A series of informal reviews (musings??) from art openings and concerts, or whatever I choose to review, in whatever place I happen to be at.
I was late to this event. The Q train had derailed near my home, though I don’t think anyone was hurt, and there were hundreds of workers onsite. I had seen them working on the tracks at the exact place of the derailment earlier in the week on my way to work. Couldn’t have been a coincidence. I went back home and jumped on my bike and headed to the F train about a 7 minute ride away, but on the way there I saw a delivery rider on an ebike hit by a car! Myself and another woman immediately went over to him. Thankfully, he wasn’t badly hit, and he didn’t fall, but the bike knocked into his leg, probably bruising it up. We chatted for a bit. I checked whether he wanted an ambulance. He was in shock, and we had some difficulty chatting in English, but he said he would check in with his primary care doctor the next day and then headed off. I continued to the F, then caught the subway, but I didn’t know how long this line takes to get into manhattan. Nuts. It would have been far faster to just ride the 45 minutes than this whole hour long saga.
And with that, I arrive at the venue only 15 minutes after the concert started. I give my name for my free comped ticket (Thank God!). I know that I was only 15 minutes late because there are precise times listed for every piece, and the second one started moments after I entered. The room was dark, very dark. In the front of the room a piano on a mobile stand, and Klipsch speakers on the floor with a small sub. There’s about 80 people sitting on folding chairs in this long thin room on Canal street in Soho. The museum is droney Spiegel music. I like her work, I really do, and regularly listen to The Expanding Universe, probably the most available album of her music, as well as Unseen Worlds. The audience sits there, in near darkness listening to a playback of Unseen Worlds. It is nice droney Buchla and Music Mouse music I believe. Music Mouse was her custom music-making software tool, a visionary accesible tool for making electronic music. I like this work, but I don’t like this form of ‘listening session.’ I don’t see the point. I have a good stereo system at home and comfortable couch. Here I’m sitting on the floor, but even if I wasn’t, why would I want to sit on a wooden folding chair in a dark hot room with 80 people around me? I don’t see how it adds to the music? I guess I am too fixated on the idea of watching a ‘performance’ - even if that’s only a DJ. At the end of the piece Laurie stands up and bows. Fine.
There is an intermission and I talk to a friend I run into. We talk about AI and its effects on teaching and how it’s split their department, with half the professors not talking to the other half. I know what they mean!
The second half of the program is different from the first. An older gentleman plays solo piano of compositions written by Laurie Spiegel. I really like hearing classical music live, so why don’t I love this? There are 12 pieces listed for this half of the concert. I find myself counting up in binary to keep track as a little challenge to myself. I am lately playing a videogame where the solution to a puzzle requires writing a binary adder in Assembly. Make of that statement what you will.
These piano pieces vary a lot. Prior to recorded music i think it was fairly typical for families to sing, or to gather around a piano to play music. I try to think of this piano this way, as an instrument for gathering. The compositions are not ‘experimental’ per se. They are the work of a composer of music for synthesizer, trying out some similar techniques in composition. I wonder her writing style: from synth to sheet music for example? I let the time piece, half enjoying myself and half counting binary. The concert ends and people politely clap and Laurie Spiegel gets up from her chair in the audience and bows. An event with music concluded.
I bike over a couple blocks to Chinatown to King Noodle, a sichuan restaurant I like, and order a spicy Sichuan pepper chicken dish. It is delicious, the highlight of the evening, where I dine solo and read about Laurie Spiegel’s musical software and approaches to playing and thinking about music. I admire her very much. I just didn’t love the ‘concert.’
This was the opener of the fall 2026 season of Roulette and there was a full house. The opener Leo I hadn’t been familiar with but had heard description of other performances. The stage was set with 2 small gongs on stands, and a noise table between. Leo started out playing droney microphone feedback. It wasn’t particularly exciting, thankfully not totally ear-splitting but still: earplugs went in. I miss the sound level consideration that takes place at most venues in Berlin for these kinds of shows, where they seem more attuned to setting the correct sound level. At some point out came a head wrap and then a hat with a colored LED hanging off of it. He shakes his head around and there must be a contact mic on the end of it as we hear wooshes swirl in and out. This goes on for a while, little swirlies of sound over white noise and wall of drone. This writer must confess that he did fall in and out of sleep. Let’s consider that a success of sorts.
After a break the trio of visual and sound artist Raven Chacon on noise table; Huangtai (also known as Last Lizard 808 and before that Dirty Beaches) playing trumpet, vocals, and laptop with something unknown he diddled around in his left hand; and then new-to-me Tashi Jorji on detuned guitar played with various means like his fingers, metal beaters and the like. I think there’s a reason most noise collabos are usually 2 musicians, occasionally 3, and rarely or never 4. In this group of 3 there was a lot of sound happening. They were listening to each other, and leaving some sorts of spaces for each other, but there was still white mud at times and the first 10 minutes was a lost morass. Smarter would have been to come up with some rules and have little solos and duos, testing the waters and figuring out some features rather than jump in and commit to sludge. But they forged ahead. About 20 minutes or 25 minutes in and beats start to take shape and some form appears. They build to a ‘noise crescendo’, which is a gimmick that I find quite effectively, and worked here. At that point, rather than the denoument, falling action, we instead have Alex jump on the mic, sing-songing deep in the mix, and the wall of noise propulses forward. His voice comes in and out, lumped in with the soup. Dorji’s guitar cuts the occasionally thick lick into it. At some point they decide they’ve gone on long enough. Chacon, always with a serious look, and set up stage center, seems to choose when to fade out. How long they’ve played nobody knows. End Tymes Bob rises to his feet, thrilled by the blasts.
Not a bad performance, though I think more rehearsal, with more preplanned sections would go a long way, improve the performace, taking it from yet another loose improv soup to a memorable series of improvisations with forms.
This was a drop-in workshop to complete a solar-powered miniature synth using a breadboard and kit of parts: resisters, capacitors, solar panel, potentiometer, and the like. I’m sure the economics of this situation was that there is already a funded series of monthly ‘second sunday’ workshops, which is why this was “age 5 and up”, but this truly and really did not make sense to me as a children’s workshop. It’s a teen and up workshop. So we had adults attempting to build the circuit for their confused children. Nonetheless, finishing up the little synth, getting help from the instructor Alex, and then hearing one’s little creation screech away was fun, and I was thrilled to be able to build one. Besides, I got into the museum for free, and sat and listened to Aki Onda’s artwork in the biennial and some other works I enjoyed briefly, then took a little walk on the high line before heading home.
This was a closing exhibition put on by an art collective, and the artists are friends who make work I like quite a bit. They use 3d printers, custom circuit boards, old reused hardware, paintings, and make animations in Blender and a video game in Love2d. These are just the materials. From these abstract components they assemble what I’d consider a radical reimagining of something like a revitalized cyberpunk style. There were 2 paintings with 3d printed and interactive sculptures with pedals, a handoperated synth, or a photoresistor thing.
The centerpiece of the exhibition was this huge console they built that looked like a computer in an old 80s era powerplant. It hosted a puzzle roguelike game they made, that was fun! And they even hosted a game tournament to play it.
My ex, the one I’m not on speaking terms with, was there, so that was awkward. We just didn’t talk to each other or acknowledge each other really. For the best I guess.
This was a show at the recording studio of somewhat well-known improv jazz dude Shahzad Ismaily. I guess he’s doing okay for himself. It was nice. I joined in one of the groups, playing a 20 minute noise set.
At first, as only 8 chairs and a bunch of cushions were getting set up before the show I was like, are each of us performing just going to play for each other? But no, at 20 minutes later there was maybe a full house, which was maybe 25 people total max that could fit, but it was a nice intimate show, and varied. The opener was lap steel guitar, played with gloves, with bow, with vibrating electronic product display stands, with metal cymbals. It was fun, improv set, played through a looper pedal. The second set was my friend on guitar with me on synth and woodwind and one more person on shtruti box. We didn’t rehearse and I’m not even sure the 3rd person’s name. I thought our set was pretty good considering. I used my wavetable synth to get some good foghorn sounds in, and i used my mutable ears to get some nice skritchy scratchy sounds, run through a delay and granular synth. After, aaron performed a couple songs with another guest on vocals. He’s got a voice like an angel, and sang two breakup songs. It felt real raw and most of the audience knew him and were sending good wishes his way.
The headliner Stranger Cat was a woman visiting from Florida. Man, she was a real diva, but not in a bad way. She used a synth almost in a DIY pop way, and even asked the audience to sang along on a couple tracks. She was great.
Afterwards I said hi to Shahzad and then headed with Moon to the train but we spotted a nice lil bar and went in for a half glass of beer each, chattin. On the way home I had a 6 minute wait for the subway and it was after midnight so I played my woodwind for the tracks. But a man did come out across the way and start filming. Funny.
I knew this was gonna be good and oh my god yes it was. I had to overcome a little inertia since I was comfortable at home working on my art in the afternoon and this show started early, listed as doors at 5, music at 6, ending by 10. Around 5:40 I started the 40 minute bike ride but I stopped only a few blocks away from the destination when I spotted a jerk stand and got 10 bucks worth of jerk chicken which I ate on the street, getting globs of sauce all over my fingers, staining them blood red.
This was my first time at the venue. I messaged Chuck Bettis who sent me the address (“ask a punk” style). It’s the backyard of a cool 2 floor apartment space, with a nice size yard that includes a chicken coop, some kind of elevated hangout spot, and evidently a $5,000 sound system.
This was a fundraiser for the Prairieland Defendants and I paid a donation then walked in. But due to the jerk chicken stop I missed Leila Berdeuil, a bummer. I got there right as Sunk Heaven started, their last show before they head off to London for grad school. Austin had a serrated knife with some amplification and wore a wireless headset. Their partner played with some plants on the ground, cutting at them. And some intense temple incense burned heavy fumes into the crowd. Some wild thrashing, some noise, some singing, some beats. It was a good mix.
This was followed by Bergsonist and G. Zifcak, some amplified and effected coil and bells and junk along with laptop technics. This was a great noise table performance, and the energy continued with the trio of Chuck Bettis on electronics and mic, Ka Baird on mic using it as a feedback mechanism with the massive speaker stack, and Luke Stewart on upright bass sawing through it.
Drew McDowall’s headliner set was deep tripper shit. The audience was having a spiritual experience in this backyard. A sacred experience. At one point a spider descended from the treetops and spun a web above our heads, with maybe a third of the audience locked into it. I guess the music sent the spider into a trance, weaving an invisible web built of silk tuned through musical vibrations. When the final sounds peeled out the audience just clapped and clapped. So blessed to experience it.
Afterwards I talked with Moon and Jessica and Adam and Ali and C. Spencer and Tommy. Nice to be back and see friends and get to share this beautiful experience with them.
I biked home, famished, almost stopping at the coop but it was 10 minutes to midnight and they were closing up, so at home I raided my leftovers (not much!) and ate cucumbers, cottage cheese, and blueberries before turning in. I wanted more music so I put on some g.q.o.m. before bed.
Okay I came into this one somewhat skeptical. It’s a documentary about the eurasian owl Flaco that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023 after an unknown entity cut open a hole in its enclosure to allow it to escape. Flaco caught the imagination of New York, and to some degree the world, interpreted as a story of triumph where an owl living its entire life in a small zoo pen learned to fly, learned to feed itself on city rats, and lived in Central Park and then the rest of the city on its own, resisting capture. My skepticism had been that I thought the public story of its ‘inspirational’ message was misplaced. I remember feeling ambivalent because this (literally) caged up bird had some freedom but its new home was the hostile environment of New York City, and his death as a result of eating rat poison was as sad as it was inevitable. Well, the movie absolutely gets into that. It’s clearly a film by a bird (and owl) lover, but is not afraid to and in fact gets into the problems of the zoo, enclosure, New York City as a home for a predator not from the continent, the sentience and umwelt of birds (raptops) and rats, and leaves room as well for the relatively simple ‘inspirational’ story too, even as it resists that pat narrative.
The documentary was screened at Low Cinema, John Wilson’s (and collaborators) new small screen cinema in Ridgewood, Queens. I am a HUGE HUGE fan of How To With John Wilson - if you haven’t seen any of the episodes of his frankly bizarre, exciting strange documentary TV show on New York, correct that! The cinema is located in what used to be until the 80s fairly common: local movie theaters in neighborhoods. Now, most of these have been closed and sit vacant or repurposed as churches and the like. This 42 seat theater has a paper mache model of ET in the lobby, and John himself works the concession stand, in a ripped frayed de rigueur t-shirt. I had been intending to visit the cinema since I heard it was opening, and it was really exciting to finally visit. A friend of mine moderated a Q and A with the director and one of the most prominent “bird lover but critical” bloggers who had written on all of the problems of Flaco and his plight.
So this was an ‘insider’s’ exhibit masquerading as an everyman (everyperson) exhibit. What do i mean by that? Duchamp to the degree he’s ‘known’, it’s primarily for the concept of the readymade, and at the top, his “fountain” signed by R. Mutt. Then below that there are people that know his readymades like the bicycle wheel mounted on a stool or the bottle racks (pictured). There are people that know of his large glass work. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even… - here, displayed as a replica created by some other celebrity, i can’t remember who. Then there are the fans of Duchamp for announcing he was done making art and dedicating his life to chess, which is clearly a ruse as his life after that was still in service of making art and living as an artist. Add to that other facets of Duchamp’s life and work: his dressing as a woman artist (Rrose Selavy). His artist ‘boxes’ that recontextualize his work in other forms of presentation including sketches, documentation, notes. And there are his works of animation and kinetic art, such as Anemic Cinema, from around the time of Calder’s mobiles/stabiles as well. Oh my god, I neglected to mention his first famous artwork that put him on the map: Nude Descending A Staircase, which to me, I still love. And his last work before passing: the installation work Etant Donnes, which I remember seeing on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in childhood and being awestruck by it, not least of which is for its extreme grotesqueness and hidden violence.
For all of these works, the retrospective had scores of sketches, notes and ephemera. I kept wondering: does anyone else care about this stuff, or is it just me? I’ve always been pretty convinced that Duchamp was the bridge too far for a lot of the public. That seemed to be true as I walked through the ‘readymade room’ was the pile-up of Bottle Racks with a gaggle of women that looked like they were part of a bachelorette party group were stopping through and seemed to just about be able to consider those racks as readymade art. “What are they?” someone asked. “Bottle drying racks,” I explained.
Many folks visit MOMA to see Monet’s Waterlilies, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, and a couple Pollock’s, and whatever slop art they have in the lobby. I kid. Sort of. This time the slop art was by Pierre Huyghe. Remember Saltz’ takedown of the Refik Anadol Unsupervised work as a crowd-pleasing, like-generating mediocrity? If you hated that work too, have I got some news for you. The Huyghe work was 2018 puppyslug (Google-engineer built) style early “AI art” that looked like the style from right before NFTs came into the scene. This work was BAD. Do NOT see it. You will NOT think it is worth your time. What it demonstrates instead is a artworld star (Huyghe) dabbles in some simple media art, and MOMA’s design curator i’d guess (antonella) thinks this garbage is worth presenting.
Back to Duchamp: I recommend the show! A number of standout works I found extremely compelling. In particular, seeing so many of his ‘boxes’ which I learned were constructed by a variety of people including Joseph Cornell of Cornell Boxes fame, and the variety of documentation about the construction of Etant Donnes, and the variations of paintings made around the time of Nude Descending a Staircase I found really interesting. Walking out of the exhibit there are tables with chessboards set up, a nod to Duchamp I found fitting, and there were many people sitting and playing a game.
last year i wanted to go to this but it sold out early and i missed it. i heard good things, so this year i made sure to go. i went with n and cata and her kid and brother who was visiting. we met up and it was a heatwave day. entering the site at tempelhofer feld there are 2 or 3 giant circus tents but unfortunately, this performance was in the outdoor un-tented area so we were sitting in full heat and not loving that. in fact the heat got so intense that l, c and b and n (everyone but me) had to hide in my shade or the shade of someone else. so intense. maybe it was 30 degrees C / 95 degrees F. dunno. intense tho.
the theme or fokus as they told us at the cirkus this yr was on the catalan region. and it felt very catalan. the 45 minute performance featured 3 performers, who stacked themselves up, contorted and launched and climbed a pole, balanced high in the air on someone’s shoulders.
first they started by walking in a circle and drawing around the stage with chalk. they had 3 giant human-high sections of pole and as they circled the stage they let the pole go as it balanced and started to fall. each person had one section, they’d let go, then run to the next person’s dropping pole and catch it before it hit the ground. they did this on and on as they moved further and further away from each other, making it harder to catch the pole. after one section dropped, they moved to the next section which consisted primarily of launching the smallest of the 3 performers into the air and catching them. then they regained their pole sections and spun around them, for like 5 or 10 minutes. no way i could do that. in some ways it was the ‘easiest’ but i know i’d go insanely dizzy. finally, they they formed a human pole of their own, first stacking on top of each other, three people high, then constructing the pole and raising the smallest performer up into the air maybe 50 feet. i recounted the performance to a friend later, someone in the know, and they said it was super catalan.
i appreciated there was no ‘technology’ (besides the music playback), no trapeze or effects. just the human spirit and bodies and amplified whispering voices, music and sound design. cata and brother b, i’m not sure if they were impressed. maybe not even N. they said something about it being slow. but i liked it. it was not cirque du soleil but instead about bodies together, sharing space, stretching to one’s limit, jokes and the like. in fact, i think this was the kind of performance you could see at a fair hundreds or thousands of years ago, at a castle party, summer festival and the like. for that reason, i was thankful i got to see it, and would recommend going next year!
This was an unplanned noise show, at least on my part. I went to my first freiluftkino (outdoor movie screening) in Berlin, held in some hole in the wall place, and saw a Jarmusch film. Won’t say much about the film beyond that it was kinda okay melancholic with bad acting, fun little pointless leitmotifs (skateboarders, talking about water) of repeated phrases or events in 3 family vignettes and really a series of boring family relationships with not-believable characters. After the film as we went out we saw like 300 qweer punx assembled hanging out eating, drinking, checking out warez (anarkist punk shirts and jewelry and leather and such), and i went inside this building and heard then saw a 8 person noise band performing. They were on modular synth, pedals, microphone, a metal saw amplified, and everything running through echo / delay. I loved it immediately of course. I missed the beginning and don’t know how long they had been playing but I watched for about 30 minutes. N asked why everyone was in a uniform, consisting of ‘punk’ clothing of patches and silkscreened stuff on muted army surplus green and tan clothing with excessive tattoos and the like. I talked about in-group/outgroup dynamics. Let’s use the term outgroups here and understand I mean a group of people that associate together that are from a marginalized subculture, considered outside normie mainstream society. Outgroups have shared clothing, jargon/argot, music and other cultural facets and signifiers that collect them together, that make them feel a sense of belonging. So it may seem that they rejected society only to make a conservative choice to adopt some groups’ ‘uniform’ but it’s also a valid way to forge community, especially as this group probably does have shared values and interests. The people were super friendly, and though at times I could probably pass as a member of the group depending on what i’m wearing, i was dressed more in my neon health goth athleisure raverwear so here i was in an outgroup of my own.
Anyway, we got some bodega premixed sugar free bourbon and cola and i can’t remember but i think chicken kebab and had a great time hanging amidst the punx. for the record, N almost bought one of the punx shirts but didn’t want to spend the dinero.
This is a long-running event run by my friend and co-organizer from DIY spaces in New York City. It’s not that different from the Show Us Your Screens event i went to last week at Offline. Basically, it’s an ‘open mic’ but with your laptop, where you plug in and have 5 minutes to show off a new project or something in progress - like a video game, a digital artwork, a coding project, animation and the like. C presented a journalism article she published. OK talked about burning discs (not CDroms, not DVDs, what’s the other one called?) of their digital life and consolidating or eliminating some of their life data. Other people talked about their code projects or what-have-you. Like some of these other events I knew most of the audience. I presented 2 works, an autobiographical work of sorts and a web browser I’ve been ambiently building off and on (no AI!).
Afterwards, we hung out and talked in various combinations till we walked to a nearby ethiopian place for dinner and ate around 10:30pm. we continued hanging, had trouble figuring out the bill (classic of being told one number then asked another), settled it, then eventually all moved along our merry way in small groups on bikes and subway. i love when large groups of friends hang out and come together, so i was in heaven. many things were talked about and nothing. i got home around 1am.
