OT-sort of....EMP opens next week....Paul Allen's $240 Experience Music Project...here's the Seattle Times article...(and Stephen, nice letter...wonder if they will answer...maybe all of us should write to them....)
KLP
seattletimes.nwsource.com
Saturday, June 17, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
Experience Music Project
Hype is real: EMP rocks!
by John Zebrowski
Seattle Times staff reporter
We're one week away from pandemonium.
On June 23, Paul Allen's $240 million Experience Music Project opens to the public. Expect loud rock shows, a media frenzy and tens of thousands of people hoping to get a look for themselves.
EMP will no longer be a weird idea. It'll be a weird museum.
A rough vision of a rock 'n' roll shrine bred with a theme park, EMP predicts 8,000 visitors a day. What they'll get is an experience that is at best mind-blowing. At its worst, it's confusing and frustrating.
Yesterday, EMP opened to the media, giving access to everything but the motion-platform ride, Artist's Journey. The idea is to turn the buzz about the museum, already intense, into a riot of anticipation.
Believe the hype. The technology is amazing. And the galleries are filled with great stories.
But the museum doesn't flow well. Its layout can be confusing. Its high-tech star, the 3-plus pound listening device called MEG, is too bulky and, yesterday, was temperamental.
EMP officials insist glitches with the MEG will be fixed by Friday. But even if the museum opens with minor troubles, it's still a great ride. EMP wants us to experience music. Well, bring it on.
Interior is something to see
Forget Frank Gehry, EMP's architect. Push his massive, mutli-colored fungus out of your mind. Park the car, hustle through the crowd and come inside.
In here, underneath a roof that undulates as if twisted by an earthquake, a museum unfolds unlike anything we've seen before. In its lobby, a metallic form, shining like a silver sun, juts overhead. It is actually an upstairs room, but from here it is a sculpture.
Behind a counter stretching the width of the lobby, EMP minions hand out MEG, a portable computer with headphones and a text screen that will act as your guide through the museum. Inside is stored more than 10 hours of sound clips, everything from the opening bars of a Jimi Hendrix tune to a detailed explanation of how the first Dobro guitar was made.
Six TV screens above the counter play a tape of two actors explaining how MEG works. Witness EMP's first mistake. The actors, dressed first as hippies, then as hipsters, and finally, like rappers, put on a performance so over-the-top it'll make you cringe. The immediate impulse is to flee.
The Sky Church
Sky Church saves us. The hall opens up, long and narrow, with a 40-foot-tall video screen stretching from one end to another. This is EMP's concert space, but its dimensions are too small for more than just a few hundred fans. Instead, it's perfect for a rave.
Sky Church is a wonder of sound and vision. On its screen, nonlinear videos play to a pounding beat or a classic hit. We witness a rainstorm, with thunder and lightning, a water scene with a shark swimming by, and to Pearl Jam's "Ocean," a rolling, fiery surf scene that ends with us drifting down toward the bottom, as the music recedes.
All the while, a school of disco balls, ringed by a circle of sheer white fabric, has descended from the ceiling, jelly fish in our sea. We could spend all day here.
But we don't. We move on. There's a museum to see. If only it weren't so dark in here.
Lots of light and dark
EMP is done up in Y2K's version of mood lighting. Around all the exhibits, spotlights focus on what we need to see. But the rest of the place is dark, so dark that if EMP weren't actually a very small space, we might lose someone.
EMP's lighting removes much of the public space from the public. After you've squeezed into a gallery, it would be nice to chill in an area not so overwhelming as Sky Church. It's as if they're pushing us to leave.
EMP could fix this in an afternoon. The flow of the crowd could prove more difficult.
Most museums are designed to follow a linear path: You enter, wind through rooms and galleries and exit. It makes crowds more manageable. There is little that is linear to EMP - and usually, this is a strength. But with no pattern to how people go through the space, crowds could clash with one another. After navigating the small galleries (think hallway) the "experience" could feel like rush hour at the Interstate 5/Interstate 405 interchange.
One way EMP says it will cut down on the crowding is to limit the number inside. Entrance to the museum will be staggered. For now, the MEG will shut off after about 2 1/2 hours. But as we found yesterday, EMP is almost more fun once we take the headphones off.
The Sound Lab
We open the door to Sound Lab and immediately, there is a spike of happiness in the blood. This is the interactive part of the museum, a chance to get quick lessons on guitar or drums. If we had paid to get in, EMP would be earning its keep in here.
A disclaimer: There were about 100 people in the museum yesterday, not the thousands normally expected. So for an hour, we hopped from guitar to keyboard to bass to vocals. We rocked out. And you know what? We're good. You will be too.
This is not the place to go into the tech behind all this. It's so good, it's practically invisible. After a few minutes, we adjust to the computer showing us how to play and we ride along. The drum head lights up, you hit it. Like that, we're drumming funk style. There's no time to play them all, as crowds form around the favorites. We place bets on how long EMP is open before someone's kids get into a brawl over who gets to play the bass next. (The smart money is on two hours.)
Next comes On Stage, essentially the world's greatest karaoke machine, in which visitors jam in front of a virtual crowd on instruments programmed to play only the right notes, and get their picture snapped in excellent rock 'n' roll poses.
It's tons of fun, except for one thing: MEG's acting up again.
Four hours - gone
Four hours - just like that - gone. We never did get to try the DJ table or spend any time exploring the punk gallery. And we didn't get to see Artist's Journey, that ode to funk explored through super-expensive digital effects, which EMP is waiting to debut.
There will be a next time. Despite its flaws, this is a wonderful museum, playful and informative, although at $19.95 for a ticket, not cheap. It's not for everyone, but is broad enough to interest most people.
EMP's not perfect. But no one expects $240 million to buy perfection these days. Do they?
Copyright ¸ 2000 The Seattle Times Company |
