The Mid-Moogfest Report: 6 Things to See Saturday + Sunday

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The Mid-Moogfest Report: 6 Things to See Saturday + Sunday

  • Ali McGhee

    Ali McGhee is a journalist, creative writer, and academic. Her work has appeared in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Romantic Circles, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary...
Mykki Blanco plays Saturday night at Motorco
Moogfest in Durham so far has been pretty freaking great. Of course part of me will always grieve the fact that the organizers decided to move the festival, but it's been really interesting to see how Durham flavors the festival. It's been a fantastic couple of days filled with panels, screenings, and shows, shows, shows. Intermittent rain hasn't kept people from packing into the outdoor stage area for Grimes and Odesza, and the sun is shining today (though rain is still in the forecast).  The rest of Saturday and Sunday are filled with some of the best and brightest of the festival. If you're looking for an update or just wondering what to do while you're here, keep reading for the Asheville Grit's Middle of Moogfest PicksSATURDAY Cognitive DJ Battle The Armory, 5-6 pm The Coginitive DJ Battle pits LA group YACHT against IBM Watson, the first commercially available cognitive computing capability. IBM Watson will respond to live music performed by YACHT, interpret it, and create response pieces. It's a beat jam throwdown like no other when man faces off with machine.    RBTS Win Pinhook, 4-5 pm Perennial Asheville and Moogfest favorite RBTS Win play at the Pinhook today. Their music, which is the perfect combination of psychedelic, dark rock + electronic, beach-meets-mountains style, makes them one of my personal favorite groups to listen to and to see live. They're working on an album and have been playing lots of new stuff at their shows, so if you've seen them, go see them again. If you haven't, don't miss them.  Oneohtrix Point Never Carolina Theatre Fletcher Hall, 11:40-12:40 I'm a huge fan of Oneohtrix Point Never's nigh-indescribable music, which sometimes is hard to even classify as such. This producer makes sounds like nothing else. Influenced by jazz, experimental music, and the language of machines, his works are sonic journeys through territories both totally unfamiliar and ghostly, gorgeous and strange. I consider this one unmissable.    Mykki Blanco Motorco Music Hall, 12:30-1:30 The other show I'm beyond thrilled about is Mykki Blanco, the weird and wonderful performance artist, rapper, activist, and gender-queer sensation who is nothing less than a force of nature. If you time it right, you can hit both Oneohtrix Point Never and Mykki Blanco. Do it.    SUNDAY Hyperinstruments, Robotic Operas, and City Symphonies Durham Arts Council PSI Theatre, 10:30-11:30 Inventor and composer Tod Machover of MIT, called "America's most wired composer," by WIRED magazine, will share the Opera of the Future Group, a project currently in development from MIT Media Labs that incorporates responsive stage technologies, collaborative systems that allow for the creation of large, city-wide compositions, and tools that can be use for everything from disease diagnosis to compositional customization.  It Follows Film Screening and Artist Discussion w/ Disasterpiece Carolina Theatre Cinema 1, 2:30-5 It Follows was my favorite horror film in recent memory. A lot of the fear factor came from the soundtrack, a persistent, brooding, heavy score that continued to haunt me long after the movie was over. Lucky for me, Disasterpiece, who created the film's score, is at Moogfest to talk about it. There's nothing like tucking in a horror film in the middle of the day, right? I think it's still going to be scary.