The flyer promised music ‘tracing the sounds of the african diaspora’ from glitch baile and gqom, to batide and amapiano. I love love love these genres, especially GQOM music but i’ve never heard it DJed live. I’ve been listening to gqom online over the past couple years and this was an incredible experience to be able to dance to new sounds. this is my favorite place to dance in berlin, not so much because it’s an incredible impressive space but because it’s a diy artist community and not a hard door with intimidating club owners but a space owned and organized by its own people.
we took some stuff and went on a journey. the dj’ing was all done back to back in pairs with a funny combo of white german women with men that i believe may have been from durban and elsewhere in south africa? i’m without internet right now so need to look up officially later. the sounds were so compelling, we were hearing many diferent approaches to gqom, along with some fusion with brazilian funk, and even tribal (3ball?) in a few places. i am going to have to look online later to find some dj mixes. update: some of my fave DJs were Rudi Nhocane from Mozambique, playing GQOM; Stefoo, from Germany, on GQOM and Batide; Vintchen and Aleakim from Brazil, playing mostly Baile funk. i really hope they recorded their sets. this was totally compelling, i loved every minute. no filler. the room moved together, mostly women.
one funny lovely moment around 3:30am. while the hardest continual gqom beats are peeling out a giant of a man (2 heads taller than me, and i’m tall!) starts talking to a woman dancing nearby. he’s so much taller than her that she walks up onto the platform seating area, up 2 levels and she’s now at head height with him. they talk together for a bit and then go off together. a magical fusion.
this was probably one of my favorite music nights at a ‘club’ / space ever. we stayed til the end around 4:30am, then melted off into the night. at home i tried to sleep and saw many demons morphing on the backs of my eyelids that i enjoyed watching, but i did fall asleep, unfortunately waking up with some ringing in my left ear.
A very cyberpunk feeling space, in an abandoned mall, complete with non-working escalators. Various artworks were DIY-installed on 3 floors of the building, mostly paintings, with a few video works, ceramics, sculpture too. The works were by artists from this particular studio buildings system (Kulturaum?) and various inside baseball convos on the politics of these spaces were exchanged but as i’m too new i couldn’t follow completely. In any case, most of the works didn’t do it for me, as I’m not so much invested in painting for painting’s sake let’s say. And it’s pretty damn hard to compete with a cool junky mall with ripped down ceilings and HVAC, and very visible floorscaping and such. What can you add in terms of small artworks to compete with the space? not much. My favorite works were these very queer giant tiles with two different scenes. One a man straddling a giant flower in bloom. The other an empty bedroom with open drawer and ‘toys’.
Afterwards we wandered to various bars in a giant group of 10 or 12 people, colonizing a DIY bar til small hours of the night. Although i can’t remember any of it, it was the kinds of conversations that fuel a life with other people, that make meeting people thrilling and give you cheer. A web of people all loosely affiliated (I brought 2 friends and my friend brought 2 friends and someone else brought friends and pretty soon half of the city had turned out). That’s the stuff of life.
This is an event where I knew half of the audience. Maybe more! And there were 70 people so that that’s incredible, but it also speaks to how I’ve really felt like this space was a kind of ‘home’ in Berlin. It’s really a home for a lot of the media artists of the city. I like this space and community a ton. Each person that signs up can present their work for 10 minutes and no more, and there was one guest artist who has a longer time slot. This month it was Corazon de Robota, who gave a performance where she started with a blank breadboard and bunch of bits of resistors and cables and such and a plug into an amp. Then she proceeded to wire up a small synthesizer over about 10 or 20 minutes. It took maybe 3 or 4 minutes til she got a bumpity bump pulse, and the audience cheered. Another minute and she started varying the tone, then a couple minutes later and she had created light-controlled synthesizer that she played with a flashlight and got compelling gritty and grainy sounds. It was a super fun ‘livecoding’-style performance that went over well with the group.
After the event a gang of us walked to that falafel place that you can get 2euros50 sandwiches and then went to the nearby tea shop and hung til late gossiping untill we all scattered on our various ways home.
This event had a name that confused me. On the one hand, it was described to me almost like this was a recurring ‘sound bath’ monthly event, which conjured in my mind that we’d lie on the ground while a hippy played tibetan singing bowls around our heads. Now this turned out to be not toooo too far off, but it was a bit more involved. As I write this I am sitting in a public park in Kreuzberg, not connected to internet, and so I will refrain from looking up info on the event and write from memory and (mis)understanding instead.
The site is a fancy resort type of space on the edge of the city, along a canal or river. In this uber-fancy luxe enviro-“sustainable” resort - these things are always full of you know what: the very fact they cater to the uber-wealthy means we can throw out the hand-wavey attempts at sustainability and say these are gestures or marketing more than paradigm shifts, even if they do manage to lessen enviro impact in some smaller ways. In any case, I digress: it’s a fancy resort that looks influenced by wellness resorts in southeast asia maybe. You walk through a building courtyard and through a wild garden to a building with a traditional thatched roof, except that the building itself is super fancy. Inside there are rooms with a reception that greets you, wine bar, tea bar, place to sit on an outdoor patio overlooking the water. The main space is a room where you lie down on black tatami mats and stare up at the ceiling while recordings of specially composed music is played in the space and it moves between the speakers above your head. It’s mostly a gimmick, and the concept eluded me a little bit, something about reimagining old phone booths, maybe in japan?, as modern ‘rooms’ for rest to escape the acceleration of the city. The music was fine, but maybe closer to spa ambient than “power” ambient. It definitely felt designed to make you feel asleep. I don’t think I did fall asleep, but i almost did. Each month they have a different composition play here. The place was packed and it felt like a scene or cult or maybe more accurate a spiritual community, for some reason that i couldn’t exactly put my finger on. but it felt easy enough so after our 10 euro experience or however much it was we moved out and the next giant group of 60 or 80 people moved in to lie down and take our place and we biked down the river to the climbing gym for a rest by the river.
This was a popup neighborhood German rap show, organized by a rapper from the kiez. Hours before it started it was announced, the gate around the building was closed temporarily, and security created a perimeter. People started lining up and then they let people in. By the time the show started maybe a thousand people were there. A temporary stage of sorts was set up on one of the balconies, complete with outdoor smoke machines, banners and banging loud sound system. Opening was a pop-ish DJ and then a series of supporting rappers. Although I can’t follow their lyrics the audience was right there, and for the headliner Apsilon everyone’s singing along, waving their arms in the air and totally in thrall. Since we had backstage access we went up on the roof and looked down on the crowd and enjoyed our perch. The music was interesting, not as hard as the style of US rap I usually listen to and am most compelled by, but i still found it interesting and compelling. I was told the lyrics were about the rapper’s roots and family, and it made me think perhaps of older ‘conscious’ style rap though obviously this wasn’t talib kweli / mos def. i think though it points to some of the timeless aspects of rap as a form for storytelling, like opera, folk tales around a fire, hollywood musical, a novel or shadow puppetry.
This went really well. I was one of the artists in residence, and my studio was swamped with people all night. I think this residency program definitely has the feel and ethos of an artist-run space, a DIY space, not so much one of the elite style residencies where you stay in pristine remote or fancy settings and then get on some who’s who list that you can mark on your CV and then get plucked to show at the Whitney or something but more like a residency that works how I want it to work, embedded in community, where a bunch of people are thrown together, live together, make art on their own or together, and the public framing is loose and whatever you make it: there’s an openhaus which is open studios and you can show what you want: finished work, professionally-presented, or works in progress, or have a performance or show your canvases, or make your studio look like a professional gallery. All of these were well-represented.
I showed 3 works in my studio and then performed on modular synth. Of the 3 works, 2 were presented in my coding library and were a somewhat comedic riff on studio visits complete with a limp wavy wacky arm of the artist or viewer, controlled by the mouse, a nod to the underlying obtuseness of the physical material of the computer as site of a ‘studio visit’ but also referencing the kinds of ‘interaction’ made legible by creative coding libraries. Another work read less comedic and more like ‘contemporary art’. It used this here very ‘blog’ you’re reading as source text. I translated these entries from their original text as written here to short and simple ‘easy read’ text, based on my experience reading this kind of text at museums in Berlin. Finally, I added a ‘hard read’ made up of transmitting the same text into morse code and then their output through vocalized encodings. These were overlaid as well with my own music recording. The final work I made was an autobiographical story you play through, built with an open source tool on the web. I ran 2 of the projects from a 2012 laptop, plugged into a very old monitor, maybe from the same era, and an old mouse. And the other from my 2019 machine. In addition to my own work there was a dance performance, zine launch, korean fermented foods workshop, an experimental dance with costumes and masks of spirits and ancestors, and an installation of a current film in progress presented on several monitors. There were many other works on exhibit as well but I can’t describe them all.
While there was a heterogenous selection of artists and works, I think partially what brings people to this residency program (as artists) is the emphasis on city as site. What this means is that artists drawn to this space are less interested in pure or fine art separable from the rest of the world (if such a thing is possible. i think not), and more invested in an approach to art or creative or research practice as a kind of cultural practice, as a way to experiment in the world, using the guise of ‘art’ as a form or permission structure to be creative and respond back to the conditions they find themselves in. In my own experience, there have been art movements in the past that attempt this in various ways, from recent movements like ‘social practice’ or ‘relational aesthetics’ to older movements in ‘soft sculpture’ or even movements around found art, arte povera, fluxus, situationism, maybe even the plein air groups in various ways. Many precedents.
The great thing about an open studio like this is that you can meet and see many creative people, locally and from all over the world, and a fermenting of ideas and approaches, foods and conversations occur. That certainly happened for me, and I’m very grateful.
I loved Limpe Fuchs’ (and Grischa Lichtenberger) show I’d seen the previous night so much that I signed up to participate in a workshop with Limpe the next day, when I learned about it from N. I only found out about it less than 2 hours before it was to start. Signup was free. I raced home by bicycle, showered and grabbed my woodwind Alto Venova, then raced back toward Morphine Raum, which I’d heard of but never visited before.
It’s a recording studio, instrument-building workshop, and a venue for small events, with incredible homemade sound system and recording board. It feels really special. I was a couple minutes late as I missed my bus when I stopped for some kebab at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse so I was 8 minutes late. When Michael, organizer told me “You’re late” with a German accent I was feeling frustrated with the tightness of time and I shouldn’t have but said “Americans are always late”, which is probably not true, and not a valid excuse anyway. But despite all this, Michael was friendly to me and showed me into the venue. He did say everyone else in the workshop spoke German and they’d have to switch to English for me. I felt bad!
Truthfully, there was not so much verbal instruction as much as Limpe demonstrating her homemade instruments and then orchestrating smaller ensembles of us performing, in duos, quartets and then full group of us at 9 people. Also, two people arrived later than me, Germans. Can I be absolved of my lateness?
As an example of her instruments, Limpe had a large drum hanging suspended high above our heads, a metal brass serpentine pipe-like thing hanging from it, bent that could be played struck with mallets, by a brass padded pipe, the metal wire plucked or bowed. She demonstrated this instrument, then had each of us try it, and gave instructions if someone was too tentative or repositioned hands. We went around this way, trying out the 8 assembled instruments. I and one other participant had brought our own instruments: myself on the Alto Venova woodwind and someone else with a Shruti box. We played a duet together, and Limpe asked someone to stop recording us on her cell phone. I didn’t mind I guess.
Then for the next hour and a half, with only a 10 minute break in the middle, we played improv sets. Totally unrecorded, totally playfully, we responded, moved fluidly between and around instruments. Tapped and tickled and tossed and beat and bent.
The sound was super fun, and I had to accept none of it was being recorded. But that was okay. This was a jam, and we were learning by listening and improvising, and the goal was joyful play.
I went into this knowing pretty much nothing. I didn’t know Limpe Fuchs at all, nor this concert series. It was held at the fancy Akademie der Kunste, a hundred meters from the Brandenburg Tor. I went with N, who had been invited by their friends. I liked them immediately: a couple that’s into experimental music, takes biking trips, goes on holidays to interesting concerts, and were friendly and curious. We had some time before the concert began, so we went up to the rooftop, where they have a bar and a balcony overlook of the gate and the Pariser Platz square. We hung out and looked at photos from S’s recent trip to the Bauhaus Dessau where his friend works. We had some weisswein schorle and then descended 6 floors, to the negative 3rd floor, I guess that’s the third sub-basement.
The setup was bleacher seating. On the floor/stage were a variety of percussion instruments like a tall drum with hanging brass pipe, a variety of metallaphones, things to strike, like homemade marimba, and membranophones, things stretched like a timpani. There was also a noise table with laptop and small rack of outboard gear. Was this going to be a duet? We weren’t sure.
We saw our two musicians come out. An octogenarian woman (Limpe) and a man (Grischa) half her age. After the briefest of remarks Limpe began by barging around shaking and bending and almost dancing with a couple of bendy metal sheets, pulled by string. Think sounds like thunder and crackling and erupting. She moved on giddily, propelled like a puppet on strings. Using these metallic sounds, striking and ringing, and then tuned and untuned drums and cymbals, she was able to conjure up both big sound but also keep it interesting, changing, but not random. Grischa was definitely following her. He seemed to be taking in her input (probably live mic but also i think pre-recorded), then heavily processing and playing back. Cutting, shredding, chopping, blending. This sound, electro-acoustic blending and breaking and making sound anew, this has been what I’ve been going for in my own music-making lately, and so I was in love with this set. I’ve been bored of the ‘improv’ scene in NYC that just consists of constant fast wailing microtonal blah-ing with no ups and downs or coherence. This was something else, and I was so into it. Neither too short nor too long, there was plenty to watch for and listen for the entire time. A set in time and out of time. Fans of Spring Heel Jack, Matthew Shipp, AACM, Anthony Braxton, Zorn will all find things to love in this music.
A highlight during the set was Grischa playing the craziest plonkiest digital glitchiest ‘hip hop’ breakbeat, while Limpe bumped around and played her homemade instrument bells. This section may have lasted only a minute or two, but it was such an incredible moment, the climax for me, for sure.
This was a last minute selection. I’ve seen Dis Fig’s name pop up a bunch, and I’ve listened to The Bug before before but never seen live. We like bass. Why not give it a shot?
Unfortunately this was an underwhelming show/party rave. Gretchen is a bad name for a club. Inside is fine, nothing special. Maybe they should call it Crystal Caverns? Anyway, the sound in the club was muddy and loud for loudness’ sake. My guess is the sound engineer is more used to techno than deep bassy dub.
The opener Ghost Dubs was fine, slow dancin’ “deep tripper” music for doing the 2-step. Follow-up Tikiman b2b Scion were boo-ring. Washed out ‘ragga’ vocals over the most basic 4 to the floor beat. We literally went and sat down on the couches during this one. I started to fall asleep despite the jackhammering bass.
Finally, The Bug returned to the decks. Massive change in the sound and we feel refreshed, rise to our feet, flow to the center of the dancefloor. Dis Fig comes out, and she starts singing/shouting, but it’s all drenched in so much reverb as to be completely and i do mean completely unintelligible. For the next hour in fact. Basically, she does 3 minute songs one after the other where she sings with so much reverb on her voice, and completely overwhelmed by The Bug’s bass. It’s a cheaper M. I. A., only vaguely reminiscent of seeing Crystal Castles. But at least with CC each song sounds distinct. After her set around 2:30am we headed home.
Sometimes you have to ‘take a risk’ for new music. This one came up blanks, but it was worth a shot.
I arrived a little late to this one, in the middle of the listening party. Lots of people sitting in what looks like a previous commercial space standalone building (an “island?”), with all glass wheels all around. Everyone walking around outside can see in. Everyone inside can see out. What is it now? Some kind of small DIY gallery space.
Walking in late, everyone is sitting and listening to music. Someone sits in the front of the room, our music selector, playing selections. I recognize Chumba Wumba, Susan Ciani on letterman (I’ve seen this on youtube before), field recordings. Periodically the artist/selector announces the past few tracks he’s played back.
I enjoy it, but am confused. Afterwards, I ask what we’ve experienced. The description I get back is something like “this person likes to do small informal listening sessions like this previously, at their home. Now they’ve done it in the gallery. It’s listed in conjunction with another exhibit elsewhere.”
And that’s fine. Afterwards we go to a japanese izakaya restaurant nearby for food and drinks and I spend too much money. The addictive cabbage salad is so good, I order it twice.
For centuries, only the hands of male maalems touched the guembri—until the arrival of Asmaa Hamzaoui. With her concert, she opens two days of the festival devoted to the women in Gnawa culture. In a ritual universe where women always performed the central role of the mqaddma—the healer who prepares the lila, guides the trance, and establishes contact with the spirits—the role of playing the three-stringed spike lute had always been reserved for men. This unwritten but ironclad law was broken in 1998 by a Casablanca-born maâlma.
This was gorgeous music, with a singer/‘spike lute’ player and 3 backup singers playing hand percussion in syncopated polyrhythms.
This show on the roof of the HKW center was in beautiful weather, along the canal. There were a couple hundred people in attendance but the generous spacing and relaxed atmosphere contributed to both a welcoming feeling as well as plenty of space to stand and move around and even dance or sit.
N thought the music was beautiful but somewhat repetitive. We talked about being new to a genre, and how that can cause a feeling that ‘all of the songs sound the same.’ But regardless, the music was so compelling and lovely, the audience was so happy, and singing back (presumably there were many people familiar with Gnawa music there). And afterwards we sat by the water and drank some wine. It was a lovely perfect weather summer evening.
The ways in which we remember and forget are shifting. Memory has become a contested terrain, appropriated by reactionary movements, capitalist corporations, and geopolitical interests. Digital technologies are accelerating these trajectories through the spread of disinformation, data extraction, and the algorithmic narrowing of perspectives – while simultaneously opening up new forms of resistant remembrance. The international group exhibition After Memory explores this subversive potential and asks how we may remember and forget in the future.
This is a regular Thursday night summer concert series that I’ve enjoyed going to in the past. My friend J is visiting so we visited the museum first and I used my membership pass this time, and he got in free. Not much new to see, but that’s okay. It’s always nice to see some interesting art.
Afterwards we made our way outside where a massive crowd had built up for the DJ night. I wasn’t familiar with either of the DJs but the description that they combine ‘dancehall’ with hard and other electronic styles did sound interesting, though I was a bit skeptical. I needn’t have been. The music was EXCELLENT and the scene was great. So many different kinds of people from college girls to old music and art heads to scene people to berlin weekend ravers. The crowd was diverse in makeup too, more than most events I’ve gone to here. The music by these 2 DJs playing back to back was compelling. Interesting mixes of new rap, various electronic sub-genres (footwork, breakbeat, dubstep, trance) all seamlessly blended (generally, not 100%) in a way that propelled the massive crowd. J and I thought we’d only be there 20 minutes but we ended up dancing for pretty much the whole set, only leaving a couple minutes early as he started to fade because he’d flown in earlier in the AM and was jetlagged from his redeye.
This was such a nice performance, held in conjunction with the free evening opening of the Brancusi retrospective exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. I checked out the Brancusi work, which I do like, then got a wine schorle with my friend and headed to the back of the museum patio to see the performances. There was a huge audience to see sound art. We’re in Berlin after all. The show was very casual. A man sitting in the volkswagen, taking recordings maybe from the board, and mixing and sending them back out as soundscapes between the main performers. He was Danfotronics. Occasionally, two guys called Afrikanherbalist came out and danced, moved, gyrated, dressed, twirled together. Responding to the music, sometimes to the audience. Additionally, people strolled in and out and up to the vanagon, talking to the performers. I’m telling you, it was wild, very casual and natural. At times people sat on the roof of the van, half-performing, half just chilling.
I was familiar with KMRU. I’ve 3 or 4 of his albums and listen to his sets for NTS radio for example. I’m a huge fan, but had never seen him live. I know he lives in Berlin, and he played a show last month before I got here, so it was only a matter of time til i got to see him perform.
The performances were definitely ‘experimental music’. Combining field recordings, synths, “tranlations”, resonance and movements. All that on the flyer. It’s definitely true. At times we’re hearing Caterina Barbieri-style synth wizardry, though slower and maybe even way more improvised but still strong. And other times we hear ‘field’ recordings. This was probably the best experimental music I’ve seen live in a few months, maybe longer. And I’ve seen a ton of shows recently, one or more a day in the past week and a half.
I got some food. It started to really rain. KMRU was playing and they lay plastic bags over his equipment, taping them down. A giant umbrella was located and put over his equipment. Then chairs started blowing over as the wind kicked up and rain came down. At once the huge audience gets up and walks to hug the building to avoid the rain. For the rest of this set 200 people are hiding under the eaves of the building. KMRU plays on. Ignoring the rain, he plays a rolling set of pixie dust and cloudy textures, maybe he should have pivoted and responded more to the rain rather than what he planned, but still, it’s strong. I should mention that i also loved Jessica Ecomane, hers was the one that sounded like synth wizardry, though i wasn’t sure how she was performing. And after KMRU was Carmen Villain, definitely using turntables, wasn’t sure what she was playing. I’m hoping all these sets were recorded and go live. I think that may be the point of the Danfo release. I see it says album launch of (long string of numbers here), so maybe we’ll get some good new recordings to listen to. Gonna go look on bandcamp.
