Imagine hundreds of horn players — trumpets, trombones, tubas, French horns — surrounding you in a warehouse, their notes surging, diverging, and sloshing from side to side, wall to wall, like whiskey in a barrel on the back of a bucking bull covered in glitter. And you are a small clown fish in that barrel, drunk on music.

Yes, it’s an outrageous metaphor. But it is, after all, the opening night event for this year’s Time-Based Art Festival on Sept. 8, where outrageousness is served in spades.

“Fanfare: Birth>Rebirth” is the mad-composer dream of the multi-instrumentalist Kelly Pratt. You might not know his name, but chances are you’ve heard him play. He was a long-time member of the band Beirut, and he has toured and recorded with bands ranging from Arcade Fire to David Byrne, Coldplay, and LCD Soundsystem. After hearing Pratt’s solo album under the moniker Bright Moments, Byrne even hired him to arrange the horns and direct the touring band for Byrne’s collaboration with St. Vincent, “Love This Giant.”
Pratt moved to Portland in 2012 when his partner got a job teaching at Willamette University.

One of his Byrne collaborators introduced him to the artistic director of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Angela Maddox, who invited him to kick off the TBA Festival.

Symbolically, it’s a big night. PICA has spent the last 21 years as a nomadic organization, often scrambling up to the last minute to find space to house TBA events and the late night gathering site called the Works. But earlier this year a donor bought them a warehouse and office building at 15 NE Hancock St. This will be the first time PICA hosts TBA in its own home.

“I’m really challenging myself to make it as poignant as possible,” said Pratt of the challenge the opening event presents. “I don’t want it to be just a nice piece of music; I want to splatter the walls with sound. Bathe it. Give it a ritual birth.”

Read the full article at: http://www.opb.org/radio/article/pica-tba-festival-kelly-pratt