the idea

I love music festivals. But what I love even more is the idea of going inside the music instead of just standing in front of it, and I don't think that feeling should belong only to musicians.

This is why I came up with FREQ WORLD: a music minifest celebrating not just the music but the whole strange, beautiful life around it. The instruments, records, books, zines, studio rituals, references, objects, experiments, accidents, technology, friendships and obsessions that eventually become a song. Part live show, part workshop, part artist gathering, part temporary sound library.

Basically: you come because you want to see music and leave wanting to make some.

the freq library + the reader

The idea I'm most excited about: a temporary FREQ LIBRARY where the participating artists, other people in the LA music community, and potentially even guests are invited to contribute a little piece of their musical world. A record, book, zine, demo, field recording, score, piece of gear, reference, object, playlist, unfinished idea, note.

Alongside it, a small printed FREQ WORLD Reader: part festival program, part zine, part artist notebook. Things to listen to, things to try, tiny scores, drawings, weird pieces of advice. Something you actually want to keep instead of discovering in your bag six months later and wondering why you kept it.

The visual world would be developed with Piknik Press, and I'd love the design to extend through everything: the reader, signage, artist ephemera, library cards, labels, objects.

the synth petting zoo

Running all day, in the middle of everything: theremins, tiny synths, sequencers, weird controllers, drum machines, musical toys, things with knobs, things that blink. Pick them up. Press things. Make a horrible noise accidentally. Make a beautiful noise accidentally. Touching encouraged (except the theremin, obviously).

who's playing

Soft Reset is my audiovisual project with artist and art historian Zsofi Valyi-Nagy. We'd bring Emotional Tech Support, our participatory workshop/performance about our increasingly weird emotional relationships with technology. We recently presented it at Latitude in Chicago.

I'd lead something around Music as Oracle as part of the launch of my new project Dreamology: listening, chance, field recordings and the theremin as ways into music-making as a "soundcare" routine for your internal glow-up.

DISKQ (Gina Kim) would bring the hardware side. She's an LA synth artist and software engineer making playful, DAWless electronic music, has performed at NAMM and around the LA experimental/DIY scene, and recently live-scored Yokai Monsters: Spook Warfare at the Philosophical Research Society. I'd love her to do an extremely friendly introduction to making music with synths and hardware.

datachild (Chrissy Tignor) is a producer, engineer and educator who taught at Berklee, went on to lead education at Splice and now teaches Music Industry Studies at Cal Poly. Her whole thing is making music technology actually understandable. I'd love to build something with her around sampling and found sound: turning ordinary audio into music.

Nicole Kiki Jaffe would do a special unplugged set.

And me: I'd use FREQ WORLD as the LA launch of Dreamology, my new project exploring music as oracle, memory and everyday ritual. My live practice has taken me from the Art Gallery of Ontario and TEDx to opening for Barenaked Ladies and Violent Femmes, and this new show brings together the electronic and more ambient sides of what I do. More at claravenice.com.

What I really want FREQ WORLD to be is a place where music stops being something you consume and becomes something you get to do. Where the analog and the digital sit at the same table: a theremin next to a phone, a field recording next to a drum machine, a zine next to an app. Where the people on stage at night are the same people who spent the afternoon showing you which button to press.

Music has always been how we heal, how we gather, and how we remember who we are. For too long the tools have lived behind a velvet rope of gear, jargon and permission. FREQ WORLD takes the rope down.

Come make something with us.