When Memphis Concrète was founded eight years ago, it raised a lot of eyebrows. One sometimes had to explain that its name was a play on the musique concrète genre, founded on the principle that anything can create a meaningful listening experience, from industrial noises to pre-recorded sound effects. Nowadays, though, as the Memphis Concrète Experimental Electronic Music Festival 2025 approaches, the two-day event’s purview is clear to most music fans: It’s the place to be for anyone interested in stretching their sonic boundaries.
Yet when I call founder and organizer Robert Traxler to learn more, the first thing he wants to talk about isn’t technically part of the festival at all. The unofficial kickoff event is actually two days prior to the festival proper, when Traxler’s Memphis Concrète Scrap Metal Orchestra will provide a live score to a classic film, The Terminator, at Crosstown Theater on Thursday, June 5th. As he puts it succinctly, “You get to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger do his thing. And, you know, people banging on metal.”
There could be no purer expression of the musique concrète aesthetic, and it will clearly transform one’s perception of the 1984 sci-fi warhorse and its era-defining star. But how does one create a new score for a film with the original audio baked in? “I take the movie, extract the sound, remove the music as much as I can, and then put it back into the movie,” Traxler explains. “I do it manually, pushing the volume up and down. You might get a little bit [of the original soundtrack], but it’s not usually too noticeable. It works pretty well, I think, especially because our music kind of blends in. If music comes in as a low drone, it kind of blends. It’s fun!”
And, to be sure, he’s not kidding about the scrap metal. “I’ve got nine people, all playing and banging on a different piece of metal. I got the metal from a friend who had taken apart an old furnace. There are these four things that look like radiator shapes, one drum-looking piece, and one person’s playing a couple of … tubes.”
While it sounds cacophonous, it actually grows out of Traxler’s very musical appreciation of the film’s original audio. “I’m very much taking inspiration from the original score of the movie. It’s one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. So we’re taking the weird things about it and kind of pushing them even more out there. For most of it, I thought it would be fun to have different parts, where each part is in a completely different time signature. The technical term would be polymetric. So one person is playing in 5/4, another in 11/8, another in 7/4, and you get some interesting rhythms.”
That’s just a small sample of what will be on hand at the festival, of course, which will take place at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday and Sunday, June 7th and 8th. And that won’t necessarily be a synth-fest either, as the whole event embraces “electro-acoustic” instruments. Reed man Art Edmaiston, for instance, will make an appearance from the “free jazz” universe. “We did a show with him last year, and he kind of did an electro-acoustic thing then, where he was running his saxophone into some electronic stuff and creating these soundscapes,” says Traxler. “He’s a really incredible musician who has a lot of range and a lot of space to explore different sonic textures. And for this show, he’s playing with Logan Hanna, who plays incredible soundscape guitar. So, like with the festival, I never have a hard ‘electronic is all you know’ approach, right? Because, you know, even with a microphone, you’re getting an electronic signal out of that.”
Another electro-acoustic experience will be the performance by Ipek Eginli. “She’s a pianist from Atlanta,” says Traxler, “and she combines true acoustic piano with modular [synth] stuff that is absolutely phenomenal. And she also plays jazz, pretty free, and when she performs she’s really intense, her hands just attacking the keys.”
Some of the artists are even harder to capture with mere words. On social media, for example, Memphis Concrète describes Liars Serum as “acid-cult mood music that puts da-da lotion on your skin. Puppy-core IDM, industrial chamber-wave, dystopian azul-grass-house.”
Another notable out-of-towner will be Janet Xmas, who combines her music with a kind of gymnastic, interpretive dance. Traxler explains that in her videos, “she’s climbing a ladder hooked up to contact mics and is writhing around and all kinds of crazy, crazy stuff. It’s kind of like a sound sculpture. She’ll have minimal tape loops, and then the contact mics are set up so when she’s moving and bumping against the ladder, they’re picking up the noises. And those are run into effects and delays and things. So it’s kind of this visual sculpture, and sonically, the sculptured thing reacts to her movements.”
Naturally, there will be plenty of purely electronic sounds on hand as well, as with the synth group led by Lamplighter Lounge co-owner Chuck Vicious, Noir Walls, and many more. But whatever is making the sound, the point of the festival will be the sense of exploration brought to the event by all of the artists. There’s so much to explore, in fact, that another “pre-festival event” will be held before the festival, a collaborative improv session at the H&S Printing Co. on Friday, June 6th at 7 p.m. “Schaeffer Mallory of Drop Ceiling has organized that,” says Traxler, “and he’s invited a bunch of other people who are playing the festival, so there’s going to be a really big band!”
The Memphis Concrète Experimental Electronic Music Festival 2025 starts at 3 p.m. on Saturday, June 7th, and runs until 9 p.m. on Sunday, June 8th, in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. For the full lineup and other details, visit memphisconcretemusic.com.