Update, here’s the remix album that was being released, and the original.
Using interviews and field recordings of city streets, markets, vendors and traffic, Emeka Ogboh weaves together disparate sonic impressions of Lagos and other urban environments into long-form, ambient, dubby electronic compositions.
Sounded great to me.
(update: P says he didn’t spill the hot oil on my shirt. Sorry P. It must have been me then)
I had wanted to see the philharmonic or an opera in Vienna. In my head it’s one of the main reasons to visit Vienna. So why hadn’t I done so? I did visit the opera 20-something years ago, in the standing room only at the top, with my two friends when we were backpacking around central europe for our first time. I don’t remember what we saw.
Well anyway, this was an opportunity to see the symphony. And playing in a park. No ticket price. About 200 meters away from the haunted house ride I’d visited earlier in the day. To be clear, the vienna philharmonic and symphony are different.
I had my backpack, synth and packed bag with me, as I was planning on heading to the train station for an overnight train to Berlin at 10:10pm. I took my friend to dinner since he had hosted me for the week. Hot oil oozed onto my shorts (tie dyed) and shirt (Barry McGee drawing shirt I’d had 20 years) and I was bummed since I couldn’t quite get the stain out in the bathroom and I’m still not sure if I’ll succeed. I digress…
I arrive a little bit late to the concert but i don’t care. I sit in the back comfortably, with my bags around me. The orchestra sounds absolutely incredible. Effortless playing. Perfect intonations. In the pocket. And the versatility is also stellar. Just look at the program.
I usually dislike the poppy summer orchestra in the park shows even though I go. For example, the NY Phil plays in Prospect park, and they do these kinds of poppy bernstein style pieces, but they don’t do Tchaikovsky. Oh man, this orchestra played a few of these cheeze pieces but mostly they just played damn fine classical, older and recent works. Even their pop works with a singer (interspersed throughout) were listenable. And my god, they brought out Soprano and Tenor opera singers who were completely insanely amazing. I mean, so good.
The conductor was Holly Hyun Choe. Choe wasn’t on my radar before but now she is. I thought she pulled together a STRONG performance, a varied series of works, with plenty of classical and a little bit of the family junk but it wasn’t even junk, still interesting, and the orchestra just soared. I floated out of there and on my way to my evening train, a perfect way to round out my trip to Vienna.
My friend kept harping on me to go walk around the Prater. He made it seem like it was like Coney Island. It was. Anyway, I love a good ghost train dark ride so I paid my 7 euros, stepped up and sat in the first carriage. I have fond memories of riding on the “witch ride” with my sister at the beach. The one at Coney Island isn’t too great, but this one was excellent. A bored park worker pulls out a chainsaw to scare you as it starts up. Monsters here aren’t necessarily plentiful, but there’s enough to see to keep you mildly entertained throughout and wondering where the next ghoul will pop out. I particularly like how the seats rotated and brought you in and out of the 3 or 4 floor house. At one point you’re even tilted over onto the side as you go through a seemingly rotating hallway to hell. I only wish it was longer or they sent you through twice.
Two thumbs up.
This building is a gorgeous gem, the oldest ‘independent’ artist space I’ve learned. Currently there are 3 special exhibitions along with the permanent installation of the Beethoven Frieze by Klimt in the basement. I started by viewing The Heart of my Machine is Golden Lead by Korean artist Mire Lee. This is a giant cut-open mixing cement-like volume in the exhibit, with dripping paint from the ceiling and coagulating paint in pools all around the floor along the platforms you can safely walk on. It was quite a spectacle. I enjoyed it, just standing there in the power of this rotting forms of blood/rust paint and the loud clanging machinery. It captivated most other people that walked through, but there was one woman who walked in, looked in half a second, maybe less, then immediately turned and walked out. She was there for the art nouveau, maybe the Klimt, and nothing else!
Onyeka Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore this Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame was fine. I watched/listened for a few minutes, enjoyed the chorus. The topic is de rigeur in institutions now (“The archive”) as subject. The projection primarily focuses on the words being sung. Okay.
Katherine Hubbard’s solo show featured wooden 2by4 blocks to build up cluttered space. Un-needed. We understand we’re looking at art, without the need to build ‘art structure’ around. But the black and white photos of the artist and her mother in dimensia (am i getting that right?), contrasted with the sloppy contact prints of their bodies, that was masterful! Great concept.
Finally, yes, i did walk into the basement with every other tourist and put on the headset to listen to beethoven and look at the great famous Klimt frieze. It was worth it! And the museum was free on the first wednesday.
I adore Hundertwasser, nee Friedrich Stowasser. I learned he was jewish, that his mother’s side of the family lost dozens of relatives in the shoah. He was a self-driven artist, builder, thinker, proto-environmentalist, sailor. The ultimate autodidact. He didn’t shy from things that he didn’t know but instead went deeper into them. He worked in painting, new techniques in ‘traditional’ woodblock and other printing styles, stamp design, flag design, designed a ship he sailed and lived on, built housing villages and sanitation plant and a composting toilet and was just generally a man ahead of his time.
The draw at this museum beyond Hundertwasser’s art and life story is the building itself - an incredible architectural marvel, with trees living indoors, the globular forms, not straight floors, rhizomatic tile-work, the blend between indoors and outdoors. I not only enjoyed his artwork but sat and watched 20 minutes of the old documentary on his work from the 1980s. I asked if they sold it on DVD in the store but they didn’t so I bought a biography with great photos, but I’d like to find the DVD if I can’t find a mp4 online somewhere. Inspires me to find some land and build some buildings and just go.
After visiting the museum I walked 10 minutes over to the Hundertwasser Village and Haus. I perused the village, all ticky tacky tourist junk for sale, over every inch of wall, but you could still go up and down the crazy Hundertwasser staircases, through the strange but earth-like flow of rooms. Across the street is the incredible giant housing project he built, where you can’t go in but can certainly enjoy the view and undulating ground and the tilework that spreads virally around the building entrances.
I didn’t love this show overall. Not much to see. Not much to think about. It pailed by far in comparison to the work at Biennale Matter of Art in Praha I saw 2 weeks ago, for example. But I did enjoy the two installations with sound art by Sergei Tcherepnin (hard to find recordings by this guy online!). They were janky, homemade speakers with arduino with a mp3 player ‘hat’ shield on top and some bent wires. haphazard looking. unimpressive looking trash. but little sensors ‘saw’ when you walked by and then the things chirped strange chirpy electronic blits and occasional bird whistling samples played too. a hybrid animal instrument jank. i kept going back to it. Beyond that, this exhibit was a snooze. 16 euro entry, sheesh.
There’s a weekly (!) improv music night at club Celeste, a vegan pizza place and bar a couple stops from my friend’s apartment where I’m staying in Vienna. I was alerted to the event by a friend of a friend on social media, and though some info was left out I understood it was an improv jam. I arrived at the time I was told, 8pm, and there were only 2 other people there: who were both set up on stage. One practiced looping and processed vocals - it sounded good. The other played on electric guitar with a chopped off neck. I was a bit confused since it was only us 3 and I thought it was supposed to be an open jam for all, but I realized they were going to perform. They explained they’d play first, to be followed by the rest of the improv sessions. I was hungry since it was dinner time (for me at least), and I didn’t want to pay 16 euros for a vegan pizza so I left to find alternative sustenance and luckily found a Billa supermarket right before closing, purchasing a prepared korean bibimbop bowl at half the price of the pizza, which I ate with great gusto along a stoop in a nearby park since it would be rude to bring it into the restaurant. I was going to say I ate it with relish but I thought you might be confused and think I added relish to my bibimbop so I went with “gusto” and then this extended explanation. I digress.
Back at celeste other people are showing up. There is a small stage up front in the club area, a deconstructed piano before it on the floor. I’m sitting up front and there are those jazz/comedy club little tables all around for holding your drink. On the stage is a small drumkit and there’s some lighting overhead and a soundbooth in the back. I go back out and meet the friend of a friend, who introduces herself as I pay my 5 euro donation admission, and we chat for a brief moment and we’re asked if we’ll perform together later. I answer affirmative, looking forward to playing with another woodwind player - I think she said she brought a flute or clarinet. Sadly, that is the last I see of this woman as she goes outside to socialize with the smokers, then left before performing or even having a conversation with me.
The listed performers sounded great, and I love the combo of fluttery staccato vocals with effects with a mean chopped guitar. Funny that the named act only plays 20 minutes, and everyone else gets the same amount of time. Next up is a trio of drum, piano and trumpet. They go on full freakout improv sesh. In fact, almost every group afterwards also features at least one drummer, but amateur drummers in my experience hit a bit too hard and too loud for my taste - too much gusto! But let’s leave that aside. My favorite sessions were a duo of women (vocals, and bass flute, with a drummer), with the vocalist vigorously applauded by her visiting younger students/friends. There was also a really fun group of homemade synth guitar thing, playing with another weird electric guitar-like and a modular synth/weirdo synth playing woman, and that set really shined with its textures and static and FM blips.
In total maybe 4 trios play, each about 20 minutes, and after all this my name is called, the flute/clarinet woman does’nt show, and I’m paired with the remaining synth/tech men, a pedal playing guitarist, a EWI player (Japanese, residing in Vienna), an overly aggressive drummer, and another guitar guy. The playing goes fine and we jam, but it’s a lot of people to balance. I’m playing my woodwind (Alto Venova) with and without my synth, but it seems I’m getting no sound out of one of my channels that’s plugged into a D.I. box and there’s no tyme to debug so I switch to a capella venova and a contact mic into the working channel on the synth. At this point, there’s no audience left. It’s around 11, people were tired and left, and maybe the loud mess has driven people home, but no, they’ve been gradually leaving all night after playing their own trios. Well, there’s at least one advantage to being last: we’re asked if we want to play again. I’m ambivalent, but screw it, I’ve been sitting here for 3 hours, fuck it, let’s do it again. Shoulda put my ear plugs back in for that one, damn the drummer.
Uh oh, I’m finally burned out on shows! By my count, this was at least the sixth performance I’ve gone to in as many days. I’m staying with P in Wien and he alerted me to this performance along the Danube tonight by Anna Gabriele and Kenji Herbert.
He wasn’t feeling up to going out again so I struck out on my own after being cooped inside all day braving the heat (at 100 degrees!) to finish writing a paper before leaving the house around 7:30 to catch the U3.
When I got out of the train station to walk to the venue/location, I wasn’t sure what I’d see. There was a loud nightclub blasting bland reggaeton, and a bar and floating pool on the Danube river (more on that later). I strolled canal-side, hoping I’d end at a relaxing place. Along the way some high school boy on a motorscooter riding along the river, I’m assuming that’s not “allowed”, spit on me riding past me really fast. Luckily it was just for COOL points as there barely any spit. Still, what a putz. Non yiddishkeit, that means small dick.
Anyway, I get to the “Central Garden”, which is not a garden but a bar along the canal with some deck chairs and a window to get alcohol and smokers everywhere. There was barely any audience but they all had a cigarette. Two musicians were already playing, one noodling with small percussion shaker type things with taped up contact mics and the other mic’ed up a south indian shruti box. The sound was “not much” but also not really lowercase music. I patiently waited for it to end. At this point the heat is so intense even at 8pm. We saw a variety of people quickly swim-floating past us downriver on the Danube. Funny.
Next up were the listed musicians. I dodged away from the chain-smoking woman that I’ve decided to hate and find another seat further away. Anna and Kenji then start playing. The event description describes Anna and Kenji’s sound as “twinkling ambient soundscape shreds meet propulsive ethereal vocal sore, sustained live improvisation” and I’d say that’s an exceedingly accurate representation of their sound. Anna played vocals, acoustic guitar and “universe things” (aka a rack of pedals and sound boxes) while Kenji played electric guitar with a pedal rack. It’s real tripper trance shit. I enjoy it.
More and more people wander from the walking path along the river, and I am getting more and more frustrated since every Austrian is a smoker and I hate cigarette smoke. I start having evil thoughts about everyone even while enjoying the music. But I decide I don’t have to take it, so I get up before the end of the concert and walk back to the floating pool and bar, which feels indulgent but necessary. I don’t have a towel, bathing suit, but it doesn’t matter. I leave my things on the side of the pool and get in and immediately cool down. I should have done this hours ago. I spend 30 minutes in the water or so, then get out and order “tacos” (note to self: don’t order tacos in Vienna), which turned out to be okay. I’d brought my kobo ereader and upstairs is a deck with jazz music playing, so I happily plonk down in a recliner, happy as, well, as a smoked fish in water.
This was a noise show followed by a techno party, on the outskirts of Vienna along the U6 line. My friend P took me, and we got off and walked through an industrial park, past soviet utopia socialism housing and past a stream and industrial carport and cat hospital.
The venue was a classic for underground shows: you enter what looks like a car mechanic’s lot, which based on the name and the hulking industrial equipment everywhere i think it was previously. Entering the venue past a laser tag spot, go in, greet the birthday boy throwing the party, get a drink at the bar, enter into a giant bay that can easily hold a dozen or more cars for repair. Small siderooms, actually pretty big siderooms for unknown purposes. It’s dark inside, with neon lighting and strange 3d printed things, oh i see they are hooks for the ‘garderobe’ and to hold TP in the bathroom. The venue is so big but really the giant room is just a foyer, an entry area with a couple couches and giant screen but the small back room in the left is going to be our main music venue for the night.
Each noise performance was about 20 minutes, which P said was the perfect amount of time. If you’re bored or unhappy, just wait a short while til the next performance. True. I said it reminded me of the 8+ act noise shows that used to happen almost 2 decades ago, where each group had a 5 minute slot, playing at The Smell and west philly spots like The Avant Gentleman’s Lounge, etc. I guess that’s still a thing with Bob Bellerue’s Ende Tymes festival and the like that I’m used to.
Anyway, these 4 noise performers tonight are all solo acts except for the third group, consisting of 2 people playing facing each other on a ‘noise table’, a classic from back in the Yellow Swans original era early 2000s noise. The rest of the acts were solo acts playing white noise-y ish sounds, of fuzzes and flutters and grind. To be honest, maybe not super different from the noise show stuff in Salzburg, though maybe slightly more DIY. Funny to notice a trend, and i’m trying to think back to noise shows in Berlin. Maybe those are more varied because it’s a more international scene. Here the emphasis seems to be on ‘sound design’ style, wih more spectral sounds from modular synth players, industrial white noise type sounds from people playing laptops that i assume are using Supercollider. Later in convo I can confirm, yes, that’s what they’ve used. Someone else mentioned Pure Data but i don’t think they were playing that night. So the instrument seems to be circumscribing or setting the atmosphere of the sounds. I’m thinking back to the noise shows of Brooklyn, which seems to use more midi hardware devices, i think may be more varied sounds, but i don’t know, maybe i know one scene more and what even is noise in 2026?
These were closest maybe to that fore-mentioned Yellow Swans type sound (that’s my own reference point, and likely not a reference point for these artists). I noticed that except for the very first act the performances tended to stay in a particular register of busyness and rhythmic complexity. The first performance was different. It went on a journey, the classic noise journey, beginning with simpler dips and clips sounds and tests and glitches, before becomeing more of a wall of sound and textures, building to a cerscendo. Usually after this is a denouement falling action, but i don’t think that happened, more like a quick fade instead.
The other acts as mentioned didn’t follow this form, tending to do thick walls of sound and varying the textures as they go. I did enjoy quite a bit but I think more variability in volume, amount of simultaneous sounds, varying reverb and delay and other effects, would have made it more, hmmm, more a piece to see where it went. but these minor critiques aside i did enjoy the performances.
The party had free drinks and snacks and what we call in philly/NJ “tomat-uh pie”, like a pizza consisting of sauce and no cheese. I enjoyed them and i love free cold pizza. I think the party’s host was italian? so i feel vindicated it was legit. and tasty.
after the noise sets was a break. then the techno started and i joined in the dancing, dancing temporarily with a new friend hovering nearby, enjoying sound and space together. a bit of the 4 to the floor bump bump bump at first was boring me but there was some variability to keep me interested. and it helps the sound system was super duper solid. great subs, good lighting effects, perfect amount of smoke machine atmospherics. this was definitely mostly used as an underground club so since we’re in europe and not in a basement in baltimore, much better setup for this scene. and i appreciated there wasn’t a totally packed dance floor, plenty of space to stretch out and move it.
around 2:30am i slink out. i could keep going but why not try to get to sleep closer to my real sleep schedule rather than ‘mess up’ my sunday. anyway, i fade into the night, avoiding following someone walking the same direction because i didn’t want to scare her. i look quickly at the phone and see there’s a train in 4 minutes and the next in 17 minutes. i’m a type ‘A’ busybody and since the walk to the train is 8 minutes, despite it being 2:30am, i decide to run for it. i love a lil exercise and i hate waiting. i make it in 2 minutes and wait for the train to come in, then get a whole train car to myself, which i ride 30 minutes home, popping out into the boiling hot night air.
I took an afternoon train from Salzburg to Wien. It was a modern and fast train, maybe 2 1/2 hours. Reader, I am loathe to admit that rather than work on some writing that is due (which I’m still procrastinating right now by writing this instead), I first read the news (all bad) and then played the addictive card game Balatro on my ipad. Balatro is loosely based on Poker, or really the Chinese card game Big Two. You are trying to assemble good poker hands to beat a particular high score that keeps rising each round. The game adds in the popular game style of the past few years of allowing you to assemble a deck of cards by “buying” special cards like Jokers, modifying cards in your deck, or even changing how good a certain hand of cards is. For example, in the game that I played and won over about an hour and a half I eventually made a pair the best card hand, beating even a straight flush. Then I just kept assembling pairs and playing them, until victory. I’m digressing too much.
In Vienna I stop at the Ikea hoping to buy a fan to deal with the heat wave that is getting worse each day, but they don’t sell them there. Was? Warum nicht? I don’t understand Europe. How come there aren’t people selling fans on every street corner? Anyway, I give up and meet my friend at his place, reunite, and then we soon head off to a party at PART, the art residency. It’s in a huge city park not far from the stadium/stadion, and takes us about 45 minutes on the subway, which he says is basically considered ‘too far’ in Vienna. We arrive and have some trouble finding the entrance. The building is in a classical style with tall Corinthian columns. P is worried we’ll be late since the music is supposed to start at 6pm and we’re getting there at 6:30pm. He wants to at least catch the end of the set.
When we arrive at the party there’s some strange performance art happening (artist: Stina Fors), who is sitting at a table and making strange noises and wearing a second false tongue (and then adds in more false tongues to her mouth, manipulating them, spitting them out). The table has a long tablecloth that covers her. At one point, she stands up, way up, and we realize she’s been sitting and concealing stilts the whole time. These are super professional industrial stilts. She now towers above us, even in this giant room, and she strides over to the curtain, slowly walking and pulling it open, then walking back the way she came. She strides all around the room in these massive stilts, then returns to the table she had sat at earlier, and pulls out a whoopee cushion, which she now reclines on, making a series of farting sounds. This goes on about 15 minutes, and is actually kind of funny. I enjoy it, and then somewhow the piece ends. We all clap and I see another friend here from several years ago, Julian.
We go outside to get some air and there is a food truck set up but they won’t serve any food they tell me, until after the speeches. I am not used to all these speeches at art openings that they do and find them annoying, but I understand they are largely about crediting the funder and then letting the funding department speak some bullshit for awhile as a display of power. Not letting us eat until after the speeches is, I declare, “fascist” but P looks at me in horror and says “shhhhhhhhh” and he whispers the director is right near me. I think she heard me but it’s okay. The speeches begin but I see a doorway to an open studio showing some films so I skip the obligatory speeches that everyone else seems to tolerate and I watch about 20 minutes of film. Thankfully the speeches end at this point and we all hang out. P apologizes that the party is so small and not what he expected. He thought there’d be experimental music for example, not performance art, but there is free drinks, free food from the food truck starts (vegan fake meat tacos and vegan fake meat kebab). Soon more and more people start to come. The DJ plays rather basic eurodance music and then reggaeton, neither of which we are huge fans of, but other people are into it and start dancing.
