Roulette’s 29th annual Mixology Festival, curated by festival-founder David Weinstein and organized around the theme of psychedelia, features music and media performances that revisit and restore the virtues of visceral imagination in the form of enlightened vision, sonic illusions, collective synesthesia, and transformative grooving. Moving beyond the cliches of drug culture fabrications, the festival seeks to induce sustainable euphoria.
February 19: Snake Union with Katherine Liberovskaya // Long Distance Poison
Night 1: February 19
Audiovisual trance-media duo Long Distance Poison (Nathan Cearley and Erica Bradbury) explores non-subjective musical processes and practices that minimize intention, self, and hylomorphic design. The electronic duo Snake Union–Chuck Bettis (Die Trommel Fatale, Mossenek, Meta-matics) and David Grant (Action Patrol, On A Clear Day)–creates psychedelic, delicate, and fuzzed-out freeform grooves and synchronized sonic dirt with analog synths, digital sound processing, modular wires, and Max patches. They’ll be joined by video sorcerer Katherine Liberovskaya.
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February 20: Rue Bainbridge // Lary 7
Night 2: February 20
The light and sound duo Rue Bainbridge (Gryphon Rue and Benton C Bainbridge) creates a space for collective dreaming, where quirks of human hand and electricity spawn impressions of nature and abstract language. More specifically, Bainbridge uses a hacked game console, driven by custom video synthesizers, to generate light drawings that become a kind of score for Rue, who produces electro-acoustic music with a singing saw. Multi-media artist Lary 7 will present his enigmatic lantern projections and legendary Owl Movie, a 16mm cinema work exploring the possibilities of arcane film equipment.
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February 21: Gold Dime // Ginny Benson // Shahzad Ismaily
Night 3: February 21
The festival closes with Gold Dime, led by drummer/vocalist Andrya Ambro (Talk Normal) with Ian Douglas-Moore on bass, Brendan Winick on guitar, David Lackner on sax, and visuals by Joe Wakeman. The band’s furious and precisely-crafted song-poems evoke The Velvet Underground, Can, and Sappho. The evening also features intermedia artist Ginny Benson using analog synths to create densely layered electronic music with video collages made from VHS tapes, and multi-tentacled master transmitter of the divine delight of virtuosity and funky truth, Shahzad Ismaily, with stellar guests in a special project for Roulette.
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Roulette’s Annual Mixology Festival focuses on new and unusual uses of technology in music and media arts. Programmed by a rotating cast of artists/curators with a collectively unorthodox perspective, the Festival has, since 1991, boldly embraced both the successes and struggles of gadgets in the service of innovation.