Artist: Owen Kurtz
Song: [excerpt]
Recorded at Bickford Park "Stadium" (Ministry of Phonic Services presents: Back to School Field Trip 2024), September 19, 2024.
Metaphor alert. Somewhere, out behind an urban schoolhouse abutting a park, there's a paved-over concrete pit with a mouldering, ancient basketball hoop against one wall. Back a bit, making it into a courtyard of sorts, there's a tree in a planter — a full grown, mature shade tree, a true miracle and rarity, given how much more often one sees planters with scraggly, barely-surviving sticks. Twenty feet below the surrounding "ground" level, with concrete walls on two sides and a tree up the embankment growing over it on the third, this tree has somehow managed to thrive in this weird, desolate corner.
Meanwhile, in various somewheres — in public spaces being taken over by corporate interests or in pocket forests or in little concrete valleys like these — the Ministry of Phonic Services has been putting down roots and building community with weird sonic experiments and placemaking celebrations. Somehow, in the dire context of this moment in the gyre of toxic unaffordability, erosion of common cause/common reason and the general enshittification of everything, younger folks are still refusing to take things as given and are using art and community to counter with a better vision of what our city could be. It's enough to make the sclerotic hearts of the formerly young and optimistic pump with a little more vitality.
This gig was one of a series of DIY public space takeovers from the MPS crew, the sites thoroughly scouted (and lovingly tidied up!) to create unique environments for some one-off gatherings. Friendly and embracing environments, even if the music hewed toward the discordant.
MPS organizer Owen Kurtz opened the evening with some tape-based sonic collages, patiently willing to let the pauses stretch out between beat-locked syllaburusts.
You can check out some more from this set over on youtube:
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