The party gets bigger and bigger and the night gets later and later. P is a half dozen or more drinks in. I’ve been meeting and talking with people all night. We head out to another party that is actually only like 100 meters away, in a building nearby, maybe even the other side of the huge building, to a different studio complex. Here there is a spread of food like cheeses and fruits and lots and lots of beers and alcohol for mixed drinks, and people are smoking and drinking like crazy. I’m not used to all these cigarettes but everyone in Austria seems to smoke. I’m shocked. I keep coughing. I meet lots of people, there are a variety of attractive people. Someone introduced to me seems to want to talk to me all night but I need a break.
At this party there is a great DJ spinning mostly drum and bass and south african GQOM (my absolute fave from the past year or two). Afterwards she tells me her name is DJ Mtasa. I love to dance so I really dance as I can despite the heatwave. At times there’s only me and a couple people on the dancefloor but because we keep going more and more people join us and there are soon a dozen or maybe more people joining us and we’re really having fun. While others cycle in and out I’m grateful for having a great DJ set, rare for me since I have left Berlin, so I’m super into it and keep going, and enjoy the exercise I’m getting. I’m tired but dancing is special. Around 2 or 2:30am she wraps her set, we talk a bit more, enjoying my conversation with Lenia, the very tall dancer (intimidating!) who I had just seen on the dance floor for an hour but hadn’t chatted then. We talk about museums, art and other things, and are joined by an Armenian woman whose name escapes me. I’m enjoying our conversation but it’s late. P promises me we can leave ‘after he finishes his beer’, and I tell him I promise not to spill it out, and we say our goodbyes and head home where I fall asleep on the couch at maybe 3:30am or so.
To be clear I am writing this review while sitting in the breakfast/dining/bar room at the hostel I’m staying in and 2 women just walked in and are playing an aggeressive tabletop soccer game, whatever you call it, those popular tables in Europe with spinning soccer players on rotisserie sticks that bat balls back and forth. So imagine that happening while I’m sipping my (delicious) free coffee while reading this review.
I saw a sandwich board sign on the street on the way to the hostel when I arrived in Salzburg wednesday evening. It had a compelling abstract poster and I recognized the word Oper and I like opera so why not? I took a photo and filed away the performance.
I had a meeting online with a collaborator in the early evening, and it stretched a bit longer as we were reviewing our work together, and I saw the hour of the opera approach closer and closer. Now I know how strict german-speakers are with the listed time of their events (see previous writing about this below, or not), so I had to cut off the meeting abruptly and even then I didn’t leave enough time. Let me tell you. The opera was listed as starting at 7pm. I arrived at 7:03pm and LOL I SHOULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS, it had started already and I was late!
Thankfully, they didn’t even ask for admission and said it was okay and walked me into the entirely dark venue at the university, an auditorium with a few hundred seated people, mostly other students. I got used to the dark slowly, as I saw the opera was already in full force. As another late presumably Austrian person entered and took the seat I had been planning to sit in, I saw only one other empty seat and took that quickly, as two MORE late people (I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE!) entered.
Germans, Austrians that read me: In the US when an event is listed as 7pm that means you start arriving at that time and there is 20 minutes or so (or longer) til the event starts. I know I’m not in America. I really should get used to the aggressively on-time time listings here in this part of the world. I’m trying!
Pause for a moment here. There are now 3 pretty ladies aggressively playing tabletop football and cheering when they score. It’s just after 9am as I write this. Now back to the opera.
I’m at the Mozarteum University to see Agamemnon, a couple minutes walk from Mozart’s birthhaus and residence, which I visited earlier in the afternoon and enjoyed. If you’re an opera fan or at least opera-aware in the past twenty years most or almost all opera productions have projected or seat-level text captioning, since operas are usually in Italian, maybe German or French. Even in English since the sung style is so stylized, such as the Moby Dick opera I saw earlier this year, they have captions. In established opera houses there are usually choice of language for the captions, with 5 or so language options. Well, this was a new libretto of Agamemnon, written by a grad student at the school, and it was sung in latin! Yes, latin! With the projected captions only in German. So, to put it mildly, I was lost!
I tried to follow along for the first twenty minutes, but with only 2 months of German lessons, and I’m not a particularly good language student, I sort of understood individual words (Father! Water! Bridge! Day!) and then assumed I understood certain words that appear to be close to English words or that I imagine I understand (TRUTH? DREAM? BORN?). Also, I’m not familiar with the story of Agamemnon very much. The stage set looked like a bridge, a ship with many akilter masts, maybe this is the bridge over the river Styx. Is that this story? (Looked it up: no, I don’t think so.)
In any case, my brain gets full and I can’t follow the story so I decide just to sit and enjoy myself abstractly. Which I mostly do, because the music is incredible. The composer is a student, Vid Ožbolt, and I strongly liked the music, which featured not just a traditional orchestra with the full section of strings and woodwinds and the like, but makes extensive use of percussion such as Ocean Drum, whistles, scratchings on violin I think, and many other atmospheric noises.
The opera has no breaks between scenes or acts, and I’m worried I’ll be trapped here for hours and hours. I kept waiting for an intermission to happen, but it never came. In total the work was an hour and forty minutes long. As this was a student show the applause went on for at least 10 minutes and I really did enjoy myself but that’s enough curtain calls for me so I ducked out of there before they finished clapping!
The tabletop football match has ended, the women have walked off, and I’m left sitting in the breakfast room with an empty cup of coffee and three guys that keep calling each other bro and bud.
“Seneca, Roman philosopher and poet under Emperor Nero, creates with Agamemnon the mirror of an unleashed, violently dominated world and fans out the motives for this bloody act in psychologically differentiated dialogues.”
Cheers!
Yo! So THIS is what the Museum of Jurassic Technology is refererencing, at least partly. I loved it. You’re walking through the apartment where Mozart was born, prodigal child of a workaholic dad, and the exhibits are 18th century paintings of Mozart and environs with little typed texts underneath it that say things like “Mozart played for the court of blah dee blah in….” and then handwritten translated letters from his pop to his wife staying at home.
This was totally worth it. I love Mozart! LOL. It was super cool to walk through, read the exhibit text, skip things I didn’t care about. The exhibit at the end of hand painted scenes from his operas was cool. There was very little technology here. The wall text was painted directly on the wall. This was a blast from the past. Touche.
There were some instruments like a childhood violin-like (wee-sized), and some clavichord he wrote The Magic Flute on. scroll down for my review of that! i hated the staging of it that I saw earlier this year, but he wrote 23 or so staged works. I liked The marriage of figaro a ton, and can’t rememember Don Giovanni that well.
Visiting his childhood house took me an hour or so, maybe a bit less. The one missing thing: they should have some recordings of Mozart playing! But no technology, that’s fine. Seriously, i can’t complain. This was worth a visit.
There are many concerts I seek out, for their artist, for the excitement of seeing and hearing a band I’ve been listening to for many years. This wasn’t one of those. This was purely a concert of happenstance, where I’m walking around DomQuarter Salzburg after leaving the Funicular after visiting the incredible Festung Hohensalzburg castle complex. I didn’t really know much about the area and was enjoying the old gorgeous hundreds of years old streets and buildings, even though it was oriented around tourists mostly.
I ducked into side alleys and courtyards, and that’s when I see a group of people marching single file with sheet music and wearing black robes. Clearly they are performers. Where are they marching? Coincidentally they walk the same way as me, then I realize they are marching into the giant cathedral ahead of me, and sure, why not poke my head in too? I see they are listed as performing inside the cathedral, in only 30 minutes from now, the Vocal Arts of Fairfax, which a sign outside lists as performing ‘sacred music.’ The group is speaking English. They are from Fairfax Virginia! Oh this is funny, almost a reverse of the concert situation from a couple weeks ago when my new German friend was visiting the US with his vocal group to sing Carmina Burana at Carnegie Hall, probably with the group paying their way for the privilege. Here, this American vocal group is singing as I find later mostly American sacred and southern music inside this INCREDIBLE and HUGE, REALLY HUGE old gorgeous cathedral.
I pay 5 euros to get in. Someone tried to sneak in right before me but a ticket taker stops her and argues with her as I walk in. She tries to talk her way in but they won’t allow this.
As I walk through the arches, admire the huge organ mounted all around, I sit near the front as the group warms up with the typical singer vocal exercises. Thank god they don’t do the “Mommy makes me mash my M and M’s” warmup that drives me up the wall as it rises higher and higher in key. In fact, they do lowkey warmups and quickly jump through the songs they are about to perform. Soon, they start their singing. I’m sitting near the front but it turns out a couple hundred folks have popped in for this impromptu conzert.
They start with what I believe is a native american song of vocables (non-words, similar to jewish nigun singing in that sense). I enjoy it. This cathedral has such an incredible natural reverb. Like up to 5 or 6 seconds before it fully naturally fades, and such a good fall-off of the reverb.
More songs. They sing Wade in the Water, which is a southern black baptist spiritual, though this group is overwhelming white. A few more pieces are sung, each quite quick, and I do enjoy them. There is a solo by a man playing the electric keyboard for a couple minutes. This is maddening to me as we are sitting in such an opulent cathedral with a massive organ in four parts surrounding us and we are listening instead to an adequate player tapping out a melody on a dinky yamaha keyboard sitting catty-corner with its own internal speaker amplifying the sound. A disappointment that he isn’t playing the organ, that’s an understatement. Thankfully, he stops with the keyboard in a couple minutes, no point to it really, and back to the acapella singing. I do not remember the songs, and though I’m enjoying it enough, they all start to blend together, I feel “okay” with what I’ve heard so far and I’m ready for the next part of my day. Feeling the call of the legs to keep moving to explore the city, I get up and head out. As I walk from antechamber to antechamber to get to the exit, I love hearing the way the sound of the ensemble sounds subtly different in these various soundspaces. I walk past the wooden boxes where a parishioner is supposed to say confession to the priest. I pop out into the hot sunshine, carried by the soaring voices.
I had only arrived by Flixbus earlier in the evening from Cesky Krumlov in southern Czechia, and this is my first time in Salzburg so I wasn’t really 100% sure what to expect except for what I saw on the brief Wikivoyage page for the city. Evidently it’s the fourth-largest in Austria, but, it seems like a teeny tiny little place. I posted on Mastodon asking what to do here and one person responded to head to a lake out of town. we’re in a european heat wave even though it’s not too warm for new york weather, but they don’t even really have fans here! the temperature is rising fastest in europe due to climate change. oof.
i found an out of date arts and culture calendar poster on the wall of the hostel and went to its website to see the current listings. for tonight i saw this Performing Sound #51: Intensify! title and of course had to check out what that was. It described a producer/sound artist visiting from Berlin and some electronic performances - at least when I auto-translated the page, so I thought I’d check it out.
It was starting in 35 minutes and there was a 20 minute tram trip to get there, and I was starving since I hadn’t eaten in 8 hours. I walked past a restaurant on the way to the tram. They had a trendy ‘bowls’ type restaurant that seemed nicer than the American version and better options for meat and veggies than the generic stuff at most central european restaurants i’ve seen so far, so despite the alienating order-from-the-screens, I chose “english” and ordered a “crazy caeser” salad with chicken, got exactly what i want, paid, didn’t understand when they asked me if i wanted a bag (“nein, danke”), and headed to the gig.
on the way, our tram goes past what i recognize as mozart’s haus, and i start laughing that i’m going past mozart’s house on the way to a noise show.
i get to my stop and walk over, it appears next to or maybe connected to a university with big beautiful modern and classic buildings. and the salzburg castle whatever it’s called towers up the mountain above us. my third castle on a mountain town in a week! prague > cesky krumlov > salzburg.
i settle into sitting in this big beautiful black box theater in a gorgeous modern building for contemporary arts. i was thinking about how we don’t really have much like this in the US since we don’t fund the arts this way. started thinking about how jazz and experimental musicians that strike it big tour venues like this in europe but maybe do a handful of or not many dates in the US since it makes no economic sense in the US whereas here they can get paid, play a clean beautiful modern venue and have an audience.
the audience seemed to be local grad students mostly, maybe undergrad too, maybe others, experimental music? art? something else? i suppose i should have struck up a conversation but i didn’t. i sat outside, avoided the smoke, ate my delicious salad, it hit the spot. i went into the room a bit early while everyone else milled outside smokin’ and drinkin’. in the background music before it started there’s some afx, some german language music i didn’t know but enjoyed (Brandenburger Wolf - Augh, according to Shazam), and a new track (the best one) from the recent Boards of Canada release.
the audience starts to filter in abruptly. the opener Elisa Visca begins with a blast of merzbow-ian industrial noise - though maybe merzbow isn’t the right reference as it was rhythmic blasts and angular grinds. white lines and patterns repeated or scattered in the projection, i wasn’t sure but it seemed like her CV or audio was driving its motion. the set was quite long, and i enjoyed it, progressing from industrial rhythmic noise, to a section where she played flute, combined with severe looping reverby flute, then a combo of the two, with some ‘no input mixing board’ thrown in too. it was captivating, and live. there were some minor ‘mistakes’ where her sound faded out abruptly or it went from loud industrial sounds to almost nothing, sound balancing issue, but these wer ebrief and didn’t mess up the overall performance. i would say i was not bored, and the variety she got pulled me in. i have been thinking a lot lately of my own recent acquiring of a woodwind instrument and looking for models of how to integrate it with improv with modular synth and not sure what references beyond this great recording by Patrick Shiroishi with sax and modular by Perfect Circuit. So this was a nice approach to watch as well.
During the break I have a wine schorle. i got a weiss wine schorle, despite being a little bit sick with a sore throat or allergies.
The next up was Barzo1, and for this one it started in a surprising way as while loud music pre-performance was playing he wheeled in a giant speaker on a cart and blasts noise from it, like he’s pulling a lawn mower through the venue. people start cheering and he ends at the noise table in the front, and then starts playing his set from there. it too is experimental noise but not industrial, more like, hmm, like whitehouse? but dance-y able of sorts. i forget what this genre is called, like dark synthwave but that’s not the right name. i just looked up perturbator on wikipedia to see how it’s listed but it says “creepy industrial/ambient” and that’s not a great descirption. it’s danceable repetitive beats on a noise background. if i felt like pulling up ishkur’s guide to electronic music i could exactly pinpoint it but i don’t want to annoy the normies in the hostel bar/dining room here during their breakfast. last thing i want to say about this act: there were vocals! shouted. hard to understand, not only beacuse they were in german which i don’t really understand. the audience was whipped up and there was almost a mosh pit of sorts, maybe more like jumping agressively, a big transition from not moving and sitting around earlier.
i had a beer! during the break. notable for me since i almost never drink beer, but it’s my second or maybe third this month since we were in the budvar region before. so all this is to say, i start to get tipsy, drunk really. very uncommon for me.
the night is getting later but the venue is packed and people are really going for this show, and i’m super enjoying it, especially since my first impression of salzburg earlier was that it was a sleepy little town dedicated to tourism of mozart and ‘the sound of music’. the third act is murmler. he starts quickly with industrial techno and the audience is on their feet around him. the sound is good. he’s playing like a ‘headliner’, though i dislike that a young woman opened the show and then 2 men in succession played afterwards. i dislike the hierarchy of headliners. anyway… this is good. it’s danceable but the setup isn’t a ‘dance’ setup so people are mostly standing not dancing. but everyone is into it. i am too, but i want to go to bed! lol. i’m tired since we’re in a heatwave and i got woken up at 4am last night. i watch about 20 minutes then decide to catch the last tram home for the night. it would have been okay if i missed it, as it’s only a 30 minute walk back, but i decided i ‘got it’ and was okay to leave. overall, had a great time at what i jokingly called Mozart’s Noise Show 3, and i’m psyched on salzburg now!
These are three exhibits at this contemporary art museum in Prague. Sadly, I didn’t really love any of these. Hit By News was fine - an exhibit of artists responding to the news, but literally. Like using newspapers and advertisements in their art. It was ‘fine.’ ‘fine art’. But nothing thrilling. There were Warhols and Krugers and a number of fine artists but nothing really hit. Unfortunately, for the solo exhibits of Radka Bodzewicz (yawn!) and Jiří Petrbok (high school boy artwork), they were quite bad. Petrbok had an art catalog release at the museum, which had a series of middle aged white men presenting almost in a panel. Not a great look.
The museum gift shop was fine. The Vietnamese restaurant across the street was quite good.
friday the 19th i take a 8 hour train from budapest to praha. in the evening i get into hlavni nadrazi, maybe around 6 or so. the train was about an hour late. but it’s light out til late. outside in fact right now as i type this up there is rolling hills with wooden roofs and endless forest. earlier in hungary everything looked crumbly, like old soviet times. back to prague: i got in, didn’t really remember the station or area, walked around a bit, then jumped on a tram to the hotel / hostel we were staying in. i bought a 3 day transportation pass 72 hour i think. i arrived ok at the hostel, checked the room out. the place was hilarious. in hradcanska, which i had little experience of 20 years ago when i studied abroad in prague anyway, as i think i was only in the neighborhood a couple times to check out the castle and never again, so the area was ‘new’ to me. the hostel was austere in many ways, minimal, i thought it strange. i couldn’t find a power outlet in the room except for by the sink. and a shower in the room, but no toilet. shared bathroom was next door in the hallway. the room was so bare but the hallways had old 1950s furniture (is that the right year?), books, woodworking tools, old posters, and such.
i took off on foot, walking to the castle area, past a lake, past gorgeous vantage points looking down on thecity. i walked past an outdoor techno festival with DJs, down stairs, over a bridge into the old city, through the old city, and eventually to the bus station past the old city, where i meet up with N for a reunion.
saturday i get up very late. we meet up together with bob/flavigula. he was drinking a pivo and N and i get cappuccinos. we hung out and talked to bob for a while. he does programming remotely, plays experimental music. was nice to connect. he is also a friend of janek in berlin. afterwards N and i walked over nearby to the trade fair palace, the art museum.
Let me start by saying this (free!) Matter of Art Bienniel is one of my absolute favorite exhibits and certainly best art biennials I may have seen in years and years, maybe ever. I LOVED it. LOVED it. so incredible. From the staging to selection of artists, to choice of works. I am completely in its thrall.
I learned about it from an indonesian artist’s post on Mastodon. I thought maybe she was a curator of it. But she didn’t respond to my post afterwards and I didn’t see her on site, so I’m not certain. I’ve just looked up the curators, expecting to see more mention of the Lumbung team from Documenta 15 but I don’t see their name or any indonesian names on the biennale team page so I’m a bit confused. Well, Documenta’s organizers and participants spread purposely rhizomatically, very anti the western style single authorship model. Maybe these people were involved in the previous Documenta, probably, but i’m not sure.
i’m speculating however and i have internet now so give me a few minutes. one minute.
i’m back. Wait, here’s the official language:
The fourth edition of the Biennale Matter of Art presents art as a necessity that our society cannot do without. The three-month exhibition and accompanying program, subtitled Necessary Wishes, will take place from June 12 to September 13, 2026, at the National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace, GAMPA – City Gallery Pardubice, and the Tusculum Prague art center. The biennale will feature more than thirty artists and collectives from Czechia, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Palestine, Slovakia, and other countries, including six new projects commissioned by the biennale and created by artists Noor Abed, David Apakidze, Yana Bachynska (a.k.a. Jan Bačynsjkyj), Adrián Kriška, Aliza Orlan, and Tadamun Kolektiv. The project is cocurated by Jaroslava Tomanová, Jakub Gawkowski, and František Fekete. Admission to the exhibition and accompanying events is free of charge. The biennale is organized by tranzit.cz in cooperation with the National Gallery Prague and GAMPA – City Gallery Pardubice. The main partner of tranzit.cz is ERSTE Foundation.
ok great. anyway the exhibit was diverse and exciting. the installations were large but “DIY” with textiles, sewn things, almost like a ton of mini pavilions, made out of tents, metal structures used to build temporary stages and buildings for festivals and the like, the same material used on the roof to build ‘furniture’ at ZK/U maybe it’s a central europe thing. yeah. there was a room of textile weavings for prisoners of belarus, including antifascists. a series of paintings by a passed-away anarchist fighter in ukraine, who drew his comrades, in the fight against russia. sewn scenes stretched on leather, suspended. video art by people from lebanon, palestine, iran, elsewhere. there was a nod to a radio station, like the one i made called black something radio i installed as a pop up at LB back in 2012 or so. the exhibit was arresting. i loved it. if i had been by myself maybe i would have stayed longer. i took dozens of photos.
i don’t think i can write well about this exhibit since i was so overwhelmed. visit the interactive matter of art website for more info, or the accompanying online radio station sheila radio.
Ok, so thanks to the artists and curator. folks, incredible exhibit! Seriously! If you’re in Praha, GO GO GO!
This extremely modern architectural marvel is an exquisite museum of central european and primarily magyar folk history, along with additional collection items, and special exhibits. It was well-curated, offering a number of different shows and ways to interact with work there.
