Went and saw the Audium in San Francisco (1616 Bush St, look up details at http://audium.org ) and had my mind thoroughly blown.

I probably take the title of my blog too seriously: I don’t post random stuff, I wait for deeper ideas to come along. Trouble being, I don’t have time to write them up as well as I’d like. The Audium was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had recently, so I’m just going to get this up and figure out what I think while I’m writing.

Stereo traps us in a lot of our audio experience. It’s good enough and cheap enough to do the job most of the time. I have been to amazing gigs — Alex Carpenter’s Music of Transparent Means, Merzbow in the Big Star basement — where the surround sound was unbelievable. I have been in noise bands, overwhelming the room and the performers with dense walls of sound. I have done listening meditations in interesting places, trying to immerse my self in the experience of the moment.

The Audium very rapidly reminded me of all these experiences and more.

176 speakers, multi-track location control, someone in charge who has experimented with this for 30 or 40 years. Even the architecture of the place communicates something important about the experience you are about to have.

The closest you have ever been to a sound system with this fidelity of location and presence is in a movie theater. There is no way you’ll see a film with a soundtrack that is this intense: multiple moving sound sources quickly pulls your full attention out of the visual realm. The performance rapidly overwhelms, becomes a raw and pure experience of attention. I was shocked when the lights came up at the end, having completely lost track of time.

I write about an experience that is, by definition, only capable of being summarized in text. I can tell you what happens around the experience, but the experience itself — the point of the experience — is beyond explanation. Once you have experienced the overwhelming presence of the sound, we can talk about it. Until we have these shared referents, I can only vaguely indicate what it is like.

In short, you should see this if you are in San Francisco. I am determined to experiment with multi-source / locational sound myself now. I have a whole bunch of ideas for a show in next year’s Adelaide Fringe Festival and a long list of people to contact about making it happen.