It was a slightly unlikely setting: the cold sanctuary of a former church with light streaming through a round stained-glass, beaming down on the stage on a cold winter’s night in downtown Marshall. But a sweet little crowd of folks clustered together to hear the Madison County Arts Council’s program of the evening, featuring the celestial music of the Asheville-based artist Vincent Wrenn on his self-created Radiasonic, joined by James Owen‘s Pythagorean-tuning creations on lap steel.
Owen, known for a wide variety of sounds either solo or in a number of Asheville bands, opened the evening with his own pulsing, wavering, sloping-and-resurrecting composition, bending sounds and expectations just enough to warm up the audience for Wrenn, who performs in a 360-note scale over seven octaves through his unique construct of eight oscillators, amplifiers and speakers inside one “hypercube.” He uses this to create waves of sound-within-sound based on the positions of the planets and sun of our solar system, one hand on the knobs of his control boards (marked in astrological signs) and two fingers of the other hand roaming up, down and around a sheet of paper that holds the patterns he moves through (also marked in astrological signs). The effect was huge—in the sense that the harmonics and side harmonics produced a complex audio experience that filled the brain perhaps even more than it filled the room.
It all made the drive home to Asheville along a deserted river road, under a just-past-full moon, something of a spectacular landing back on the earth.
Kudos to the Madison Arts Council and their Saturday evening Arts Sanctuary programming. By the way, they’re starting Friday-evening dance events this Friday, Feb. 9, as well.
— Nelda Holder, news and opinion editor
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