Has anyone been to Experience Music Project?

[Good Ol' Batmanuel!]

I saw a special on t.v. around the time the Experience Music Project in Seattle opened and it looked great! I'm also a Jimi Hendrix fan, so that's an added bouns. I really hope to see it someday. I'm just wondering if anyone here has been and what your impressions of it are. Thanks.

[Kat Pryde]

Ya know, I was about to. But the last time I checked, the price for an adult and age 13-17 (if I remember that correctly), was $90+. Me and my dad were like, okay next time. And now, I feel very sad for leaving washington state, and not even getting the chance to go into the EMP!!

I missed ALOT for not going! You can make your own CD, play with KISS 106.1's dj tools, bang on many many many drums, check out that guitar exibit, and waaay much more!

... I wonder when I'm coming back up there.

=' - '=

[Palin Dromos]

I did some work for EMP. It's pretty interesing place. Not sure I can verify that price of admission from Katgirl, but it isn't cheaper than a movie.

When I was there I was working, so I didn't get to actually experience the music project, but just walking around the place was really weird. (there aren't corners in the entire place). It's very Po-mo architecture. Lots of cool tech, and art. There are deffinetly lots of other things to do in Seattle, but EMP is pretty unique.

[Ed Liu]

Howdy,

We went to the EMP about 2 years ago while waiting for a flight out of Seattle. Spent about 4 hours there. On the plus side, they do have some interesting exhibits and neat rock-and-roll paraphenalia. If you're a serious Jimi Hendrix fan, I think it's worth the price of admission to see that section alone. The other seriously cool section is the music lab upstairs, where you can learn the basics of guitar, keyboard, percussion, synthesizers, and even scratching. Our friend learned some basic blues scales on the guitar within a few minutes. I figure if it gets 1 out of every 50 kids interested in making music, the EMP is a worthwhile endeavor.

However, we ultimately felt the whole experience was rather hollow and unsatisfying. There wasn't any real "meat" to the place, and the fact that we closed our visit with a ride on "Funk Blast" (a motion simulator "ride" where two Asian kids learn to Get With the Funk) kind of gave the whole thing a real amusement-park sense, which is completely at odds with its stated purpose of being a museum and information center.

The building itself is also seriously utt-bugly. It would easily win the grand prize of "Ugliest Building in the Entire Universe in This Reality and All Possible Alternate Realities." There's ugly architecture, and then there's architecture so ugly that you could turn to stone if you look at it for too long, and then there's the EMP. News flash to modern architects: corners are not Evil Things. Some little kids couldn't go into the museum because they'd start crying and screaming, "Daddy, please don't bring me into the Ugly Building!"

Excuse me. I just got an Instant Message from the Worldwide Association of Really Ugly People asking me to please stop using the word "ugly" to describe the EMP, because they're afraid they'll become associated with it, and their lives are hard enough already.

The other incredibly annoying thing about the place is that they give you these little over-the-shoulder bags with palm computers attached to them. The theory is that each exhibit has a little transmitter which sends the exhibit label copy to your palmtop when you get near it, along with sound samples and other neat-o multimedia stuff. Very very cool idea in concept.

Except the stupid things almost never worked right. My wife went through 5 of them before she got one that was stable. There's about 1500 people who work there whose only function seems to be to swoop down on people after 3 seconds to ask, "Do you need help with your computer?" (which, within a minute, would usually end in a new computer for the tourist). The founder of the EMP was a founder of Microsoft. Draw your own conclusions.

Oh, and the building? UUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGG-lee!

-- Ed/Ace

[Kaner]

I live about 6 blocks from the EMP and I can verify the stupefying ugliness of this building. To make matters worse, each one of the "kewl" 5ft x 5ft metal tiles that make up the outer shell of this immense monstrosity were purchased for upwards of $800. If Paul Allen had cut costs and made a less ugly building, he could have used that money to take care of Seattle's homeless. Anywho, I'm done ranting.

-jerkbox