Musicians and music lovers gathered at ArtSpace West on the West Valley campus on Friday to celebrate the phenomenon of drone music.
The festival, Super Bloom, recognizes students in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Performance program who are creating experimental electronic music and ambient music simultaneously.
"It's a minimalist, electronic, acoustic type of music that can be low-level listening or you can really focus on it," said Zack Hansen, the founder and organizer of the DIY concert series Desert Drone, and a co-curator of Super Bloom.
The event's name stems from the ecological phenomenon of the super bloom that occurs in the Sonoran Desert, particularly during the winter and spring months.
Super Bloom was established as an outlet for the students to have a space for their work to be showcased to the public and for others to honor it, Charles Eppley, a professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies and the co-curator of Super Bloom, said.
The gallery included large windows and tall ceilings featuring speakers and colorful theater lights. A gallery like this allowed for the overall vibe of Super Bloom to be executed, Eppley said.
"Finding these moments of joy and ecstasy, perhaps in moments of hardship," Eppley said. "The desert is often seen as an inhospitable place, and yet these beautiful, tender, soft, vulnerable flowers can bloom and create these fantastic landscapes."
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Oscar Jaime-Marcial, a junior studying interdisciplinary arts and performance and a performer at Super Bloom, said the best way to describe drone music is that it feels like it's filling up every crevice and spot in a room.
Artists at the event constructed their music using a variety of different conventional and unconventional instruments to help them perform.
Jay Needham, one of the performers at the event, played a piece of music using field recordings of barbed wire fences and a block of graphite.
"(Needham)'s pumping sound through the graphite and sonify-ing this material," Eppley said.
Super Bloom opens opportunities for local and regional performers, as well for students. For Sun Devils, this event often platforms their first live performance alongside established performers who are further in their careers.
Jaime-Marcial, who has been practicing different forms of music since the fourth grade, said his experience with Super Bloom has allowed for growth in his music career.
"Being able to perform here really just opened my mind to love genres of music but especially ambient music," Jaime-Marcial said.
For this years' lineup of artists performing at the festival, they are all making different music in their performances but are still a part of an experimental community exploring their art.
"Art is an important expression of what it means to be human," Eppely said. "Getting people to come together to express a shared humanity through art making and through music making is really crucial at this moment."
Edited by Kasturi Tale, Senna James and Pippa Fung.
Reach the reporter at csfishe4@asu.edu.
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