Random Act of Culture in Miami-Dade County. FIRST AIRED ON WLRN-MIAMI HERALD NEWS RADIO ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2012.