I won’t go into the details of all of the shows much. Uncropped featured an exhibit of collected found photographic positives, plates and the like from rural photographers from the 1880s to early 1920s. I was particularly interested in the one photo of a jewish boy taken in 1921 by an unknown photographer. Manga was an exhibit, sponsored by a japanese org or gov’t, of original Manga paintings / drawings by Hokusai aand current manga and how they relate. I enjoyed Hokusai’s drawings but not the modern manga very much in this small temporary exhibition. The Rituals of Beauty exhibit was documentation from over 50 years of a hungarian ethnographer’s photography and reporting on a south american tribe and how they have changed, preserved their culture, respond to societal challenges. I enjoyed thisone quite a bit, surprising myself. Finally, the permanent collection is well-done, well documented, with lots of wall text and little details. Some favorites included a history of field recording in Hungary, including the recorders, as well as video documentation of a cimbalom/hammered dulcimer player and the actual cimbalom, homemade instruments like clarinets and hurdy gurdy, with recorded music playing. I also really enjoyed the exhibits of traditional clothing, folk homeware and plates and the like. I spent a couple hours here and would recommend it to anyone visiting Budapest.
This came together in a funny way. When I was camping last week with my German friend visiting me we saw this guy sitting at a picnic table on the way to our campsite. He smiled and my quiet friend later said he looked German too so when I walked past later I asked if he sprechen deutsch. he did sprechen. He was very nice. In town with his choral group visiting from Munich to sing Carmina Burana. We hung out a bit and talked about life, marriage, travel, hiking, bears, and classical music. It turns out that all of the classical concert tickets for the season become available at a particular day and time that corresponded to his camping trip, so the next day we saw him desperately trying to sign up for tickets for the season in Munich, using his phone. He made it.
Back in NYC a week went by or so. I have never been to Carnegie Hall before for a concert, not even really paid much attention beyond Miles davis album live at carnegie hall, and come to think of it, a bunch more concerts recorded there. I really should visit. Well this was the perfect opportunity.
The opener was the munich harmonists. they explained that they traced their lineage to a group from the 20s and 30s that was shut down by the nazis. their music was cabaret funny, with silly voices and gestures and the like, but this is a tough sell to buttoned down americans who either need it much funnier, like american humor, or 100 years more recent humor. no one laughed at all. i felt bad for the harmonists. i was tight up in the nosebleeds and since i found the harmonists boring i was looking around at the gorgeous maintained hall, studying where i could slip in later (more on that in a bit…)
the next act was a hippy children’s choir from california. they wore like scarf clothing and played a hippy off beat drum and sang kumbaya music. it was ghastly. after their first song i skedaddled out and went in pursuit of a salad with chicken and a slice of pizza.
i came back during intermission and used my power of observation from earlier i had counted empty seats / rows and knew where to sit in the lower balcony, where a seat had been empty. i had a much much better time as i was no longer cramped in, with minor distraction at times by the kids sitting around me clicking and twitching in their boredom. still, the youngest one mostly did ok and he didn’t bother me, it was the older kids that annoyed me, especially when they were surfing on their phones.
let’s talk carmina burana. i haven’t heard it live before. i’m familiar with the main theme of course. i read up in the times, on wikipedia and in alex ross’s writing. i felt like i had a good sense of the music. i’d say i loved the famous opening and climax, but found the huge variety of rapid time changes left the music hard to hang onto at times. it does get you to move and groove sometimes, as alex ross (i think) mentioned. you feel it bodily, even or especially the kids around me did. but i didn’t necessarily find the lines of the piece memorable. however the huge vocal choir was super rad. my friend was in the front row of the huge ensemble singing.
i also really enjoyed the (mostly) young and very diverse musicians. i’ve not seen that many Black string players play on stage since seeing an explicitly Black led and organized orchestra years prior in Philadelphia. The playing was strong. I wish they had other pieces to play as well. But at 57 minutes or so, i was in good hands, mostly not bored, and found enough to listen to and look at and that was new to me.
after the show i looked for my camping friend and found him eventually in the museum area of carnegie hall. it was a private after party for the munich singers but i was able to sneak in too for a while and hang out. it may be the last time i see this new friend, although i guess i could always visit him in munich (what’s there?). it was a good carnegie hall experience, and i’m glad i stole a better seat to get a comfortable perch for the meat of the perfomance.
This is an annual Ted Talk esque event organized by the arts incubator New Inc, which i am an alum of. It consists of talks on a stage to an audience where they give a pitch, show some art projects, then ask for support like exhibition opportunities and money. a bit crass, but that’s america for ya.
I saw the Art and Code and Extended Reality series of talks. I liked sitting with my friend, and liked seeing a student alum of mine present, especially since she presented a sound art quilt she made. i was proud of her participating with others much older than her.
I wasn’t/amn’t super into the capitalistic endeavor part, which is why i’m not a perfect fit for this community or presentation style. there was an exhibit held as part of the demo days, and some of the work was interesting new media work, though the new museum is a much more constrained environment than the previous cyberpunk office building the past 2 years of events were held in, which i’ll miss.
The funniest moment was when a presenter talked about his project to present a new never before seen star to everyone. You get a printout about a star that’s been scanned in the night sky but probably never studied or seen by anyone before other than as a distant blip. Well, it’s still a distant blip but now with a name and some description (I didn’t read). The reveal was pretty funny where the presenter pulled an Oprah and told us to grab a sealed envelope under our seats and to break the seal to reveal our own never previously seen star. It was a great moment but why stars, why this one star, what’s the importance to this crowd or our presenter? I didn’t/don’t know. I can come up with my own narrative or poetic experience, but this felt more like a spectacle. Some spectacles are good, but where’s this one going?
Back to the art: there was an interesting piece of these glass sound installations mounted up on metal polls at roughly head height. They made vocal sounds that bounced back and forth in a hocketing pattern. I like hocketing music. This one was fine, but maybe in contrast there is a strong sound art installation exploring similar approach but more interesting visual design and concept up in the Greater New York show currently at PS1.
I snagged some relatively last minute tickets to this show, only picking them up a couple days ago, and they were the ‘cheap’ tickets (if anything in the US can be considered cheap these days), at $30 a ticket for the ‘conductor’s circle’ section. That definitely did feel like a steal since we were literally sitting right above the orchestra with great view and sound. It’s just that it’s considered ‘behind’ the orchestra. But that didn’t matter to us, as we could see everything, and were so close. In fact some moments were maybe even a bit too loud.
I went with my parents. We made a day of it. This was after visiting Calder Gardens and then having a bbq dinner at Sweet Lucy’s where we ate brisket, smoked turkey, ribs, mac and chee’, collard greens, cole slaw. Rolling outta there we headed to the concert hall, a huge megamillions center built about a decade ago, built when money was flush. It’s not the most attractive concert venue, but it is big and majestic.
We arrived early enough for the pre-concert talk so we slipped in and listened but the bbq dinner must have sugared me up because i fell asleep in a food coma, probably from a blood sugar spike and fall. I woke up near the end but didn’t learn much about the music we were going to hear. No matter, the brochure handed out had enough info. At least about the Bruckner. The new music performance by Tyshawn Sorey defied definition. The description basically read - it sounds improvised but it’s not (writer’s note: it did NOT sound improvised). It isn’t a narrative. Just listen without preconceived thoughts - Ok! That doesn’t say much. When conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin came out to the floor he gabbed on the mic and said to turn our cell phones off and don’t cough because it interrupted the piece yesterday and we are hopefully a better audience. Wow, that was a bit of a warning. And sure enough, the piece was slow, boring, atonal, plodding, and quiet. You could hear everyone coughing and sneezing throughout its 25 minute run. It was so slow and plodding that i kept wishing, how much time is left? After 25 minutes of quiet meandering random notes in a packed auditorium of old people that can’t help but constantly clear their throats, we were released to an intermission. The people all around said they hated the piece. My parents disliked the piece. I disliked the piece. Ok then.
Intermission was short. We walked on the balcony and admired the soaring heights to the ceiling. We were barely out of our seats 5 minutes when the chimes signalled to return to the auditorium and we dutifully obeyed. The next work, Bruckner’s 3rd symphony, noted it would last 65 minutes.
Ok, we sat down. I’m not a huge Bruckner fan like I enjoy Mozart, or Beethoven, Vaughn Williams, Mussorgsky, Shostakovich, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Reich, etc but I’m down to see/hear it performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Just in contrast to the previous pitiful piece as soon as this one started I could feel the audience breathe a sigh of relief. This was the ‘dark academia’ they came to see/hear. Nezet-Seguin is a world class conductor, extremely responsive - his players are completely tuned in, and you can tell the rehearsals are meaningful. It made me think back to my high school and college orchestra/ensemble days. The Bruckner work had tributes to Beethoven and Wagner - literal snippets and themes excised from their work and placed in the piece. I would not say I loved the work, but I didn’t hate it. And The Philadelphia Orchestra is a world class orchestra. Their playing quality is so high. I really enjoyed sitting there, so close, and watching and listening to every note, listening for different instruments and sections in the polyphony.
One thing that quickly came to mind was the whipsaw back and forth between fast and slow sections. Was I imagining it? No, afterwards my dad said the same thing, unprompted. Did I see two bad pieces that I didn’t love but by one of the best conductors and ensembles in the world? That’s how I’d characterize it. I can’t say I love the combo of snoozy ‘classic’ symphony with snoozy modern commission. But so it goes.
The work was listed as taking about 65 minutes but I timed it and it took 72 minutes. How? Did it drag? Were the pauses between movements extra long? Was an extra coda taken? This was the first version of the piece. Had they listed the revised version’s timing accidentally? Bingo. On YouTube this version this exact version of the work takes an hour and 12 minutes as well.
Overall, Bruckner is no Mozart, no Beethoven, no Shostakovich, no Tchaikovsky, certainly no Wagner. But he’s in the ballpark, and tonight, that worked enough for me. Despite not loving the pieces, I liked my time listening to the orchestra, having great seats, and listening to an incredible ensemble at the top of their game. Just need some better music to play.
This is a new museum, and a bit of an experiment. A museum dedicated to the sculptor Alexander Calder, inventor of the ‘mobile’ and ‘stabile’ (look it up if you don’t know!).
I’ve always been a fan of Calder’s work, and he’s connected to the city of Philly, if only through family. His father and grandfather were artists and sculptors in the city of brotherly love.
This museum was designed by Herzog and de Meuron, and was a gorgeous sunken building enveloped in a garden, designed by landscape designer Piet Oudolf, who designed the celebrated High Line in NYC, which I do enjoy.
For starters, this isn’t called the Calder Museum but the Calder Gardens, changing the expectations of the visitor. Secondly, there are no exhibits, just slowly changed out artworks placed on site, taking a cue from how Robert Blackson’s Temple Contemporary, and who knows, maybe Rob learned that technique somewhere else, but that’s where I first came across it. Rather than the typical multi-month exhibit up-exhibit down-exhibit up musical chairs, pieces and public events roll in, responding to the whimsy of the curator/director.
So much of the power of Calder’s public sculpture are these grand or more modest steel sculptures in public plazas and in nature. The gardens and the sunken museum allow the artworks to be situated in a gorgeous building and beautiful garden areas, with simple but beautiful forms and flowers surrounding. No wall text or didactic experience to distract. Just you and the art and a couple visitors. The program sounds interesting, but is sparse. Some occasional expensive ‘walks’ for $30 or meditation thing for $45 and a silent night at the museum once a month. Fine.
The museum, okay I’ll take the cue - the garden - takes as much time as you want I guess but for us was about a 45 minute experience, and that’s for 3 Calder FANS. I can imagine you would blast through, and be disappointed at throwing down $18 a person. I have to say I enjoyed it, a mini mini experience like a lil Storm King sculpture park but in the middle of a big city, and at a more kunsthalle-sized exhibition space, albeit in a $100 million dollar buildings/grounds. It is worth a visit I’d say, but it’s probably a every-few-years-when-I’m-in-Philly kind of thing, maybe.
I visited the Greater New York triennial at MOMA PS1 with my friend Alex and we loved it. There was a LOT of incredible work. Kudos to the curators. Of course, I’ve always loved this museum, and its curation. And it just feels good as an old school. Never change PS1! In contrast, the Whitney Biennial, also currently up in the same city, was just “fine” and was probably in its best iteration in the past 25 years and yet not nearly as interesting as this show at PS1.
I can’t even summarize what I saw at PS1 there was so much excellent work, and typical, the website fails to show any of the artwork really, much less exhibit shots or individual photos of all the works and their title and artist.
From my head I’m trying to mention some standouts. Here goes nothing. Tiffany Sia’s videos on tiny monitors, hanging in the window, looked great on a rainy day. Kenneth Tam’s performance/ video art work was compelling, but I wish had seating. I walked in during a moment that didn’t fully absorb me - I’d need to see it again at another moment maybe. Not as strong for example as his work I saw 10 years ago at the Hammer Museum for their version of a biennial that I returned to see 3 times, but nonetheless, that’s a high bar to reach, and I did find this experimental performance and installation about immigration taxi driver brothers compelling.
But for example I was able to sit for 20 minutes in another (somewhat hidden) room and absorbed and loved the installation environment by Mekko Harjo. The wall text stated the space was a nod (so it said) to the great Brooklyn club Bossa Nova Civic Club (though it looked nothing like it, so whatev) - meets indigineous traditional fairy tale. If I understand the wall text description correctly the artist is reckoning with the place for the indigineous experience in cities, where over 80% of native people now live. The story was exciting, strange, funny. The sound, which seemed to be of rain and nature field recording soundscapes, played loudly through the SUNN PA system, was in contrast to the appearance of the club-like atmosphere.
There was an EXCEPTIONAL sound art work by the artist Coco Klockner. And fun experimental weavings bound to objects, almost like dyptichs. I failed to write down the artist’s name for that. An installation with video (using oldschool VHS/video mixers) and installation, that noted it was based on techniques from noise shows and the DIY scene, by Tom Thayer, was also strong and I sat watching it many minutes.
Also, as I find typical, I did a search for reviews of the exhibition afterwards, to compare what they thought to what I think. And as always I’ve found that the reviews show images from and describe artworks that didn’t register with me that much at all. I’m out of step with the ‘critics’ though there’s a teensy bit of overlap. But it also just goes to show, it’s a big art scene and exhibition, with lots to see and play. I highly recommend this one. It’s probably the best show I’ve seen in years. If you’re in NYC, GO. And it’s free to visit!
I’ve been cranky about this festival for a couple years now because it’s so damn expensive, but this was one of their free events. Imagine in your head an amount of money you think they would charge for a DAY PASS for this weekend festival of new music performances? Nope, it’s much more than that. They charge $95 + $15 handling fees for a DAY PASS! Insane. I really wanted to go to the performance of Steve Reich’s work by So Percussion, but alas. I would have paid maybe up to $45 to see/hear that, but no dice. So instead I went to this free performance of a John Luther Adams work in the park, and invited some friends to join. It was gorgeous, an absolutely exquisite work and performance that I am so thankful I experienced. So my crummy mood was (mostly) turned around.
John Luther Adams is not Steve Reich, but he is a compelling composer. I’m particularly a fan of his Become series of works, like Become Ocean, a gorgeous spiraling work that you get so caught up in its torrent of ebbs and flows.
I biked to Fort Greene Park, arriving a couple minutes early. I saw musicians assembling under one of those easy-up tents and asked for the proper place to sit. “Around the monument!” So I locked up the bike and set up. I didn’t even need the picnic blanket I brought.
As I was waiting for my friends to arrive I saw some musicians walking about, holding bassoon or piccolo or trumpet, and a number of large drums set on stands. Huge drums. Even timpani.
At some point, as a crowd of hundreds shuffled around or talked amongst themselves I realized I heard chimes and xylophone, staccato rhythmic pings and flurries. The crowd hushed as the pinging increased, and answering chimes from triangles very very distant pinged back. This went on several minutes, and then blastlike beats from a drum thundered through then dropped away. A trumpet and bassoon blowing. A piccolo cutting through. Dozens of musicians calling and responding, then leaving silence, then starting again.
And the sounds of kids’ park birthday parties, distant police sirens, and the heavy wind through the leaves in the trees - all these played a part in the orchestra of sounds. Humans were the final accompaniment, their murmuring or shuffling feet, and even one horrible grating drone flying above the crowd. I moved away from that one. But overall such a cool experience wandering around the park as the instruments and sounds moved and shifted, built up and dropped away. Not too disimilar to Become Ocean or his other works.
At one point a person sitting on the ground, in meditation pose with a beatific expression on their face. It’s the US so people are annoying with their cameras, trying to take pictures for social media.
Forty-five minutes into the piece I too am meditating, listening to the branches and birds and ambulance bleets far away but echoing up the hill. It all blends together to make the piece. It was a beautiful crescendo and a lovely way to spend an afternoon in the park with friends.
This was another of my own performances, this time for the opening of the New Jersey Art Book Fair. What can I say, some things just work. Since I traveled so much this month we had only 2 rehearsals prior to the day of performance. It helps to have an easy-going collaborator who is confident in their own work and trusts you too. I sampled Sue whistling, then used morphagene to time stretch and granular synthesize and make grooves, that I then fed into the Strymon Magneto to let it ooze out, molasses. Sue narrates a story, of family, of history, of extinct plants and forgotten records, while using the overhead projector to move images and text in and out of the frame, projected over a slow color changing background video of smoke or fog or clouds over landscape. It was a hypnotic performance. I had to balance volume not to overpower her quieter though mic’ed up voice, except for one part where I let the Plaits and sequencer speed up doin its thing. I loved playing the ‘ghostly’ sections, letting the Mutable Instruments Beads add texture to my voice and breath from the mic input. The audience clapped loud and long. Our 30 minute set went over well. So we’re looking for more venues to do it again.
I was flown to NC for this festival and put up so I could perform at it. Basically, this is an event that’s been going on 14 years to commemmorate and in honor of the activities from Black Mountain College. A variety of things happen on this day festival, like interactive weaving activity, a breakout circus marching band, projections and sound installlations set up, a man playing the saw on a floating dock on the lake. The grounds are gorgeous. The people are in good spirits. I’m satiated by the chicken fried chicken and brussel sprouts. For my set I play modular synth soundtrack to a performance art work by my friend/collaborator. I’m enjoying playing and have made a bit of a score for myself. We play two sets and they both get a good response but the second one in particular gets a loud and enthusiastic audience that come up afterwards to talk and look. They like it! Great.
Earlier in the day I came across Matt Robidoux performing as The Spiral Worker. It had a heady description but basically Matt collab’ed with another musician playing flute and maybe clarinet, who was hiding behind a sheet. Matt was wearing all green strange outfit, spiraling around the floor in a circle along a LED lit path around some kind of constructed green circular DIY structure. He was playing modular synth, something like a stylophone, and some wireless DIY breadboard thing that squonked and thwootled. Matt plays freak improv like Sunburned Hand of the Man (obscure reference maybe) or Wolf Eyes - like noisy drone but groovy set that thurns and changes and sounds good. They know how to play. They went to some avant garde music program like Mills probably. I like it so much I go up and introduce myself and we realize we have lots of friends in common. I come back later to catch their second set, and they come to my show too. Overall the festival was fine, a mini burner-y-like thing in the woods and a chance to visit a place i don’t get to often.
I love 90mil and went to this night with someone I love going to clubs with. 90mil is special. Will be sad when they are forced to close up later this year and have to move to their new location on the outskirts of Berlin. But I digress.
This night featured all 6 members of the Jokkoo Collective performing in various combinations of B2B sets. I saw them play as a group in the fall at Atonal Festival on the last night. They were great. This promised to be a more stripped down DIY space show. The night felt great. We were sober-ish, drinking some whiskey with sugar free soda, my fave that they make for me on request at their bar / hangout room there.
I honestly don’t remember all the sets but I enjoyed dancing and things were pushing forward and had new flavors of sounds and combos in there. I remember feeling like they were trying out new combos - things I hadn’t heard in club music before, not quite named things. I wish I had the vocab to describe.
The highlight was definitely Baby Sy and Sami’s set (i think!), where they rapped / sang, a bit reminiscent but more listenable than Death Grips. In fact, at one point with the aggressive beats and bounce and lyrics the audience was so fired up a mosh pit broke out! Never seen that at a club / electronic night before. I checked behind me to make sure shorty was ok but everyone is super peaceful at that club and people were more like bouncing and jamming rather than trying to elbow, and it soon switched back to pure dancing.
We stayed til 3:30 to see the last set but it was unfortunately too mellow / plain so we melted into the night and headed home, literally able to walk home in 15 minutes, what a luxury, and then to bed.
