Thursday report: Deep Spaces @ Paradiso
As titles go, Deep Spaces is brilliantly evocative. Full of promises and mysteries to come. Kicking off the musical program is the collaboration between Keith Rowe, Kjell Bjørgeengen and the musical duo Streifenjunko. To put it bluntly: this is what Sonic Acts is all about. Collaboration…possibilities…strange beauty. Bringing the outer limits just a bit closer home, or towards the spotlights if you will. The precise technical process is lost on me, but the nine screens at first just seem to flicker, emitting static and noise over which Streifenjunko layer whispering saxophone and trumpet sounds. With care the static is manipulated and slowly evolves into mesmerizing patterns. Just when one is settled into some sort of rhythm/trance, ghostly voices appear out of the noise, to quickly disappear. A beautiful moment in an idiosyncratic performance.
Deep Spaces is all about the interplay between music and visuals. Fred Worden’s 11-minute film 1859 eschews sound. This experimental film is built out of a short clip of lens flare. At times the source material can be identified as such but Worden manipulates the dots into something truly cosmical: rotating molecules, unknown planetary systems and overwhelming suns that scorch the retina. The poetics of space as another term for psychedelia.
Next up are Thomas Köner and Jürgen Reble in another audiovisual collaboration. To be honest, for me this performance was the most conventional of the evening. I use the term conventional in a relative way, it felt as the most generic Sonic Acts performance. Köner’s artic music is as beautiful as ever but has over the years sadly grown into a well-worn format. Materia Obscura at times possesses a strange beauty especially if you realize that what you expect to be purely digital constructions really is manipulated filmstock. There are plenty moments that deliberately make you wonder “am I seeing the birth of crystals? Are these African villages seen from above?” But overall there is something of a mineral Koyaanisqatsi feel about Materia Obscura.
Still In Cosmos, the collaboration between Makino Takashi and Jim O’Rourke was very well received by the audience and with good reason. Coming after Materia Obscura this piece seemed to answer the former’s detachment with forced immersion thanks to a continuous onslaught of skyscraping guitar (sounding as a compilation of bands ending their songs in feedback) and shifting visuals, so abstract that they cannot be put into words. Something sublime and ecstatic then: effective, powerful and unique.
Haswell & Hecker seem to slouch towards their equipment as if they just entered Paradiso from the street and bluffed their way in. That is just an impression because their performance of UPIC Diffusion Session #22 is very controlled and in spite of its piercing force quite beautiful. Of course their use of lasers is a masterstroke that enhances the at times overwhelming sounds. Something synergetic actually seems to take place. I am not sure if it is a space I want to live in but this performance seemed worthy of the visceral electronic lineage of Suicide and Pan Sonic.
The last performance has to wait until the midnight hour. With rights one should say as it gives some time to shift the audience. The influx of the regular clubbing crowd seems like an unusual move but in the end gives Monolake with Tarik Barri a broader audience that should be receptive to the slightly experimental yet pleasurable techno. Listening to Monolake live got me thinking of something I would like to dub the Avatar effect. Or the possibility of the Avatar effect, I am not sure Monolake is there yet. The Avatar effect is about making a technical jump within a discipline that threatens or succeeds in forming a new experience. The sound design of Monolake is probably the best I have ever heard in 20 years of techno. Every detail is heard, the smallest blip, the lowest roar. But the strange thing is that the volume made it into an oppressive experience. Monolake live nowadays are state of the art and chances are this setup will gain popularity. Understandable as one rightfully seeks to enhance the technology of sound, and yet I wonder if techno does not lose something with this newfound clarity. The old cavernous sound, woozy and wooly, seems to belong to another domain, of dreams, labyrinths and ecstasies.
Omar Muñoz Cremers
