Art institute series celebrates DIY musicians

Lujain Mohamed, Contributing Writer

The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU presented the first rendition of their recurring “No Input” series on Nov. 1.

“No Input” is a musical series in which the ICA invites local musicians from spaces in Richmond’s do-it-yourself scene to perform sets adapted to the ICA’s unique architecture, according to the ICA website.

The title of the series represents the noninterference of the “no-input” mixing technique, according to the ICA website. Static is produced by the inner components of a mixing board and fed back into the mixer creating feedback loops that generate sounds and rhythms. 

The series was created by Mimi Luse, the ICA’s head of program production, as a way to bridge the gap between local DIY performers and institutions, like the ICA, she said.

“The idea behind ‘No Input’ was to work with local independent promoters and DIY promoters,” Luse said. “These programmers and promoters are doing amazing work outside institutions — often they are run by volunteers and are self-funded.”

Luse said she believes the DIY space is a crucible “for new music to be created.”

“What I’m trying to do is to bring these underground promoters and artists into this institutional space,” Luse said. “And by doing that you’re displacing them from the DIY scene and bringing them into an art museum.”

Richmond is home to numerous of the DIY musicians Luse seeks out for the “No Input” series, she said. Formal venues also tremendously outnumber private house shows, typically hosted in someone’s basement.

Luse said she appreciates Richmond’s rich music culture.

“It’s so unique and also very diverse,” Luse said. “There’s so many different genres of music people are pursuing, and I do think that the community itself is very empowering and sort of feeds upon itself in this really interesting way where artists are playing for each other, learning from each other and inspired by each other.”

This Friday’s performance was the first installment of the series, and Luse says she already has another show planned for Dec. 13, which will be curated by noise artist and promoter Alex Capraro. 

Luse said it will be a more theatrical production featuring New York-based Sunk Heaven and RVA’s The Three-Brained Robot.

The title “No Input” refers to the musical technique featured in the performances, according to Luse.

“There’s this musical movement where people take their quarter-inch cables that are in the mixer, and they’re putting them into the input and then the output again,” Luse said. “Then it’s basically sitting back on itself and taking the sounds that are inside the mixer and sort of replicating them over and over again, creating feedback.”

Luse said it is also a priority for her to remove her own authorship from the series.

“I wanted to allow DIY programmers to provide all the input, not me,” Luse said. “So I picked the programmers and let them pick the artists.”

For this month’s performance, Luse recruited Sarah Samson and Emma Draga, the creators of PENG!33, which is a zine about the Richmond music scene that values independence, experimentation and community.

Samson and Draga started PENG!33 to document their friends and local music in Richmond.

“At first it was to document local music in Richmond,” Samson said. “We realized it would be a good platform for Richmond musicians and bands to get more attention because there wasn’t enough spotlight on underground music.”

Samson said the series is a great way for artists to reimagine what they could do.

“The show is about putting DIY musicians in a space they haven’t had the chance to perform in and seeing what they could do with the ICA’s resources and architecture,” Samson said. “They are paid to perform and also given a budget of $400 in October to be used towards their performance.”

The artists took different approaches to utilizing their allotted $400, Samson said. One performer decided to buy a new pedal to invest in their music long-term, while others used the entire amount on this one performance.

Luse said Samson and Draga have filled an important gap by documenting the local scene.

“They are great journalists and they were the perfect people to ask to be the first programmers of ‘No Input,’ not only because they have great experience, but also because they have been working outside of institutions,” Luse said.

The three artists Samson and Draga chose for this month’s show are Sprout, a solo musician with an experimental ambient sound; Destruct O Sound, a warm punk-adjacent three-piece band; and Scott Clark Landscape Trio, a band with a free jazz sound.

Draga said they played around with different ideas during the curation process. 

“What we landed on was that we wanted to highlight three very different parts of the music scene,” Draga said. “We wanted to highlight somebody who’s done more ambient noise and also highlight the more indie pop, college rock part of the Richmond scene — and then there’s a huge jazz scene in Richmond as well.”

All these performances are very different from each other, but they all share in common being an experimental part of the DIY culture in Richmond, Draga said.

Josh Brown from Destruct O Sound said he used the money to fix his guitar, buy a track recorder and buy some props for Friday’s performance.

“I’m really thankful we were able to get that money,” Brown said. “It was a really good amount, and I wish I could have gone all out with the props.”

Brown said he is grateful Samson and Draga chose to feature Destruct O Sound at the show on Friday, and he really liked the idea of Richmond’s art scene feeding back into itself.

“It’s really interesting,” Brown said, “With the ICA being sort of monument to VCU’s art scene, and us being VCU students in the DIY scene. It’s a really cool concept, and I’m really glad we got to do it.”