Tickling your brain through your ears.

The song "Echoes" by Pink Floyd is 23 minutes long. "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" by Dream Theater clocks in at a whopping 42 minutes. Stoner-rock titans Sleep recorded a mammoth 62-minute track called, fittingly, "Dopesmoker." But all of them are tiny musical hiccups compared to the preposterously long song that will be performed at a Kitchener church this Saturday to kick off the 2009 Open Ears Festival.

Starting at 6 a.m., a team of more than 50 pianists will take turns playing Pages Mystiques, an 1893 piece by composer Erik Satie, who dictated that a certain 22-bar movement should be played 820 consecutive times. Satie was a bit of a kook.

If all goes according to plan, the final notes of the piece will be played at 10 p.m., 16 hours after it gets started.  While anyone is more than welcome to sit through the entire performance, it would be clearly insane to do so, which is why Open Ears organizers are encouraging people to come and go as they please.

A 16-hour repetition of the same 22-bar movement is just the first of many auditory adventures that will await visitors to this year's Open Ears Festival of Music and Sound. The 10-day festival will feature experimental concerts (The Books, Hard Rubber Orchestra, Red Chamber and more), "soundwalks" through an ecological reserve, film screenings and sound-art installations at locations around Kitchener-Waterloo. Oh!  And there's gonna be a BLUE DOT!  Yes, a BLUE DOT!  If you don't know what that is, I strongly suggest you learn more about the Blue Dot, then attend on Saturday May 2.

A full schedule of Open Ears events is here.

For a sneak peak of what's to come, I strongly suggest that, if possible, you head to the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and check out Whispering Room, a sound-art installation by Janet Cardiff.  In a nutshell, it is: a roomful of speakers, a movie projector, and one of the creepiest, most unsettling experiences you my ever have. Read all about it.

I hesitate to even mention one aspect of Open Ears, because the selfish part of me doesn't want it to be crowded. But I suppose it's my journalistic duty (Ha, I said duty!) to not withhold pertinent information. So here it is:  the festival will also host a screening of Heima, the documentary about the 2007 tour that saw the inimitable dream-pop Sigur Ros return to their native Iceland to play a series of free, unannounced concerts.

I went to the Canadian premiere of Heima in Toronto last year, and it was great. It should have been super-mega-fantastic, but I had the bad luck of sitting behind a person with the WORLD'S LARGEST HEAD, who also happened to have the WORLD'S WEAKEST NECK MUSCLES. This woman's enormous, planet-sized noggin flip-flopped constantly from shoulder to shoulder.  Trying to watch the movie behind this giant bobblehead was an infuriating experience.

I have since bought Heima and watched it on DVD a bunch of times, but it really demands a big-screen viewing, given Iceland's majestic vistas and landscapes. So I'll be at the Princess Cinema on April 27, basking in the gorgeous sights and sounds.  Be forewarned, though: if your head enters my line of sight, you're getting a smack to the noggin.  Here's a teaser (of the movie, not the smack):

Comments

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I have since bought Heima and watched it on DVD a bunch of times, but it really demands a big-screen viewing, given Iceland's majestic vistas and landscapes

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I hesitate to even mention one aspect of Open Ears, because the selfish part of me doesn't want it to be crowded.