Storms start to move out of Minnesota, continue for western Wisconsin

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n Minneapolis is opening an exhibit called “Holding Up / Holding With — Rethinking Resilience.”

The exhibit features four local artists: Rajine Williams, AK Garski, Talulah R.M. and Nikki McComb.

The artists use a variety of mediums to explore tactics for responding to challenges, including LGBTQ+ discrimination, ableism and illegal firearms.

There will be an opening reception Saturday at 7 p.m.

First Avenue and the Minnesota Orchestra announced a partnership to build a new performance venue.

The venue, to be called the Community Performing Arts Center — or CPAC — will be built within the Upper Harbor Terminal development, a planned 20-acre park on the north Minneapolis riverfront.

CPAC is expected to have a capacity for 8,000 concert-goers, with a percentage of ticket sales earmarked to be reinvested into the surrounding community. 

Construction is scheduled to be completed by spring of 2025.

has begun. The now-30-year-old performance festival will feature 86 shows in eight venues throughout the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, with additional independently-produced shows throughout the city. 

Fringe Executive Director Dawn Bentley stresses that these shows directly support the artists who create them. Her advice to newcomers is to start with a show that you think you will like and then “take an adventure.”

If you’re hanging out along the Mississippi River within the next couple of weeks, you may run into a band of musical nomads performing on an old-timey wooden raft. 

 is making stops at towns along the river to perform a story guided by aerial gymnastics, puppets, clowning and more.

The circus has provided free entertainment along rivers over the past four years. But the mighty Mississippi is their biggest undertaking yet. Jason Webley, of Washington, is the founder of the project. 

“The basic premise is that our boat is our stage,” Webley explained. “And so the action all takes place on this boat. There’s a number of characters living on the boat, and they get visited by another character. And that’s kind of the beginning of the story.”

The Flotsam River Circus' first performance is today in the University area of Minneapolis. 

, a classical music organization located in the Landmark Center in St. Paul, has announced a range of new initiatives designed to improve access to music education for children, students and families.

These will include offering free concert tickets to children aged 6-17 and students of any age who show a valid ID. The organization is also launching a program called Schubert Club Student Connections, which provides additional opportunities for students 7th grade and up, including backstage meet-and-greets and opportunities for master classes.

The MPR News arts team offers suggestions for the best in avant-garde, experimental and off-the-beaten-path arts and culture.

Japanese musician Masami Akita remains a sort of Platonic idea of avant-garde music: Since 1979, as Merzbow (a name borrowed from Dadaism), he has produced an astonishingly prolific amount of recordings of pure noise. 

This year alone has seen at least four recordings, some partnered with a U.S. noise band whose name we cannot print, with albums sometimes containing 80 or more separate recordings on each album.

For many, one track would be enough — Merzbow likes noises that are harsh, discordant, industrial, seemingly gormless, often sounding like the static from an old television set having a tantrum. 

The artist seems to be taunting us with impossible abundance — in 2019 he released at least 28 titles as Merzbow, and he has a dozen side-projects. If you can’t handle one of his songs, he seems to be saying, ‘how about a thousand?’

But each of his recordings, somehow, impossibly, is distinct, although it may take a few times listening to catch their unique textures and personalities. There is a pranking, “I dare you to listen” quality to his music, especially when he offers such superabundance, but the recordings themselves are not stunts. 

He genuinely appears to be on a profound, 44-year-and-counting investigation into the outer limits of recorded sound, and it’s a heck of a trip for those who choose to join him.

Jacob Aloi

Author

Alex V. Cipolle

Max Sparber

Olivia Stevens

In this week’s Arts Briefs: a new riverfront music venue, the Fringe Festival and more. Also, in Absolute Bleeding Edge is a prolific producer of noise.

A graphic with the state of minnesota and pieces of art

Arts Briefs: Festivals!

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