After Two-Year Hiatus, soundpedro Bounces Back to Angels Gate

In many ways, 2020 and 2021 will forever be defined by absence, by the lack of all that would have existed but for the intrusion of COVID-19.

After three highly successful years of transforming Angels Gate Cultural Center into a one-night-only indoor/outdoor gallery of multisensory sound-centric installations, soundpedro was derailed just as it became an annual tradition.

But fuck COVID — soundpedro is back!

In truth, it never fully left. Despite being unable to hold the onsite event during the last two years, curatorial group FLOOD pivoted toward the virtual.

“When COVID lockdowns hit, it was kinda like landing on Gilligan’s Island,” explained FLOOD’s Marco Schindelmann last year. “We had a choice: wait for rescue, or build huts.”

That hut-building resulted in dozens of sound artists reimagining what would have been (i.e., in a COVIDless world) their onsite installations as virtual experiences or virtual performance samples; and an extension of soundpedro programming from one night to “a season of experimental sound art events.” (The current season began on April 9 and lasts through November 27.)

But soundpedro2022 is subtitled “BounceBack,” as there’s no replacing the experience of moving in/around/through Angels Gate’s seven acres when it’s been transformed into a landscape of sonic-and-more stimulation.

“Our emergence from COVID captivity to an in-person happening will reunite a community of niche artists and aficionados longing to hear one another’s voices and artworks and to again exchange ideas face-to-face,” Schindelmann says. “Even the most hermetic among us are ready to step out of our caves into the fresh air.”

Noting that soundpedro became one of Angels Gate’s signature events in its three pre-COVID years, AGCC Executive Director Amy Eriksen is delighted to have it back.

“soundpedro is one of our premiere events and is held in high esteem by both the sound-art community and Angels Gate Cultural Center,” she says. “It is thrilling to have this great immersive experience bounce back after such a lengthy COVID hiatus, especially during our 40th anniversary year. There are so many ways to engage in the arts at AGCC. Our hope is reinvigorated as we celebrate the return of a host of diverse innovative events and welcome the community back to campus. […] soundpedro helps us to support artists that don’t always get seen, or heard, locally. The chance to walk around this great campus and fall upon a new sound-art installation around every corner draws crowds to the top of the hill each year.”

To minimize COVID concerns, this year only one of Angels Gate’s interior spaces will be activated. Nonetheless, soundpedro2022 will feature more installations than ever before, roughly three dozen “sculptures, environments, installations, timed and ongoing performances, interactions, and presentations [that] explore or incorporate acoustics, psychoacoustics, electronics, audio technologies, listening actions, performance actions, spatialization, conceptualization, timbralization, hearing anatomies, found sound, environmental sound, AI, etc.”

As an example, M A Harms’s “This Body is a Play Thing” is an interactive installation “about abuse and harm done to those around us [that] point[s] out significant flaws within the music and art world via abuse, sexism, fatphobia, and transphobia” by employing written prompts questioning how we use the word “play” ringing a circle of instruments made from mannequins. “It will then be up to the participants to rely on their remembered interpretations of the prompts as they navigate into the inner circle to explore the mannequins and the sounds that they are capable of producing.”

But written descriptions only hint at the experiences that will be on offer at San Pedro’s apex — and because of the interactive, immersive nature of the night, soundpedro attendees will co-create their own completely unique experience.

“soundpedro is a chance for visitors to broaden the auditory perception of sound as a meaningful phenomenon towards the physical reception of sound as experiential,” says Schindelmann. “Each visitor to the onsite soundpedro will decide what that means to them. Some will wait until dark and go on a nocturnal sound safari, some will get stoned and stagger or dance to sonic staccatos and legatos animating the air around them, and others will simply close their eyes and listen through the skins on their bodies — including, of course, their ears.”

What: soundpedro, an evening of ear-oriented multisensory presentations; soundpedro.org
When: Saturday, June 4, 7pm to 10pm
Where: Angels Gate Cultural Center, 3601 S. Gaffey St., San Pedro 90731; angelsgateart.org
Admission: free! (includes parking)