On Saturday, June 30, Wobbly’s aural installation complemented Jason Brown’s witty lecture by juxtaposing visceral and intellectual responses to our increasing comfort with technology’s escalating presence in our lives. Wobbly (a.k.a. Jon Leidecker), focusing on feedback as the “intrinsic voice of electronic music,” improvised an audio set exploring the similarities between birdsong and feedback but offered no theories on why these similarities exist. Feedback doesn’t sound any different or better when created deliberately than it does as a nasty fluke of a badly arranged sound system, and all the drugs in the world would not have killed the necessary number of brain cells to allow a visitor to comfortably enjoy the session. But persistence (or the sense of obligation to stay with the hosts in their home rather than leave when the going got tough) revealed that the sounds that we associate with chaos and horror are the sounds created by malfunctioning technology. No lion’s roar or rolling thunder or crash of waves could sound as frightening and alienated as the hissing, churning, crackling arrhythmic mess of out-of-control machinery. (continue reading; this review is part of a group addressing a series of events and mine is towards the bottom)