Virginia Tech’s Cube Fest 2024 melds music, art, technology

Event update: Arvcúken Noquisi has canceled his Friday night set at Cube Fest 2024.

Clarification: Brendan David-John is affiliated with the Seneca Nation, not a member.

Alternating smorgasbords of sound and vision are on the bill for this weekend’s Cube Fest 2024, at Virginia Tech’s Moss Arts Center.

Among the performances scheduled at the Cube — which the university describes as “a completely reconfigurable immersive environment” — is “Sounds in Motion.” The Friday show’s four sets will feature a swarm of experimental jazz music, an electronically manipulated synthesizer chorus, a performance with tribal beads providing rhythms and visuals, and a narrated text with choreography that addresses migration from mistreatment.

“Sounds in Motion” is part of this year’s Cube Fest theme, “Immersive Indigenous Experiences.” The variety on offer for the senses is something that the Cube can do like few other places on the planet, said Eric Lyon, one of Cube Fest’s three organizers. The versatile four-story, black box-style theater with a complex projector system can literally surround audiences via 140 loudspeakers while providing technological accompaniment that includes motion-capture video.

“In terms of the actual experience, you can just have this … in some ways, more naturalistic experience of electronic sound,” said Lyon, a composer, professor at Virginia Tech’s School of Performing Arts, and a faculty fellow at the school’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology. “When you’re out in the real world, sound really is coming at you from a number of different places far and near.

“What’s exciting about the electronic world is the world of electronic music in a high-density, loudspeaker array is that you can get all of the richness of a naturalistic environment with all of the wonderful ways that artistic creation can take you beyond the natural world.”

Cube Fest, which began as an experiment in presenting entertainment through heavy technological methods, has been open to audiences five times since 2016. In 2021, with COVID-19 still limiting people’s ability to gather, organizers went with a combination live and live-streamed event that focused on Afrofuturism, a Virginia Tech spokeswoman said. Organizers repeated the theme in 2022 for a full audience.

Both years, co-organizer Tyechia Thompson was key to gathering the performer lineup, which featured former members of the Sun Ra Arkestra. This year, co-organizer Brendan David-John, a computer science professor and Seneca Nation affiliate, led efforts to develop the lineup, Lyon said. Cube Fest has moved to a biennial schedule.

Cube Fest, a collaboration between its mother venue, Moss Arts Center, and the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology, runs Friday through Sunday. Tickets are no more than $10 per performance, but it’s all free for Virginia Tech students.

About 2018, Lyon, Thompson and David-John “started thinking about the fact that a relative lack of diversity within the academic/electronic music communities … really was worth kind of pushing back against a little bit,” Lyon said. “We wanted to see if we could really show a model for what a festival would be like to just kind of supercharge that range of diversity of programming because, among other things, we just thought this would be great for our audience. You have all kinds of different music, and you’re sure to find something to love within all that.”

“Sounds in Motion” is Boston-based saxophonist DA Mekonnen’s brainchild. Mekonnen, whose resume includes leading Ethiopian pop act Debo Band, is bringing an analog element to the digital event — four one-sided long-playing vinyl albums of his 2023 project, “dragonchild.” At Cube Fest, he and his cohort will set turntable needles on all four records to play simultaneously. The result will be one song, “BLACK: Constellation X.”

On drums will be his former Debo Band colleague, Adam Clark, a Roanoke Valley native and drumset teacher at Virginia Tech. Clark recommended that Mekonnen submit his “dragonchild” concept to Cube Fest. Clark is always on his toes behind a trap set, and that will serve him well, as Mekonnen says that when the needles drop, there is no way to time it so that the four records sync the same way every time.

Mekonnen, born in Sudan to Ethiopian refugee parents, moved with them to Texas, where he grew up. He said he developed an expansive idea of what it means to be indigenous as he was writing and recording “dragonchild.”

“I kind of think of Ethiopia as my heritage, as my homeland … where I wasn’t born, sort of like taken away from me, if you will,” Mekonnen said. “I wanted to think about Ethiopia … thinking of the land itself as a dragon, and that the people from the land are the children of the dragon. … ”

“I was really exploring, who are the dragon children? And I was thinking that they were indigenous people from this land before it was called Ethiopia. So this kind of reclamation of indigeneity is something I was interested in. When you talk about indigenous people … we’re all indigenous to a place. We’re all indigenous to the place where humanity began. And so that’s kind of what I was exploring with ‘dragonchild.’”

Also performing as part of “Sounds in Motion” are Shawn Greenlee, Arvcúken Noquisi and Aline de Souza with Brandon Hale.

Greenlee will perform “Sluicer,” which he describes as a performance system for electroacoustic improvisation. In this case, the audience will hear two 20-voice, erratic synthesizers that Greenlee will operate as a roving “chorus.”

Noquisi, a Muscogee Nation member and Arkansas native, will use seed beads and handmade beadwork to develop micro-sound samples while using a microscope camera to examine them visually. 

“I hope to play with the relationship between a non-indigenous audience and myself — reflecting on histories of wax-Indians in museums and the desires to observe, record, and access Indigenous knowledges which underlie so many contemporary interactions with settler institutions,” he said on the Cube Fest web page.

De Souza, a humanities and arts instructor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Religion and Culture, has performed multiple times in the Cube. In her “Aline R S S de Souza,” she will use text, narration, choreographed movement and images to address violence, family rejection and her migration from Brazil. Sound technician Brandon Hale will accompany her.

Visit the Cube Fest web page for more information and a list of performers that includes painter and sculptor Bill Crouse with New York-based Alleghany River Seneca Dancers; Amelia Winger-Bearskin, a digital artist and University of Florida professor; and audio/video/sculpture specialist Casey Koyczan, a member of Dene Nation.