Cathedral is proudly billed by its producers as "one of the first interactive, continuous works of music and art designed specifically for the World Wide Web." Despite my immediate sense of discomfort at this familiar high-art claim to pioneering status (I had to wonder how online gaming experts would feel about such statements), I went along to this 'live' performance of the work resolved to keep an open mind.

Cathedral is a multi-media and multiply situated work featuring acoustic and computer music, webcasts, and interactive musical, visual, and text-based elements, which coalesces around five historical 'moments' (the building of Chartes Cathedral, the building of the Great Pyramid, the founding of the World Wide Web, the inception of the Native American Ghost Dance religion, and this one - the first detonation of the Atomic Bomb). Dating from 1997 (a fair while ago in web terms), the project is the brainchild of composer William Duckworth and multimedia artist Nora Farrell, and while it has been evolving continuously online since its inception, it has also come to life on stages around the world, for occasions such as the mini[ ]max (short for "minimalism to the max") Festival here in Brisbane.

The structure of the work is loose, semi-improvised, and reactive: the on-stage performers worked within a general framework, developing musical motifs out of material delivered to them via the PitchWeb. (The PitchWeb is a software instrument which is played by selecting and manipulating shapes from a palette, or inputting words or phrases, that are mapped to banks of sound samples - at the Cathedral performances, some audience members had brought their laptops along and were 'playing' the web installation from the front row). On stage were Cathedral co-founder and accomplished composer William Duckworth, doing something with a laptop and mixer (it was hard to tell exactly what, without any clear aural or visual differentiation between the various electronic sound sources), trombonist (and conch-shell-ist and hosepipe-ist) Stuart Dempster, Hindustani singer Sulagna Basu, sound-artist and composer Warren Burt, and the very hip DJ Tamara.

The highlight of my night was this emerging talent's very subtle and affective work at the CD decks, making use of gorgeous samples that never sounded too tired and familiar. The show for her started with light percussive scratching sounds, gradually built up, followed at times by some kick-ass drum and bass and jungle beats (as in, start worrying about your internal organs), and the extremely clever use of sitar samples intertwined with Sulagna Basu's beautifully haunting vocal lines. The combination of DJ and singer really would have been enough for me - I have a personal aesthetic very close to minimalism after all.

However, the audience was constantly forced to choose where to place its attention - Warren Burt's scratching on a dead tree, close-miking of squeaky toys and just about every piece of the detritus of American popular culture you can think of? Or Stuart Dempster's trombone/hosepipe didgeridoo/conch shell solos (which did not always sit very well over DJ Tamara’s grooves), or the bleeps coming out of the pitchweb? Not only this, but at various points "actor and semiotician" AJ Sabatini wandered onstage and delivered monologues that circled around the subject at hand (the detonation of the first atomic bomb) with a mixture of narrative fragments and philosophical musings, in which he also circled around the very postmodern idea that there is no authority or authenticity to be ascribed to the role of narrator, no authenticity to the accounts of witnesses, while contradictorily providing a kind of narrative, a kind of imagined witness account. Probably all too familiar to students of cultural and critical theory, and probably all but meaningless to the rest of the audience. This soup of ideas, bubbling activity and layering of sound was certainly interesting, but surely the stated aim to create a space for "reflection and contemplation" would have been better achieved with a more reasoned and sparing use of sound, a less populous stage (which goes for the virtually as well as physically present performers), and - dare I say it - an aesthetic more consonant with European 'sacred' minimalism (hand over to Arvo Part, I say) than this free-for-all structure with its sonic clutter.

As for my problem with Cathedral 's claims to inventiveness (which come straight out of high modernism, by the way), the show was certainly diverse, witty, and inventive enough to create a pleasurable sense of daring in audiences and musicians who define themselves primarily in relation to either the high-minded European avant-garde or the staid mainstream classical tradition. But I worried that those better acquainted, or living with, with the endless permutations of popular music might have found it all a bit pedestrian. After all, mystic drones and traditional ethnic music have been a feature of prog rock, new age and world beat music for decades, while electronic artists and psychedelic rock musicians have been experimenting with the sonic possibilities of seemingly inappropriate objects for just as long. The fact is that there are many, many, electronic artists and DJs working in a minimalist style, numerous adoring John Cage fans among them. Even Wired, hardly the traditional home of underground arts reporting, recently published a story about the emerging lower-case sound movement. At the mini[max] festival as a whole, this burgeoning post-minimalist music scene was seriously underrepresented, with Cathedral left to carry the can for the experimental/electronic tangent of postminimalism.

I don't in any way want to downplay the liveliness, the sense of 'now' of the festival, particularly as communicated by the instrumental ensembles featured throughout the festival (local groups Isorhythmos and Topology were fantastic), but surely there was room to show us more of what bedroom artists and underground DJs (especially the locals) are doing with the minimalist aesthetic as well. It was because of this suspicion that Cathedral 's artists (with the exception of the fabulous DJ Tamara) were incorporating half-heard snippets of 'popular culture' (seen as exotic other), rather than organically producing work that is in and of the popular contemporary world, that my discomfort refused to subside.

Details

The Cathedral Band
William Duckworth and Nora Farrell
Warren Burt
DJ Tamara
Stuart Dempster
and A. J. Sabatini as The Chronicler

Guest Performers
Sulagna Basu, Hindustani singer
And via the world wide web:
Therefore [San Diego]
Aspects of Physics [New York]
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