This was the ending event to the Electronic Faire, a permacomputing-adjacent fair(e!) held at Temple University’s Charles Library in the makerspace. Clearly organized by someone for whom it was a labor of love. I really enjoy the fair, the workshops and talks. And this rooftop quiet concert is likely one of the quietest “shows” ever organized that I’ve seen. Not quite 4’33” there are loads of students indoors nearby studying for exams or writing papers and directly outside on the roof deck are musicians (barely) playing quiet electronic noise sets that the audience kind of strains to hear. A strange experience for sure. Hard for me to fully get into at that (low) volume but I appreciate the concept. Still, I wish the show was a couple blocks away in one of the north philly warehouses or we were wearing wireless headphones maybe, but I guess that doesn’t fit with the low tech theme of the fair.
Codie opened tonight, a 3 woman livecoding supergroup, with Sarah GHP on visuals and Melody and Kate on sound playing Strudel or Tidal I think, linked through flok. Sarah was remote so they played a video of her work. The sound opened with a deep digital dub thing going on. Definitely sounded like they started minimal or with nothing and quickly built up. I loved the transition to dub techno, and I think Sarah’s visuals look so different from a lot of other livecoding visuals. She’s not using Hydra or other more common tools but instead built her own. There’s a tropical vibe, and i believe she runs it through a fairlight visual synth? The bass got deeper, heads were nodding. This was a good opener for the night as giant shapes and colors flashed and got repeated, gridded, or swiped.
Next up was nnirror. Like the first night, a performer in the vague genre i’m calling (incorretly) post-autechre. but seriously, is it okay i say this? nnirror did open for autechre at a bunch of their dates on their recent tour (as did some of the other performers from night 1 i see now!). the broken beats livecoded and patched - juggled, scrambled, fried. sorta coulda dance to them. individual tracks that wove together over the course of 40 minutes. spiky.
followed by keith fullerton whitman. i’ve seen him perform a number of times, going back to 25 yrs (yes, i’m that old) when i saw him perform live on air on the radio station at my college, where he remixed the marble madness (go listen to it, please!). his set was all modular synth - a tangled web of cables - a rat’s nest. impenetrable. he never unplugs and replugs. everything is plugged into everything else. he’s built a system that he knows and can play and plays itself. that he can tug and coax and tickle and it slowly or quickly unfolds into side hustles and pockets of jank and loping beats and grooves, with a bundle of voices chirping around each other. did i like it? i liked it and at times i didn’t like it. it’s a system that can go either way. and though it was entertaining, it was like watching a single man jam band himself. i did like it i’ve just decided. i’ll see him live again. he spoke earlier in the day and demonstrated that he was trying to figure out his own way of making a new approach to improvisational jazz but true to the modular. was that a part of this performance? i couldn’t tell ya. but it was its own sound system, and i have mad respect for him and his approach and experiments. a true virtuosic player of the maschine.
next was c_robo_. i pre-listened to his music online cause i saw his name popping up previously. he’s fast. it’s a new approach to livecoding. strudel i think. with lots of modifications. he showed off in his earlier talk how he assigns hotkeys to jump between samples and effects, adding and subtracting. i could be saying this wrong. but def he’s using keybindings with the number keys to affect his livecoding and quickly add and subtract stuff. he does still type and such. traditional hello world type intro commented out text at the beginning and end of the set. his beats are fast. the energy does pull you in and propel you. there is a journey forward even if it doesn’t arrive. well, he tried to manufacture an arrival of sorts. he attempted to crash his IDE. now that is possible. basically, as opposed to the original england style i’ve experienced of starting with no code, he instead has insanely huge multi hundred of lines of livecode prewritten. he’s modified his IDE so that he can turn on specific sections to trigger sounds/lines to start and continue playing. so he has all these different tricks in his bag he can trigger, and the sound is hectic but bringing something new to livecoding i think. i dug it. maybe not home listening, but a nice night out trying out new sounds. and yes, he’s pushing at the limits of the IDE with all those samples running, it glitched out, paused, many times. and i think he didn’t mind that and it’s part of the c_robo_ live experience. i dug.
finally, gabor lazar. loud drenching beats but it sounds, hmmm, i’m not engaged. he’s playing something on his laptop, but i could’nt see his screen and not sure what he’s using and it was fine. i didn’t hear of him previously but he was def the ‘headliner’ so i guess i’m missing out. (checks online). ok so he’s on planet mu so he’s a somebody! lol. i don’t know though, i am still in this same mindframe that i’m trying to escape Warp Records or whatever 1999 and find something different, growing, new. maybe too harsh an assessment from me, but is this different? does it move my body? am i rolling in it? i try it out and it’s not bad, it’s definitely loud, but i need a break. i go outside to talk with friends. then we gab and gab and gab. i come back in and walk back into the center of the sound and realize it’s not bad up close. in the back of the room where i’d stood previously it sounded more dinky. up close the bass envelopes me into a giant smoosh. i like it for the remaining minutes. glad i’m wearing my earplugs.
afterwards i catch up with friends again and we got gigantic burritos the size of a baby. it’s 1am and i have a flight the next morning. i shouldn’t eat the whole thing. (15 minutes later). damn, i ate the whole thing.
I forgot to mention: V Vale and Marian from Research Pubs were there all three nights. Incredible. I checked out their zines and bought 3 of them and had some good conversations with V. What a hero! I bought Terminal Punk, How to Love Forever (or something like that), and a guide to reading and writing. Research is such an important reference for me. I first found Research 8/9 when I was staying at a rural anarchist commune in germany about 15 years ago and loved reading j. g. ballard and the interviews. what a cool publisher/mentor/thinker. this was a huge highlight for me.
one other final note: this festival was fun but quite a lot of men
Warning: this post will mention the death of a friend
I jumped on the BART train, taking it across the bay into Oakland. It’s been three years since my last visit. This is a noise show and I’m psyched. I need a break from angular post-autechre breaks and though I know this will look almost the same sub-genre to many people I must confess I’m really more down for noise: that’s what gets me fired up.
I am so eagerly anticipating this noise show for a couple reasons. I haven’t been to a noise show in a warehouse in Oakland specificially in YEARS and I have fond memories playing these spaces 15 years ago. In 2011 I went on a tour on the west coast, stopping and playing at some warehouse whose name escapes me. I stayed with Jsun McCarty, an incredible noise musician who was building string instruments, amplified and running through various pedals, but even stranger, the bodies of these instruments were built out of discarded styrofoam. I forget what they named these, and I can’t look online right now as I’m typing this on a train. But the band name was Styrofoam Sanchez (see video at link), among other funny noise band names they used. We played shows together, and Jsun put me up in his space when i visited. We jammed, hung out, visited a pirate radio station where he got interviewed, tramped around oakland and the mission, lots of fun together.
Sadly, Jsun passed away wayyyy before his time. You can do a web search for the Ghostship warehouse fire to read more, or this profile on Jsun from KQED. This was a huge tragedy. I remember that day trying to get in touch with Jsun to make sure he was okay. He wasn’t.
Jsun’s artist/music collaborator Michael Daddona keeps his tradition and artistic activity up, and pays tribute to Jsun. He’s organized Ratskin Records as an incredible combination of performers - particularly diverse, including indigineous/native, SWANA artists, Latinx, trans, many many different people. Visiting this warehouse show at The Church of the Buzzard was an incredible scene, full of welcoming people. I met up with my friend Sholeh, who introduced me to her friend Kelan, who was so kind he ordered food delivery for me when I said I was hungry and there were no nearby markets or places to get food open (My bad for assuming it would be like Brooklyn and Berlin and that I could get food after 8 on a Friday!).
Michael put together such an incredible lineup. Every one played a 20 minute set, with like 3 minute intermissions between bands. Truly Michael is such a powerful organizer. I loved all of the sets I saw, from Bored Lord with her wild breakcore and noise to Sholeh’s vocal lilting processed singing through modular synth and pedals, to the insane quasi-bro theatrics of Tugboys. I only went to night 1 of the two night event, but it will stay in my mind for a long time. And shout out to the sound engineers. Can you believe they had a high end Meyer sound system with serious room speaker array and subs in a noise warehouse in Oakland? Some of the best noise production I’ve ever heard, on par with The Handbag Factory (LA) or TV Eye (Queens).
With the aggro gronky texture o hell and jingly skronk beats, walls of squelch, and spine-tickling processed singing, I was totally floored by these ‘mature’ noise performances - folks that weren’t famous - (what would that even mean in noise? maybe wolf eyes is the only quasi-famous band?) but just people honing their craft and playing such strong sets. A feast, truly.
This was the opening night of the Algorithmic Art Assembly. After some afternoon workshops, folks started to pop up. The venue is a cool theater. I wish I’d been there in its glory days. A beaut. The sound: loud. The scene: dark empty floor. A stage with modular synth or laptop in the center. Performer after performer ascending to the stage and playing 30 - 40 minute sets of oblique saw wavs, slippery sine waves, supercollider-derived mangle-beat repeats, experimental Max mega patches and the like.
I was socializing and connecting with old and new friends - and I don’t totally remember who played what. I definitely saw the first three and a half performances, but I missed Kindohm even though he was the only person I’d heard of previously and thought I’d dig his music. R Tyler played vaguely post autechre beat-y things. Not 100% danceable, not that that’s required, but also it was not NOT danceable. Things sped up, slowed down, jumped - a glitch. Is it post (i keep using that word - again) post-breakbeat live coding. i think this was in tidalcycles.
Wolf Parkinson White was next. he started ambient-y and brooding but this too became angular and even more undanceable beats. maybe a little memory of the work of bogdan raczynski (but not kid606) cerca 2000? less of a grower / show-er. despite the plinks, tinks, pops and smears there is an even-ness - i think more of a journey might be nice. i paused to get a drink.
the next performer was william fields and had a similar autechre-influenced not-quite idm style. my apologies to fans and performers of this genre for not being able to more accurately capture the joy of this micro-genre.
after william fields came nathan ho. i liked it. nathan wears a witches outfit with cape and black witch’s hat. hilarious. he keeps the bit up. the sound: that does sound like he’s trying to push to the next thing, even though he’s coming maybe from a similar background. i think (though might not be true) he’s a bit younger - and seems like a math nerd. it comes out in the music - (PAUSE - takes a break to pull up an album by Nathan to refresh my memory while writing. HAHA i am SO on the head it’s insane. Get this:
In 2008, at the age of 11, I created Googology Wiki on my parents’ computer. “Googology” is a word for the study of large numbers and fast-growing functions, deriving from the 9-year-old Milton Sirotta’s coinage of the term “googol.” The website was never meant to go beyond my personal use, and I gradually drifted away from it. Fifteen years later, it has grown to tens of thousands of articles and a community of hundreds of active users.
nathan goes on to write more about his music for the album deriving from a mathematician’s ‘ordinal number’ system key to the study of large numbers. (UPDATE: Nathan gave a talk the next day that was DEEEP tripper mathematician territory. HARD to follow, but def came across as a math/musician genius.)
At this point I’m needing a break from math-breakcore-braindance-beats. I went to get tacos and missed the last set. Sorry.
The fact that I went to this was mostly an accident. I saw that tickets were required or becoming a ‘supporter’ (they didn’t use the word membership) and it started at $99, which is too high i think. I usually go to the New Museum at most twice a year. Other friends of mine were going. They’d finessed tickets somehow. I messaged my friend S because she had mentioned going, and she said she was a friend’s +1 and that I should message our other friend. He got back to me ASAP and said he couldn’t go but he had a free ticket and I gave his name at the door. I didn’t know if it would work, but at door not only did they let me in they asked if I had a +1. Okay, anyway, this just demonstrates how overly networked and self-serving our community is. Moving on…
The New Museum has been closed a couple years. I thought 2 or 3 but no, didn’t it close in 2020ish? Has it been five years? I’m not looking it up, so I don’t know. But it’s been a while. This was some mega million expansion as they took over the building next door and expanded their galleries. The architecture - fine. A big ole winding staircase, not necessarily visually impressive, not particularly a good use of the space. Some public seating area that’s in all glass - strange, I don’t want to sit in a place like that. So who knows but I wasn’t bowled over by the architecture or the wind-y rooms added on. This was a night of snappy dressing. All the artists age 30 - 55 from Brooklyn had turned out!
I ran into two of my colleagues and many friend and started by ascending to the top. Upstairs was a temp bar and views of the city from the rooftops, but too packed to really see. I descended again to check out the art, stopping first to check out the New Inc art incubator space - their 3d printers and laser cutter and small immersive media room and their co-working space. Very nice. On to the art..
The main thing on view was the opening of a giant exhibit called New Humans: Memories of the Future. Title is so-so, but the exhibit was fun, cool. A history of robots, early and recent and historical art. It’s a bajillion item show and hard to describe its 3 floors of objects but some highlights were weavings, Anicka Yi’s drone octopus sky creatures, a video installation by Hito Steyerl, very early computational art by Allison Knowles, a cybernetic object by Marvin Minsky, an Alien model by H. R. Heiger, and the robot inside of E. T. from the movie. And that’s aside from famous 20th century artists that were presented in the show but easy to miss as they didn’t stand out as non-flat 3d objects or interactive works. For example, I’m looking at the artist list and it lists so many from Dali, Jeremy Deller, Vera Molnar, El Lissitzky, Marcel Duchamp, Dubuffet, Agnes Denes, Brancusi, Francis Bacon. I missed these and so much more. I barely remember the Nam June Paik, can’t remember the Rebecca Allen, Milford Graves, Bryan Gysin, I do remember the Cao Fe. I’m listing name after name because the exhibit felt like that. Just a ton of shit, some okay writing, but not really a great theme or walkthrough. Just a bunch of stuff.
The New Museum website sucks by the way. No text. Not even really much of an intro. No photos. What a crock. So okay, it’s a grab bag of vaguely cybernetic past and recent-ish artworks relating to “robots” and autonomous objects, and weaving, and militarism, and entertainment, and models. I’d love to go back to see the work again. But big message, take-away ideas - not much. And maybe that’s okay - the point is to see great artworks that individually might make you think, or display great beauty. Most of the works succeed at that. But as a past museum curator, I expect more from an exhibition. I mean, not everything needs to be a response to LLMs right now, but would it hurt them to take some stance, say something, address it in some way? If not, maybe this is really a catch-up of a show. It would be more honest to just say “we’ve missed the past 70 years of cybernetic and digital art and here’s a bunch of it” and not really what’s happening now/new. But if so, what makes this the NEW emphasis NEW Museum, huh?? This isn’t the grab bag of a Whitney Biennial, or it shouldn’t be. One random example: there is a Rammellzee-designed figure decked out urban streetclothes and vaguely samurai-influenced design that Rammellzee was known for. But what does this have to do with New Humans? Honestly, Rammellzee could/should get his own exhibit. It could be treated on its own. A damn audio tour could help so much here! Something! I can make something up, but I’m a digital artist and curator. I’m not a regular visitor.
Maybe that’s fine. This isn’t a regional art center. This is a showing of great work. But it’s a lot. They’ve selected such a large amount of artists and some great works - but they’ve mixed everything up into a messy salad. It would benefit from some structure and statements. But it’s worth seeing even without this corrected - with hundreds of historic artworks, rarely exhibited, it’s worth it for the gems that shine through.
I arrived pretty late to this one! I missed the first two acts (thus listing the title above as + more) so I can’t write on them. I was finishing up something that had a deadline on that day so needed to just finish the damn thing, and then I was hungry and had only had a salad so I got a Chapli Chicken burger at the Burger Bhai place across teh street. I eat “Low carb” so had them wrap it in lettuce. Not super appealing looking. Tasted okay! It was good. My friend joined me and we got spicy fries and I had a couple. I don’t usually eat those since I don’t really eat potatoes. They were delicious.
To the task at hand: across the street from Burger Bhai we enter the venue and stand in the back. Three hornswogglers (I’m in a Dahl mood) goin’ at it skronking at length. Ok, so it’s a bass player, viola? (or violin, i think it’s a viola), and electric guitar. The viola’ist’s bow is completely fucked. Strings hanging all akimbo. She’s scraping the shit out of her device. This is the modern classical improv. Everyone’s scraping along improv’ing. They are all feeding off each other. The guitar player plucks, uses a little bow on their instrument. The viola player grabs a metal nail and scrapes the strings. The bass player smears his hand along the wood, making squeaky sounds and textures. I love the textures.
I’m enjoying the entire palette of this performance. But it never “goes anywhere.” There are no distinct sections. They are clearly improv’ing together but it’s all some continual plane of existence, no highs, no lows. Don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful and fun and I’m glad I’m checking it out. But it’s an acoustic version of that Merzbow show I saw at Knockdown Center a decade ago that was jut guitar/laptop skronkling for 45 minutes with nothing to show for it at the end. I’m not asking for a score, but…(grandpa enters the scene)….back in MY day, we had various methods when did/do improv that we could bring to bear…taking opportunities, finding little scenes where we could try other ways of playing together…dropping out to allow solos…referring back to earlier themes or melodies or rhythms…varying our technique…leaving silences…changing tempo…using eye contact to find moments together.
This was a really cool event of performance art put on by artists that I think don’t usually do performance art. Each piece was 20 minutes long, and not related to the other works. I arrived after a 45 minute bike ride from my home, on a crisp evening. The daylight savings time change happens here a few weeks before than Europe. So even though it was evening it was still light out here, and that helped with my mood.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, maybe an audience of 20 or 40? I’m more used to these kinds of things at galleries where everyone stands around, and I thought CPR was a small room, because a friend had performed there 2 years ago and it was like that. But evidently they have a back room, and it’s set up like a black box space with typical theater seating. There was easily 125 people there, and we were crammed together. This larger room was actually a white cube.
An announcer in a regal but plain costume (think HER) welcomed us and let us know there would be audience participation and that if you participate you have to take your shoes off, i guess because of the white floor. Okay. Then they asked for volunteers. I wasn’t in a volunteer mood, so i kept my hand down. Five suitable people were chosen from the assembled and they headed up to the floor, standing in the only spotlit section. On the other side of the room, a musician had a folding table set up with a bunch of noisemakers on it and parts of a drum kit (snare, cymbal). They began to play music while the announcer began the piece, instructing everyone to close their eyes and leading a guided meditation about a journey. This helped to set the mood, and the dark lighting throughout and the trancelike music by the musician almost put me to sleep, in a good way. The volunteers on stage were guided through movements, walking along behind the announcer, lifting long rods together as the announcer described a journey along a river. At some point, moving with the participants they guided through the journey walking, rowing, swaying, and reading lines from a poem, overlapping. It was a beautiful piece and I was surprised the participants were so in the pocket since they had been plucked at random, but I guess it was an artsy crowd so everyone mostly just fit the task. A nice piece and spiritual ‘journey’.
The next pieces were each different. There was one I loved by a single performer, wearing only small shorts, moving slowly and deliberately, I would say kind of like a dinosaur. He contorted his arms around his head or torso, slowly moved his limbs as appendages, like he was a 4 legged animal, a camel, a pre-homo erectus. A tattoo on his bald head looked like an extra face was on the top or back of his head. A peculiar and not-displeasing visual effect. Other performances included a performance on Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions - To be honest, this one was the hardest to follow and I lost track of it. This was mostly told through a voiceover with slides and video. It was almost like an experimental essay or ‘performative talk’ I think they call these things. Neat idea but I was lost and it kept going on and on.
I’ve forgotten one of the performances, and there were 5 total. The last one was also interactive in a way. First a naked woman crawled out in the corner of the room and wrapped around what appeared to be a smaller speaker or amplifier. Then a woman came out and had a microphone, didn’t at all refer to the naked woman in the corner, but asked the audience if anyone there made more than $200,000 a year. One man raised his hand, and she asked again and he said he thought she asked if anyone made more than $200 a year. Confusing. There may have been a language barrier happening. The she asked if anyone made more than $150,000 a year. No one raised their hand. She explained she was trying to find a scapegoat wealthy person there but it made sense the audience was all artists. Anyway, then she asked everyone to come down to the floor and two friends joined her and she told us they were going to “rock out.” She cajoled about half the audience to come down to surround the band while they played maybe 2 quick rock-y songs that vaguely resembled Rage Against the Machine to me. I looked over and the naked woman in the corner disappeared, maybe while the audience was ‘rocking out.’ (Can you tell I hate that term?). I think there was some lyrics about unions? It wasn’t the strongest work for me but it’s how the hour and a half performance night ended, and though I was losing interest around then, I was glad that something new happened every 20 minutes and I got to see a variety of work performed. I don’t usually see performance art that often, maybe a couple times a year, much less than i go to see experimental music, but it’s good to try these out.
