[ANDREW RUSSELL. Trib Live]
“Last Saturday, for the second year in a row, a group of Carnegie Mellon University students and faculty transformed a 100 year-old limestone mine in East Brady into the region’s only underground arts festival called SubSurface, Site Specific Sight and Sound.”
[BILL O'DRISCOLL, WESA: Pittsburgh’s NPR News Station]
“Subsurface was likely a milestone, though…For an afternoon, the inactive mine in Brady’s Bend, Pa. – about 90 minutes north of town, in farm country – was the region’s go-to spot for subterranean sights and sounds, a mix of performance art and experimental music.”
[Julianne Mattera, CMU News]
“The Activated Anamorphs moved in character to the music performed by IDeATe’s Exploded Ensemble and the musical group Bombici. The musicians, in turn, improvised in response to the movements. Students from Concept Studio: Space and Time also contributed inflatable, projected, shadow-based and mobile artworks.”
[JEREMY REYNOLDS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
"It was an aggressively captivating experience, equal parts beautiful and bizarre. Visual artists took full advantage of the lengthy tunnels, distorting perceptions of space and shadow with sequential light displays and roving projections. The closed-in nature of the tunnel created for some breathtaking shadow-play. The musicians wandered among listeners, playing into microphones that broadcasted to networked speakers throughout the mine."
[JEREMY REYNOLDS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
"Between this sleep-themed concert and the concert in a nearby limestone mine last fall, CMU’s Exploded Ensemble is proving itself one of the city’s most creative musical performance groups."
[JEREMY REYNOLDS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
"inconceivably vast... dramatically lit... an outlandish new tradition"
[Meg Fair, Pittsburgh City Paper]
"On Dec. 2, a group of Carnegie Mellon University creatives shuttled a crowd of curious travelers from CMU's campus to a limestone mine for a subterranean exploration of sight and sound. The location had been turned into an underground storage facility, but for a night it was repurposed into a deep, winding gallery, a space through which light and sound travelled in interesting and unexpected ways."
[ANDREW RUSSELL, Trib Live]
"On Saturday night, 108 Carnegie Mellon University students and faculty plus performance art fans traveled an hour and 15 minutes from the CMU campus in Oakland to experience the region's first underground arts festival."
[Apeksha Atal, The Tartan]
"a truly unique musical experience... thought-provoking and performed with a combination of electronic music and acoustic instrumentation... stunning..."