WITH MAX FRIEDENBERG
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SFR: You're the director and co-founder of the local not-for-profit High Mayhem. Tell me about its origin.
MF:
High Mayhem began in 2001 as a single electro-acoustic improv ensemble called Invisible Plane. The project bifurcated and attracted other experimentalists, free players-and incestuous iterations ensued. Many of the ensembles began to play out at the CCA, W21, whoever would have us. By then, I had acquired the entire live/work space on Lena Street with the intention of creating a recording studio and practice space. We started throwing shows and open recording sessions there. Our first fest congealed in fall 2002. So we produce events of various scale and type year-round. But every year we build the big one: an extended journey into sound and vision-a synesthesia called the High Mayhem Emerging Arts Festival. Struggle is easy.
What's with the name High Mayhem?
In 1999 I was tinkering with an ontological experiment with self-referenced personas: Gregor Petrov, Janus Shilling and Kay Levels, among others. The name, High Mayhem, for it, emerged. I bought
to promote the shenanigans. A couple years later, as I got back into music with Invisible Plane, the idea of a studio festival sprouted. As High Mayhem was already a quasi-entity, and I had a Web site we could exploit, the name was usurped. I renamed the original project: control-alt-delete.org. Apparently, the name High Mayhem scares some people. For some it means an unpredictable and zany event; others picture warriors with broadswords on opium. Anyway, High Mayhem is pretty vague, and this summer we changed the official 501(c)(3) name to IDEA-the Institute for the Development of Emerging Arts.
Who else is behind the organization?
Did you know that four out of five people make fun of the fifth person? So to keep it safe there are only four of us. No. The organization grew from some of the players from Invisible Plane and others who joined hands. We are building a board of directors and so on, but it's all strictly volunteer at this point. The board is secretive…mysterious, normally odd, urgently weird. There is also a large group of supporters from Wise Fool, Unit D, SITE Santa Fe, Burning Books, BANG!, the CCA, the Lensic, individuals and small businesses, courageous and tireless.
Who manages the economic aspect of it all-the funds?
Funds, what funds? We are a fledgling 501(c)(3) and sort of cannibalistically rely on one another and our community. Also, we rely on the givingitude of the performers and staff and volunteers, who are generous to a fault. It's complicated, but we have an open-source model for intellectual property. The terms are specific, but generally: We multi-track and video-document performances extensively, and two things happen: 1) We compile a release of the documentation for promotional purposes (our label) and 2) Make raw materials available to the artists so they might use it for themselves-for a release, promotion, whatever they want. It's theirs…it's ours. It's shared. However, I do think the performers do deserve to be paid on top of that, and we are working toward that. It's like, right now, they get icing, but no cake. We would love to give them cake and ice cream. And wee candles to blow out as they wish for the kind of viral exposure available these days.
How have the festivals been received in the past?
So far, High Mayhem has produced four well-received festivals in Santa Fe. In the process, we have discovered that a great deal of underrepresented, experimental artists and musicians sought a venue for their expression, and that there happened to be quite a few interested in checking it out. In a festival/salon environment, artists, musicians and onlookers performed, hung out and vibed on one another. We borrowed some modest recording gear and gave documentation a shot. The festivals have become a three-day recording and shooting marathon. We now release video and audio documentation of each festival, and these have garnered international attention. The response was much better than we could have imagined.
What can you tell me about this year's festival?
This year is our sixth annual festival. As usual, we sent out a notice for submissions and then organized the festival. From nearly 60 submissions, based on a wide set of criteria, we narrowed it down to 20 or so. We embrace, for the second year in a row, the Wise Fool Performance Space for the big event: exhibition and documentation. The lineup spans three days and includes installations and 'attack performances,' so check out
for the details. If it weren't for observation, no one would notice anything.
High Mayhem's logo is some sort of abstract design. It almost looks like a stick figure wearing a loose jacket. What's up with that?
Well, the logo was another thing absorbed from the ontology experiment-one of the personas from the experiment was a temporal engineer who will have invented a 'happenstance generator-a many-worlds navigation device.' He coded information and sets of instructions, or 'keys,' with mathematically complex and encrypted pictograms. The logo is one of those pictograms, and provides encoded clues to space-time coordinates and how they relate to his navigation of shared realities. If you are a cryptographer and feel like taking a crack at it, let me know what you can extract.
The Sixth Annual High Mayhem Festival will take place Oct. 6 through 8. See page 27 and
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