Whitney Biennial crowd looking at Samia Halaby’s digital
computational paintings made in BASIC and C
Well shoot, I cannot believe I am saying this: I liked the Whitney Biennial. I have seen at least 4 or 5 Whitney Biennials, and they all sucked. I don’t even like to say the work ‘suck’. But they did. And yet, this one, I liked. I really liked it.
It neither tried too hard nor leaned into trend too too much. The works felt accessible, small or made from someone following their own method rather than some blue chip formula. I’m speaking in generalities. And bear with me for one more: I could generally see the seams in the works. The handmade. The DIY. Not tooo many painters. Not too many works that look sellable.
Let’s get into specifics. The show sits on two floors of the obtuse ugly unpleasant building. It’s no MOMA, and who knows what the new New Museum will feel like when it opens in a couple weeks.
Some standout works:
We spent about two hours perusing the show and then ascended to the eighth floor to see the Calder’s Circus at 100 show. I love this work, but have seen it in so many configurations over time that this time, with being overloaded from the biennial i actually didn’t have enough concentration to give it my all, maybe spending only 10 minutes on something that i normally would probably have spent an hour viewing. that said, i did enjoy his wire sculptures, the documentary that i’ve seen before and will see again, and the ephemera like drawings and showbills for his circus performances.
Overall, i recommend the biennial. the calder show comes down tomorrow so is likely closed, but will i assume go on tour. or parts can be seen at many museums like the new calder museum opening in philadelphia.
the biennial will be up several months. i think i’ll return. i want to spend more time with some of the video pieces, on a less crowded day.
overall, this biennial was smaller, not pomp-y, not overproduced works, and not overthought curating. while showing a wide variety of work, there were a lot more hits than misses than i expected, and it’s worth a view.
My man Richie played this show. We’ve known each other a decade or so, part of the same art collective. And was I hyped: I like his style, and this was actually in my own damn neighborhood for once! I love living closer to the huge park but man do I live far from the neighborhoods with lots of concerts and such. I literally just walked 5 minutes to get to this show. I miss when I used to live in hipsterdom and this was the norm for me! Anyway, I digress.
This spot is a Brooklyn hipster trinket shop during the day. They sell gifts like nice ceramics, soaps and kids items and novelty gifts and jewelry.
This was curated by Cecilia Lopez and Melissa Almaguer. A new monthly show. All free improv sets.
The opening act was Almaguer, Kochis and Binter playing as a trio: a tap dancer with keyboard synth and flute. This was truly weird. Great!
The tap dancer had two different surfaces, with different textures, which she could not just tap but rub. A medley of shakers and other noisemakers lay nearby, which she would brush against or strike with her foot too. Accompanied by the keyboard, played making treble-y pad sounds that were unremarkable doodle-doos that evaporated into nothing.
While the tap dancing was extremely visually arresting, I’m never a huge fan of tap, but here, I appreciated it for its novelty within an improv set.
Let me also interrupt myself here and say the flautist was too damn loud. I get that flute can be lost, so in that sense it makes sense to have a mic, but man, it was so shrill. She switched to piccolo at one point too, as if that was even needed. I was truly fearful for my hearring and though I put in my ear plugs as I always do in these circumstances i even added a finger to firmly push in my left earplug. The long long piece didn’t go anywhere. No buildup. No movements. Just lots of stuff tried out. A rehearsal. After how long, 35 minutes or so, the set ended and the tapper asked the other organizer if they could do another piece. NO was the firm response.
Short break and then Yo Vinyl Richie was up. Cue up that Bandcamp album while you’re reading this.
Wheeling out his 3 turntables, then arranging a couple dozen albums on the floor, in stacks that were inscrutable to me but I could tell were some kind of ordering system, a visual score he was about to perform. Richie is doin’ something unique: there’s lots of bebop, hard bop, post bop, free improv, a little soul, then recent experimental albums by other musicians. He freely uses his hand, beat juggles but maybe that’s the strangest part as he’s not playing beats. The strength of his work is in his layering, which makes sense. Environmental album sound effects like rain, forests, etc while squeaky experimental jazz is played at the wrong speed, sped up, slowed down, stopped and started by hand and squeaks and gurgles played like an instrument on the third turntable. Richie’s set was also long. So long in fact that I was antsy and wanted to go. I saw the next group setting up, looking like it would be crazy loud, and I truly was not up for that. I gracefully Irish goodbye’d and fled into the night.
i’d been looking forward to this, half because it’s a free show, half because i haven’t been to this venue in a decade and wanted to see what it was like again. it was good! hasn’t changed at all. big comfortable room, low light, mostly just a drinkin’ bar, very williamsburg, a back area to sit and smoke, and a back room with a stage and nice feel for a concert.
i ended up talking with c. spencer yeh a bit while we waited to be let in. we caught up and talked the good ole days of the experimental music scene on the east coast from boston-providence-nyc-philly-baltimore-dc - talkin venues and acts and such. he was burning star core. i had a few names and had a few different venues over the years. anyway.
well, they let too many people in and we were squished like sardines and that was uncomfortable and not very covid-friendly. but not only was the show free there were free shots and free beer samples from some good brands. i have no idea why. i got tipsy and didn’t even spend any money.
CUBE was the opener, and i know him. he’s also the publisher and writer of BAITED AREA, a really well-done magazine with interviews with artists, DIY royalty, musicians. I highly recommend it. Well written. Excellent production. CUBE was back from a series of shows on a mini tour in the west coast, plus he opened for Autechre for a series of their north american shows. his music is fun, some cool gimmick things in it. like crunchy scratchy stuff that goes on too long (that i like), or that loops and loops and too many things synced and loop (again, i like this), and he has some old bedside tablelamp that flashes in time with his beats. all that is good. the beats or music as such is vaguely mid-range blip blip blip, i kept thinking ‘post-drill-and-bass’. i never got tooo deep into it but i guess it’s okay. for some reason, he sings sort of too, though you can’t make out any lyrics, and so there are ‘songs’ of sorts, but then again he lets the blip blip scratchy shit proliferate throughout and between the tracks. so it’s okay! but i wouldn’t listen at home.
the headliner came on a bit later, drew macdowell. i saw his modular synth waiting while CUBE played and was excited for the set. and it was a deep tripper set. heavy slowly evolving chords and textures that went on an hour or maybe more. i was stuck in the back left corner completely crushed in between a dozen people. it was almost okay on account of the free show and free alcohol but at some point i’d had enough and thought - “this is fun but i’m very uncomfortable being this squished and i haven’t paid any money and i want to go home” and i ducked out, probably a couple minutes before the end, but that was fine. i bought the latest issue of BAITED AREA and brought it on the subway with me. so even though there were delays on the line, i read 3 - 4 interview articles and had a grand time.
really great show tonight. was in a bit of a funk due to a disagreement with someone i care about. stopped on the way to the show, in a blizzard!, to get tacos from the spot near where i used to live. the best taco shop in new york city that i know of. the taqueria on wyckoff spot across from the hospital. that one. anyway…was running late because the L was down and i was talking to my parents on the phone and it was a blizzard. anyway, got to the show on time and there were plenty of chairs and people filing in.
chatted with the dragons before the show. we were very close when we
lived in the same city, and i’ve known them for hmmm
the lights dimmed and the mc announced it would start. the first act lafrae sci i didn’t know anything about. i was sitting in the second row for the second time at this festival, surrounded by friends. lafrae sci played this palette of sea sounds with occasional bass thuds with echoes and some real POWER. that overwhelmed the wave-scapes. it was beautiful and lush and the combo of the wash sounds and beer had me nodding a little. i was thinking of a drexciya sound scape and was surprised afterwards to read that was indeed a reference. far out.
act 2 were ben and dorothy. dorothy on electric cello and ben on laptop and an o-coast semi-modular that he seemed to use mostly as an audio processor of the cello. this started fast and scattering and strong and proceeded on from there. a masterful and heavy noisy improv-y but never boring or uneven performance. not so much that dorothy attacked her strings but overwhelmed them, plucked them, stroked them, resonated them, making them cry out, talk, laugh, screetch. ben laptop twiddled but i didn’t mind, as he was clearly processing her input and adding in samples and granular synthesis and just really the synthesis of the two together made a slab of textures that never stayed the same but never jump jumped. it just seriously built a wall of sonic textures moving evenly and clearly from a to b to c to d to e, etc.
finally were the lucky dragons. i’ve seen them perform between 6 and a dozen times, even hiring them to perform at a museum i worked at a decade and a half ago. but i haven’t seen them play in maybe 8 years. they have never played a bad set, and no one else sounds like them. this was gorgeous starting with their intense fast cycling loops that produce intense bursts. it’s really hard for me to develop the right language to describe what they do since they have their own genre and sound that isn’t described well by other systems. like clearly they play ‘experimental music shows’ but that’s not a good description of their music. there are elements of steve reich / glass but if reich or glass new how to use a sampler and max/msp. ya dig?
i have so much appreciation and joy for their music. at some point sara dragon (not her name) picks up the mic and begins intoning a description of orchids. their sex lives. their gender. the view of an orchid as seen by a bee. the inability of scientists to classify new species, or they disagree on them. all this being stated calmly, clearly while a wall of fast vibrato’ed electronic musical lines and loops and scratches, so fast but so full-sounding and resonant.
to my left i notice a man scribbling in his notebook throughout the show. does he pull out his phone at one point to record the audio secretly? i think he is a critic. my instinct. i was at an opera or classical show in the summer when i saw a woman pull out a notebook to scribble in during and after the concert. the next day i saw her review in the new york times i think it was. what journal is my seatmate writing for? when the lights come up he quickly gets up and disappears. everyone else stands around and talks and talks and talks. we all love the show and are having so much fun rapping together. meanwhile our critic has rushed home in the blizzard to type up his review while it’s fresh in his head, with his pages and pages of notes.
good show. let’s see where his review gets published and what he thought. but it would be hard not to love that show.
this is a festival taking place at fridman gallery in new york, on bowery near the new museum and a couple blocks from chinatown. so my friend dan and i decided to meet at spicy village before the concert. let me tell you, spicy village was incredible. high recommend. we got the chicken pile, i don’t think that’s what it was called, but something like that. also, nothing about the food was very spicy, though it was tasty. we also got a stewed beef thing with hand drawn noodles. i mostly skipped the noodle but the beef was succulent. dan likes peanutes and they had fried salty peanuts so we got that too. i honestly think we shoulda skipped that as i started drinking too much water to offset it. we also went to get boba milk tea but i forgot the milk part and just got iced oolong, which tasted like nothing. my mistake.
Now for the concert. Calderwood was ambienty noodly in a good way and maybe it was the whiskey we had earlier in the evening and the low light levels, it couldn’t have been the plastic chairs, but i was next to the heater, and the next thing i knew i had nodded off a few minutes, 10, 20? how long was the set? it had started harsh and im not sure what she was doing as she was sitting on the floor and we were sitting on chairs in rows and had no view of her but i think she was bowing a metal string and that was picked up and amplified and run through processing on the computer. in the end it came out as beautiful murmuring electronic noodly doos but like i said, sleeeeep sleep.
that was set 1. next was sue huang, who gave a vocal performance, reading an autobiographical but poetic text about divorce, dating, the pandemic, the LA fires, and the fires of kuwait. it was a strong read. maybe a 25 minute recitation with a black and white experimental video behind showing scenes, stock scenes? wind, nature, buildings, streets, curving. it worked. worked well.
finally the konjur collective. a hard bop and occasional free improv and occasional ‘conscious’ spoken word. there was even some kora. and each of the 4 members of the quartet seem to play sax on the side too. outfits definitely post-arkestra. this one went hard and i really liked it, hadn’t seen a performanco on that tip in a long time. definitely had a ‘philly/baltimore vibe’ to me.
each of the 3 performances were very different from each other and so it was a nice trip to different lands. satisfied despite the higher cost of the ticket (we thought).
this was a grab bag closing party for two exhibits and i think an artist talk and photo slideshow but i arrived super duper late. flux has two locations and i went to the wrong location, then thought i was feeling sick and should head home but then doubled back when i felt bad i had come all the way out and should go support my friends so i went so i wouldn’t experience FOMO. i ended up missing the formal part but everyone was hanging out in a small group left so i hung out too, said goodbye to my friends heading back to kazakstan and then berlin. and then made my way home too.
The first performance of the year I attended is the opera. Last year I ended up buying a couple tix to some operas during ‘cyber monday’ when i exploited a little loop hole i discovered that let me buy a couple of cheap(er)ish tix. i ended up going to 4 different operas that spring i think. but this year i didn’t see any that particularly compelled me, and i had always wanted to see this opera, so this was the only ticket i bought. i even got a balcony box ticket because it said obstructed view but the ‘seat with a view’ website made it seem like the seat would be fine. NO IT WASN”T. the girl in the seat next to me swung her big head and jacket in front of me and blocked my view. i was fuming and should have said something but i kept my tongue because i was too mad and didn’t think of a polite thing i could say that i wouldn’t have yelled. i mean, honestly. it was really annoying. i also didn’t like the plot of the opera. dumb. and i like mozart, i really do. but bleh. i made a poor choice. and there was no intermission! i like intermissions. i was really annoyed. the opera, even with discounts is still very expensive, and i like it to drag on with multiple acts and a long intermission. but no, this was all in one, scene after scene after scene. a dumb story that i didn’t care about and didn’t even pretend to make any sense, and i don’t mean that in the opera sense, i mean like in a nonsense way. it was just not that interesting a story. i feel funny criticizing mozart. but this was not my thing. didn’t love anything in fact, not the staging, not my seat, the singing of everything in english. this was ‘lighthearted’ and the struggle was basic. BASIC. there i said it. this was a BASIC opera. serves me right for going to this instead of the opera about the school shooting that they’re self-satisfied about, very human and deep and compelling, but i don’t want to go to an opera or a musical or a theater piece or a movie about a school shooting i don’t. anyway, back to the magic flute. this was a miss for me! 2 stars.
Well this was a fun one but i didn’t win anything. or at least, i didn’t want to spend so much money. backing up, i got there and there was a huge spread of food and drinks. i felt dumb because i had just gone to find food in the neighborhood first and spent money when i didn’t need to. since i got to the gallery and realized they fed and liquored people up to get them to open up their wallets and bid on things. this is a gallery i’ve curated shows and events at, but not in over a decade. they are friends, and i like the space a lot. it’s a long running artist run space, 26 years in fact.
at the auction, which is their annual fundraiser, they had a few hundred items - mostly paintings but also drawings, photographs, sculpture, and some objects. the big highlight this year was a photograph by zoe strauss of two mummers men with their dicks exposed, showing tattoos on them. strange. it went for a lot, but can’t remember how much. maybe just under a thousand bucks? lots of other items. i wanted to bid on this one painting of a home goods store in the suburbs near where my parents live where i bought my teak cutting board. it was just such a funny and sad painting of a big box store in the suburbs surrounded by a parking lot. but i was prepared to spend up to 60 bucks, and as soon as it shot past that i was prepared to spend up to maybe 90 but it ended up going for 200 or so and i was not about that right now. i don’t even have the wallspace.
party steve showed up cause i tipped him off. even joe. pete and emily came and we went to the trestle inn afterwards. it was liike i hadn’t even left this city 10 years ago. or it was like we were picking it back up. but steve was in a bad mood. joe was in pain and used a cane and had to go rest. and pete and emily left almost as soon as they dragged me over because their babysitter wanted them to come home. i walked wearily to the commuter rail. it was freezing. i had to kill almost an hour so i got a slice of really bad pizza and read a book, waiting for the train, then heading back to the woods and eventually to bed.
this was a performance part of open studios. no input mixing, experimental vocals, clarinet, synth. can’t review myself! hard to see from an outsider’s eyes. my internal feeling was that the parts worked at times, didn’t wor at other times. ! makes sense since 1 of the trio didn’t practice with the other 2 first. anyway, i haven’t listened back to the recording yet. then can make some decisions on what i thought.
This was a fluxus spectacle, and hard to make heads or tales of, as it went on and on for 4 or 6 hours or longer. I stayed for about 2 1/2.
Nam June Paik (1932-2006), the inventor of video art, was also a great composer, sent to Germany by his parents in order to prevent him from becoming a communist in North Korea. His earliest music scores – largely unknown – form the basis for this post-fluxus action. You might hear June Paik murmuring: “I make technology ridiculous!”
I hadn’t been familiar with this part of Paik’s background, so was interested in checking this out. It was held in the red salon in the back of the beautiful Volkesbühne.
Basically, anarchic madcap theatricality ensued, like watching a 1930s cartoon come to life. A variety of pianos, complete and “prepared” were played, at times played with hammers, nails, or one’s head, and even a raw supermarket chicken wearing a diaper was made to dance on the keys. The three performers alternately yelled, played, or frolicked. I found the one white dude performer the most annoying as not only could I not understand what he was saying, he dominated the dialog, had his mic way too high (I put in ear plugs), and I don’t know, I didn’t like him.
But I loved hearing all the crazy ways to play the piano, the layering of old early 20th century recordings (via Youtube) projected on top, and even the occasional performance art performance that didn’t totally annoy me. Would I have hated fluxus when it was in its nascence or would I have been a huge practitioner, doing the annoying? Yes.
I loved this. I was on a mini trip/vacation to Leipzig and a friend of a friend joined us for brunch and invited me. I’m so glad I went.
A huge group of people came out to the artist-run space SMS Leipzig in Leipzig east. In the gallery was a video playing on a phone and then a ton of sticks leaning on one wall and various knives for carving hanging on the opposing wall. We were instructed to select a walking stick and then to optionaly decorate it. I did a zig zag cut on both sides of my stick.
Then we set out on an epic and lovely 3 hour hike through a big park, which reminded me of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Everyone was so nice. There were about 25 of us perhaps. There were 5 or 7 or so installatons set up in various places in the park, and they weren’t disturbed by the public. There was a model of a kind of GDR house, absurdist newspaper installations, two panels that were on gorgeous wooden standing boards in a field, a video on a phone set up on a tree branch that was accompanied by coffee and snacks, a short absurd reading, a hanging fabric-based work, and maybe one or two others I’m forgetting.
We climbed hill and dale, spread out, having conversations, and being led by an intrepid scout lader wearing a winter fur style hat, a backpacker’s rucksack, and large hiking boots. The air was cool but not chilly. We marched with our hiking sticks and must have looked funny in that urban/suburban/park atmosphere to onlookers.
The full hike was a beautiful slowly roving exhibition and party format. It was accompanied by a lovely folded 1-page zine/catalog. And I’d love to try to copy this approach in NYC sometime or elsewhere.
Okay, this was a weird one. Even for me. Even for Berlin.
This was a performative installation consisting of what looked like funky funny DIY exercise machines from an artist gym, drawings of female bodybuilders, painted glass pieces, and then a performance with bodybuilders as instruments. Let me explain: There were 4 buffed up women bodybuilders, who could definitely take out anyone in the audience. They wore straps that held like guitar cable strings, and extended the strings in poses for a period of several minutes while musicians dressed in black bowed the strings.
Let’s talk performance art: it was quite a spectacle! I mean, the audience could not hold back from photographing or videographing, me included. It was not just bizarre, it was definitely singular. Will never see this again. Never seen before.
Let’s talk music: it didn’t fully work. The ‘musicians’ such as they were I think were actually artists with a concept, but the audio was not much. Hacking at strings. How could that even compare to the rippling musclebound bodies that produced the instruments? It couldn’t. My friends and I were baffled why they didn’t plug them into amps. My occam’s razor response is probably that the people didn’t know how to do that, and didn’t look into it. It would have been easy, and it would have sounded stellar. The audio sounded dinky, tinny, not much. The bodies were loud. The ladies in their not much clothing outfits were already a performance, and in the ‘art’ context they were enough. The dinky bows did not much.
But that said, it was a fun spectacle. There are to be at least 2 more performances, and I’d hope the artist would make a change and add amplification, but at the least it was a fun quick time.
Mat is an acquaintance of mine but i came into this a bit uncertain. I like their work together as musiciansand performers, but as i’m none too optimistic on LLMs I didn’t know what i’d think about a LLM-front-and-center project.
This is an exhibit, but like the opera-as-exhibit i saw at Hamburger Banhof yesterday, it’s presented as an exhibition. Coming into the exhibit there is a warning that they will record and our voices will be used to power an LLM voice database, and could be released in the public domain. You say okay and walk in. There are two smaller rooms, with 3d printed clear plexi towers/objects in an installation. It looked nice, but i couldn’t quite understand the ‘inscribed’ printed iconography, and it makes sense that the images were LLM derived because they were indecipherable. So this was the appetizer. Some background ambient Holly music is playing. But i think that was coming from the larger room.
