Part five: To the observatory! On Saturday, September 15, I had the opportunity to travel to Toravere in order to participate in a sound festival that had been organized by some young, adventurous artists from around the area. Toravere is an unusual village, as the USSR built the Toravere in the '60s house the new and improved Tartu observatory as well as the astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, and general brainiacs who conducted research through the facility. Despite being under the thumb of the Soviet state, this scientific community had a degree of intellectual freedom that may not have extended beyond the limits of the village. From what I understand, a couple of the organizers for this festival were the children of those original scientific pioneers; and they just asked their parents if they could use the campus of observatories to put on a festival. And the answer was, "Sure, why not? Just clean up after your selves!" The festival was called Kaevu Taga Kostab Kosmos (n.b. I really am not sure what this means, something about digging behind the cosmos is the best I could come up with the couple of Estonian dictionaries kicking around MoKS), and the requisite website is konverter.ee/kaevutagakostabkosmos. The grounds around Toravere were amazing, a juxtaposition of Soviet apartment blocks situated next to domed observatories. As totally amazing as the facilities were, I had the misfortune of coming down with a head cold just a day before needing to be Toravere. I rallied, as best I could, with the handful of Walgreens cold tablets that I keep in my shoulder bag for emergencies just as this. This cold had short-circuited my short term memory, and I forgot the camera. How stupid of me. Hopefully, I can get the photos from Patrick that I took with his camera... My performance (a collaboration with John Grzinich, Patrick McGinley, and Toomas Thetloff) was the last of evening's events, which included a series of installations in several of the observatories. Probably the best of the lot came from one of the organizers, Piibe Kolka, who had broadcast a constant drone of mechanical noise through one of the now decommissioned observatories which featured a hole in the center of the floor (where the telescope used to be). Through this hole in the floor, you could see down to the level below where a couple of people were lying down staring uncomfortably back at the audience. A bit unsettling, but certainly effective. Later on in the evening, Mr. McGinley had presented three site specific performances for an areal antenna (which he bowed with amplification into a series of scraped resonances), a deep cistern connected to the outside world long metal pipe (amplified for its resonant frequencies and reverberations), and a subterranean bunker in which several performers (me, included) banged, stomped, and bowed the various surfaces to activate the space. While I missed the accompanying performance, one of the last events featured a giant eyeball being projected onto the surface of the largest observatory. Despite it being quite the Tony Ousler knock-off, the disembodied eyeball is always a hit at the party, as far as I'm concerned. As for the Grzinich / Haynes / McGinley / Thetloff ensemble, I was quite comfortable with what we had intended on doing: scraping various objects to generate a mass of texture that was recycled through a looping mechanism of Patrick's. Field recordings and shortwave were also brought into the mix. In general, a big swooping mass of sound. By the time we played at around 11:00 PM, the last bus back to Tartu had already departed, meaning that only the die-hard audience members who were spending the night were remaining. Most of them were volunteers for the festival, but it was still an audience who was content to let us lull them into the night. After the event, there was a mass exodus to the sauna, which I had hoped would do my cold some good. It probably did, although the therapeutic benefits of the sauna were undone by the hard school room floor where we slept. Since then, the cold has all but faded away, leaving one serious clog in my left ear. So I've been feeling fine; but somewhat unable to do any sound work because of what is stuck back in there. Gross.