Concert experiences combine the senses of sight and sound; the visuals of stage presence, lights and sometimes projected images are part of the show. But two acoustic groups from Charlottesville are bringing a very different experience to Fredericksburg next weekend.
IF YOU GO
Golden Hour, Saturday, Nov 15, 5 & 7:30 pm, River’s Edge Healing Arts, 3300 Bourbon Street, Suite 103, Fredericksburg. Tickets are $55. RSVP
Wife and husband duos David Wax and Suz Slezak of David Wax Museum and Daniel and Lauren Goans of Lowland Hum will present Golden Hour at Fredericksburg’s River’s Edge Healing Arts in the Bowman Center. This performance involves blindfolding the audience so that they experience the music only through their sense of hearing.
Owner Lynn McFadden has attended several Golden Hour shows in Richmond and Charlottesville. At the Charlottesville performance the audience was blindfolded before being led to their seats.
Photo by Sanjay Suchak.
“They scanned your ticket and they had everyone wait in the lobby. Then they had you put your blindfold on and they walked you in,” McFadden said. “You had no idea where you were seated and what the seating arrangement was. It was pretty trippy.”
The experience was so unique that McFadden knew she wanted to bring it to Fredericksburg. She approached the couples after the Charlottesville show and arranged for a performance at River’s Edge.
The idea for Golden Hour was inspired by a dark dining — eating while blindfolded — experience the four musicians shared for one of their birthdays.
“We read about one in Berlin and it was kind of intriguing to us so we did it just with our friends but it was terribly awkward and felt very strange; to meet new people at this party environment and not be able to see anybody and to eat,” said Wax, who sings and plays guitar for David Wax Museum. “But being musicians we thought if there was music here, if that was where the focus of our attention was, then actually that could be beautiful and relaxing.”
Since the Golden Hour audience is seated in circles, not facing a stage, the performers are free to roam around the listeners so the sound is constantly shifting.
“It’s been pretty organic,” Wax said. “It’s conscious. We are thinking a lot about the spacing of the musicians, which instruments are in dialogue, so they’re spaced out in a particular way so we can hear each other well enough. It’s not choreographed in the same way a play would be with all the movement but there are certain moments where we know we are coming together. There’s a dance to it, but it has a lot of spontaneous intuitive elements.”
Photo by Tristan Williams.
The resulting performance is somewhere between meditation and an immersive listening experience. Wax said he honors the trust being placed in the performers by the audience so the intent is not to trick them, but to focus their attention solely on the sounds.
“We take seriously that people are giving us their trust … we feel like we’re really tending the audience, like they’re in our care,” Wax said. “It’s amazing the journeys that people go on.”
Wax said that often audience members leave with personal revelations. “I don’t want to say that this is a guided meditation but there is some .. people come out of it they’re like, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t look at my phone for the full hour’. Or ‘I haven’t sat still for a whole hour, I can’t remember the last time I did that with my eyes closed.’”
Golden Hour performances have become so popular that both David Wax Museum and Lowland Hum have been more busy with these shows than their own bands’ touring schedules. After eight years they have decided to release an album of music written for Golden Hour and also perform some conventional shows.
Photo by Sanjay Suchak.
“Kind of a new chapter so we’ll be doing both,” Wax said. “We’ll continue doing the Golden Hour experiences and we’re going to try performing as The Golden Hours. When people find out about the record and the band, that can lead people back to the experience. We can get more ways to let people find out about what we are doing besides just word of mouth.”