In the main room a wooden tower to ‘heaven’ or somesuch in the center of the room, with wooden bench seating all around. It looks like a Quaker meeting to me, or other religious event. In the back was what looked like a church organ woodwork/equipment, but lined with GPU fans, looking like an insane bitcoin mining operation as musical instrument. In fact it is playing MIDI but i wasn’t sure if drives or what were making the noise.
We sat down and the benches filled with people. There are 10 weeks of events for the exhibition and this is the first one. After we gather, 3 women walk in, wearing muted robes. They are leading. Holly stood up on the landing, watching, along with Mat. An ‘angel’/LLM with a fake child’s voice narrates a bit, explaining we are to sing on cue. The leading guides are silent and pantomine directions, like the flight attendants do at during the safety warnings as you takeoff. We were handed sheets with lyrics, which were in latin. They weren’t translated, but that was okay. The leaders sang, basically ‘spirituals’. There was sparkly ambient Holly Herndon washes of sounds at points, particularly between our singing. The hipster audience was enthusiastic and participated, blending with the leaders. It did sound beautiful, and reminded me of religious singing from childhood or playing spirituals as simple sheet music in high school and learning to blend. The LLM angel voice encouraged us between songs to ‘swarm’ our voices at points, which i thought would be more hectic but overall it was just very gorgeous traditional group religious singing and the LLM thing was a gimmick, a red herring, a McGuffin, to move us along and pull us in to the event. Now that said, the LLM thing might actually come into use later, taking the recording of our voices and training to create a new digital choir voice. I think that’s the end goal. They said in writing it may be public domain’ed and the LLM angel voiceover said it would be public domain. We’ll see. But overall, it was a nice group singing activity.
The exhibition wall text lists the first name while the museum’s website lists the second, so I don’t know the true name of this show. This was a gorgeous exhibition where you essentially walk through the set of an experimental opera that was staged in-person in the village of Syrigana in Kosovo, with set pieces, costumes and audio recordings rearranged into a stunning museum solo exhibition.
This is a love story folk opera, based on the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditional story of Adam and Even but here turned into a fox and a rooster, a queer and local folklore reimagining.
There are 2 huge rooms with set pieces, and additional spaces with installations that I believe were built for the opera or added later for the exhibition. The music plays in the space, with lit stars that change and flash, and a giant backdrop sunset that shifts along with the music. There is also a documentary in the center connecting room with a an adventure the artist and their partner had visiting rural Kosovo looking for ancient artifacts of culture and meeting local people.
I loved the work so much I sat and read the book for the exhibit, that included essays and an interview with the artist. I should go back and buy the book. I’d also like a recording of the opera performance, as the music was strong. This wasn’t just an opera in name alone, like a work that had been presented at MOMA last year that was really just an installation and some strange voices and drones that played continuously. This was actually an opera with singers, staged. Here we did not see a recording of thet opera ,though I do think that would have strengthened the exhibition to have that screening/running continously somewhere for viewers.
Halilaj is a brilliant artist, who has pulled together many talents: staging, music, costumery, narrative. This was the first Kosovo opera commision, performed in Kosovo, and staged not in a performance hall but in a village. The artist shows all of the challenges in the culture, the tension that exists between ethnic albanians and serbs in his mother’s town. Only 8 days before the opera was to be staged, there was an arson attack and the storage containers holding much of the garden of eden set and costumes was burned to crisps. This I learned from reading the book. But the artist went on, prevailed, was urged to continue, was told this was the nature of the living environment in the country. Over 1200 attended the opening we learned.
In the exhibit at HB there is a gorgeous leaning/sitting structure covered in traditional rugs. We sat and listened and watched the lights changing here for a while before moving on. But the set pieces of a caravan, the giant sun, the watching married couple of fox and rooster, all were strong, looking out over us. I recommend seeing this exhibit, and seeing if it moves you as much as me.
Okay so this wasn’t a DJed show. It was a talk on the Black Atlantic sound migrations - from the Southern US to Jamaica to the UK to Europe to South Africa, and beyond. Denise’s book Why Willie Mae Thornton Matters (original performer of Hound Dog, popularized by Elvis) is now on my reading list. She wove a historical narrative of Black musicians and the flow of music between cultures and technologies. My recommendation is to listen to My Brother The Wind by Sun Ra right now! (Ra banging it up on a Moog synth in 69).
Afterwards was a screening of 1998 documentary Modulations: Cinema for the Ear, an INCREDIBLE documentary on the birth of electronic sound systems and machines - Stockhausen, Schaefer, Saunderson, Cox, Can, Kraftwerk, Bambataa, Autechre, Squarepusher, Alec Empire, Donna Summer, Aphrodite, Ryoji Ikeda, LFO, John Cage, Moroder, etc. The list is a mile longer but i’ll stop there. See it!
I’ve been at a lot of shows lately but couldn’t pass this one up. I’ve been wanting to see DJ Haram and wanting to visit 90mil so this was the perfect combo, especially with this interesting lineup that seemed half DJ event and half live performance sets.
Got there a bit early and hung in the bar/cafe area. Played some chess. I brought a mess of friends so it was all good. There was ambient stuff in the beginning (Kovac?) and then some really great jamaican dub, super dubbed out dubby dub. No Lee Scratch Perry but that kind of thing ya know? For example at one point I had to do it, I shazammed and it was the real deal Glen Brown and King Tubby Version 78 style. I was in couch lock hanging while friends left to get some Halloumi situation on.
They came back and I got to my feet and the night continued with DJ Haram throwing styles every which way from rap and hard club styles while she sang over it, and Dakn joined with some rap on one or two pieces. The audience was super way into it. Dancing hard even though the place wasn’t packed, the energy was great.
my egyptian friends met my sudanese friends kind of deal.
Dakn followed haram, who got such a long and loud ovation. he unleashed a rolling combo of UK Grime and boom bap with arabic rap vocals with maybe a touch too much reverb to try to glue it all together, but the beat production was HARD ya know? Extreme audience dancing reaction like totallly vibing out. My whole crew was there and LOVING it. peaking time. I mean, this was such a nice bit of energy, like how can you bottle this moment or make a kodak snapshot in your mind? took some photos and videos but of course they’ll do nothing to really bottle up this experience beyond leaving a fleeting reminder like these words. i get why mckenzie wark writes on raving (do i?) and the whole rest of the bit. berlin was doing its berlin thing and the combo of the sound, experimentation, fumes, haze, effects, chemistry, crew, brew in a homegrown miasma really worked on me.
faded home at a reasonable hour, melting around 3.
Yow! Killer show. This afternoon my college roommate that lives in Berlin messaged me to see if I was interested in going to the show. Yes I was! I’ve had a number of friends tell me how good Ciani was live, and I like listening to her music, especially her Frkwys Sunergy album with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. The price wasn’t completely insane, and tix still available, so I jumped at it.
On my way to the show, on the S-bahn, I see a message from my friend. His kid is sick so he’s staying home but his wife will be there. So I went to meet up with her and her friend. The show was held in the round, with rugs on the floor. People were mostly sitting, and some lying down, every which place they could. We had to elbow and tut mir leid our way into a place, but we found room near the front right in front of Ciani’s setup Buchla synth.
I missed the DJ opener but no one had much to say about it, so okay. The duo of Cassie Kinoshi and Petter Eldh I wasn’t sure what to expect. I listened to them in the afternoon and heard more and less traditional jazz. But what they performed was experimental textured electronic bass noises with looping sax and wooden flute. It was good, far out. I didn’t quite fall asleep, my mark for a relaxing performance, but I liked it quite a bit. Nice textures and variety and almost almost a beat. It would have fit well with the sounds of Atonal festival I think.
After their wonderful set there was an announcement of a 30 minute break. I kind of groaned but it was okay. We talked and sat, not wanting to give up our good location in front of Ciani’s synth. When Ciani started, it was immediately good. Now it was 4 channel sound, and she played with moving the sounds around for the entire hour-ish set. Now I usually don’t care about 4 channel work, and even here it was a bit gimmicky, but it was maybe the least bad version of that effect I’ve heard. (Seriously friends, we don’t need it. I’m very impressed! I’m clapping. Good work! Now put those extra channels back in the box! Thank you!). I wasn’t sure if she had a joystick to control the panning but I think it was some automation she setup as it seemed to loop through the panning forever and ever pretty much.
The sounds were classic Ciani, and quite complex, running pace but not hectic, variety of textures, changing. Definitely not tired new age, but a timeless modular synth sound. The Buchla has such an expressive range (was it used on any of the Fourth World music stuff? need to look that up. maybe not? seems not.). I particularly liked when she rolled up the sounds so squashed and flanged they’d sound like white noise beats, pitter pattering or attacking over time. Her changes are fast and expressive thanks to her use of the Buchla Thunder controller in conjunction with the Easel Command. After the set she encouraged to look at her ‘beautiful Buchla’ but I was actually fascinated how many tablets she had (4 or 5!) each with a different software synth loaded onto them. She said how much she loves the Animoog app (Buchla and Moog, united in harmony! lol. Don Buchla would be rolling in his grave?). It did sound lovely.
The audience was in awe. I really loved it too. My friend’s wife’s friend said she’d seen Ciani maybe 6 times, in the past year alone. Wow.
As usual I started to feel restless maybe 10 or 20 before she finished, but it was a good and energizing set, I’m glad I went, and it was a ‘good vibe’ overall. I’m feeling inspired, and ready for more music-making and concerts again soon.
What a rad performance night. I found it listed on the echtzeitmusik mailing list of mostly improv music concerts. I didn’t know what to expect other than seeing the night would combine dance with live experimental music and that one of the performers would be playing daxophone. In fact, a competing performance the same evening elsewhere also had a daxophone performer listed. Since most of the world doesn’t know what a daxophone is, and i’ve only really ever seen my friend D play it before, it’s pretty wild there are at least 2 more performers in berlin. figures.
we’l come back to daxophone, or the dax. to start, the night featured 2 performers, a dancer and a barry sax player, though the sax player also moved around in a semi or fully-improvised duet with the dancer. it was nice and meditative, slow, and i started to nod off almost asleep i was so relaxed. i came to. i clapped. it was really good. they explained that next would be the participants from a workshop in dance and music improv they had led that afternoon. 2 performers started abruptly but were joined by maybe 10 more people. there was violin and another sax player and the rest were dancers. the movements were compelling, funny, really good at working together. afterwards we were told many of the people were performing for the first time, but i didn’t get the feeling of that. it was strong and compelling, playful. surprisingly not full of ‘improv dance’ tropes.
a short break. i got some bibimbop from the restaurant in front of the exploratorium space, which was a large room that reminded me of many other performance art venues in other cities. after some food i got back to my seat, i had accidentally left my jacket there so no one took my spot. a dax player was setting up next to my chair and i introduced myself. of course he knew my friend.
this had been listed as dax and electronics and butoh. i hadn’t seen live butoh performance before. this wasn’t butoh as i understand it. at least not the traditional form, if that can be stated that way. butoh is a modern performance practice that began after the second world war. ok, i’m bopping over to wikipedia:
It is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion. However, with time butoh groups are increasingly being formed around the world, with their various aesthetic ideals and intentions.
ok so the performer wasn’t wearing white body makeup nor was it super slow. it was definitely a mix of mostly fast and frenetic body contortions. also, it was directly reacting to the music. let’s talk about that. the musician started with pedals and some kind of mic and played with feedback and delay. kind of like no-input-mixing-board music. there were daxophone tongues on the floor and held by the dancer. as the dance piece went on the musician also moved, like in the first act, and crossed the floor. the dancer helped unspool the instrument cable as the musician crossed to the other side of the room and set up the dax, seemingly performing this as if in dance. the piece wound on and on and took on many forms, though i never got bored.
there were moments of daxophone tongues being thrown and gathered, many way of playing the instrument, the dancer removing their suit and wearing a yellow bathing suit underneath, and a yellow light held to their head, reflecting their bright dyed yellow hair. lights were eventually abruptly put out and the feedback noise wound down. a success and beautiful night, with great performances of sound and bodies whirling around each other in improvised motion, physical and spiritual pushing and pulling. at the end, i was feeling inspired and excited. exchanged contact info, skated to the subway, purchased kebab in a box and boarded the ubahn home, where i met up with my housemates and we watched skate videos til late into the night.
Wow, this was a cool spaced out fuzz odyssey tho over too short. Maybe they had played earlier sets, i don’t know. but basically, my friend brought us to this space that he volunteers at and i’d heard lots of good things about it. it’s a social space, a hangout and organizing community garden, very punk, eco-toilet, improvised architecture, tent structure, fire pit, etc. people were bbbq’ing and putting food out. there was a bar and when i asked if i could donate some money this woman asked me to pay with a smile. i obliged.
this fuzzfest of a noise jam broke out with this saxomophone-dude, a woman doing gentle vocal murmurs, a guy that on and off played on his pocket korg, and a guitarist and keyboardist. maybe someone else. they loped around but it was engaging, and the sax and korg in particular pulled me in. the woman doing vocals had a laptop, maybe processing or recording, and the sticker on top said FIGHT COPS (see photo). a buncha of folks just hanging and having a good time and introducing themselves. lots of people were refugees from war.
at one point a birthday song broke out and it turned out it was someone’s birthday. at 10pm the music stopped, to avoid problems with the neighbors. we talked about anarcho organizing principles and experiences in our 4 different countries (malaysia, ukraine, china, us). we started to get cold so Z, T, S and I took the u-bahn home, then we played a few rounds of poker, using beer/soda tops as chips, and baked apples. anytime someone won a round everyone else yelled ‘Capitalist!’
Went to the opening of the Diane Arbus and Ligia Lewis exhibitions at Gropius Bau. This was a free event and despite arriving relatively early at 7pm the lines were long. We caught the tail end of some dance choreography but the website doesn’t list who it was and there was no info onsite, definitely a mistake to not credit your artists. This always pisses me off about bigger institutions. Hopefully they at least paid some money to these performers! But I don’t take it for granted.
We stood in line for the exhibitions, and enjoyed them both, especially as Yazzus’s DJ set bumped in the background. In the corner of that massive open air central hall, the sound gave us a little kick, was a little knotty in a good way, though it wasn’t pushing into new territory. This wasn’t like DJ Marcelle, but no knock, this was danceable despite not being in a dancing space. We got drinks after getting our fill of the exhibits and sat in the hall to listen. In fact, 2 hours had elapsed in what seemed like rapid time, so we swamped the bookstore looking for deals before catching the U6 home.
I had been looking forward to this especially since I saw them play one time previously, 22 years ago in Prague when I studied abroad there. The old radio building venue is interesting, built right before the rise of the Nazi architecture. Outside was gloomy and wet but the inside of the building looks like a pool, but sort-of post art deco subway style. The audience was the kind of audience that goes to “International House”, meaning it wasn’t very diverse, certainly not as much as a free concert in the park group would be and at 40 euros for the back-of-the-hall seats we sat in, no surprise.
We got some wine and the requisite brezel as we settled in. There was no opener (shouldn’t there have been?), but the hall was beautiful, there really were no bad seats as sight lines and acoustics were very strong. And I was glad it was packed for the band. Maybe a couple hundred shy of a thousand in attendance. That’s a lot. The concert was exactly two hours, with a 15 minute intermission (more wine?) and 1 encore, that I’m sure was stipulated in the contract.
Let’s get into the throat singing. It was rad, and I was thankful they seemed to balance out the cowboy tuva pieces with the raw voice. I did want for a bit more multi-tone singing, but it’s possible that while I said the sound was good equally everywhere, maybe I was too far back to hear the lower frequencies and such and they didn’t get picked up as well on mic. So it’s a tiny question or criticism maybe but still, it was a varied and beautiful performance, the songs were not repetitive. I didn’t get bored. I wanted more when it ended, and yet I was tired and ready to go home to bed too (maybe the wine). I don’t need to see them in a year or two, but 22 years would be too long again.
This was an offsite performance art event organized by PickleBar in Moabit. A friend joined last minute, and they didn’t have a bike, and we headed to the art space first accidentally before realizing it was offsite. So we arrived late, and since Germans always begin at the stated time, even young cool people, we were told by the door greeter this meant we had missed half the performance. Fuckin eh, man. So I was a bit pissed. My foreigner mind cannot really fathom having a performance that starts at a specific time, lasts only 38 minutes, then everyone is supposed to leave, travelling wherever they came from or somewhere else. Literally people started walking out the door immediately after the show. It’s done! LOL. Who does that? Anyway, it’s normal here!
Ok, so let’s jump to what this was: a strange and great very Berlin performance - two women chanting, moving, licking, climbing. This was held in an old hospital complex in Moabit, in what appeared to be in maybe a lecture hall, with raised rows of seats in a semi-circle that rise up to a balcony. While we only saw 15 minutes max, what we did see was great. Strong sound design, good costumes, compelling movement and chanting by the two performers.
A poster and long text description, almost an essay accompanied the performance, part of a series called She Wailers on (keywords!) female voice and power, silence and hidden violence, sorrow and uncovered history. Those things did come out in small ways, though I didn’t see the whole performance, and I think mostly it came out through reading the text first. Climbing up and over each other and up and over the rows of chairs, tables, etc with hard edge ambient in a darkened space surrounded by Berlin’s performance art scene - it really worked. My friend and I loved it.
A walk home and we stopped at Go Asia for chinese vegetables, then a hang out at home and we had a dark ambient drone music session on the modular synth.
It’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Weeks and weeks. I haven’t gone dancing in that time, or seen any other shows, which are usually the things I write about here. I have seen some screenings and such but I’ve chosen the constraints of “live music / DJing / performance” so those will remain un-written here. I have gone on vacation however, to the island of Usedom along the Baltic Sea. And there, for lack of other forms of live music entertainment, and because I do like classical performances, I chose to see the NDR Elbphilharmonie perform.
Let me say that the performance was “fine” and “nothing special” but still Classical is nice to listen to, a “treat” usually. But the music wasn’t the main attraction, at least to my friend. She was very curious about the venue, in Peenemunde. This was one of the third reich’s military research and planning spaces, with forced labor. A very dark history. The museum itself was unfortunately not open though the grounds where we were had some interpretation materials. It was also a cold drizzly night, and due to some interpersonal issues, the bleak atmosphere did not contribute to my mood, despite my friend’s enthusiasm for trying to learn the history of the area. I had gotten us to the venue on the train but not realized that the train stopped a half hour before the concert was to end. Perhaps we should have just left the concert early to walk back to the last train. My friend was unamused and asked me to figure out the way back, talking to Germans there to find a way back. Since we were not older than 50, and not dressed exactly the same as everyone else in black and off-black, and my friend and I look different, and we were in a conservative area, and the fact I’m an auslander, I think all of these made it hard for me/us to find a ride out of there after the show. I arranged a taxi, having been told it would be 10 or maybe 20 euros. The taxi driver told us 30 when we got in, then 50 when we got out. My friend got into an argument I could not fully follow in my weak German. We did not pay 50 but the night was expensive, involved arguments, snuck in wine, a depressive atmosphere, bland Sibelius, and speech from a represenative for a probably-conservative right politician. 1 out of 10 stars.
The Algorithmic Pattern Salon 2025 was a super fun conference, existing very much at the intersection. Let’s try to draw it out: It’s not an Art and Code conference, or a tech art or a mathematics or a knitting conference but instead some combination of all of these plus something more. Just by its nature of being founded by a visionary live coder / programmer, it seemed to pull members of each of these communities to establish a new quasi-super-scene. And because it was in Sheffield and not in London or Paris (par example), it was 60% people from the UK, and then folks from other parts of Europe mostly as well as the US (at least 3 of us, but 2 of us currently based in Europe), and some folks from further afield.
During the day Friday and Saturday were talks, usually 15 minutes or so, with 5 - 10 minutes of Q&A. In the evening were mostly live coding performance nights, with Friday being a sit-down concert and Saturday being simultaneous live coding club nights. During the performances there were tables set up in the bar for folks to do kumihimo weaving. I sat down and got sucked in and missed two friends’ sets.
I popped over to catch the show next door and it was pretty much a present day Braindance Coincidence style post-IDM set by this group interworld media media crew. I’m not sure which two performers I saw actually but believe it was possibly MYNA with Sleepsang? OMG it was so next level. It started ambient-y deep tripper material but then -zwip, spin it back - jumped in bpm, energy and breaks. I particularly like harder stuff when I’m out dancing, like juke footwork / gabber / some breakcore that’s not too corny. This was as good or better than most anything I’d heard DJ’ed performed live, and it was incredible. This was in a tiny room about the size of half of my apartment and everyone was dancing like crazy and couldn’t even keep up. Seriously, like Afx or Bogdan Raczynski level. I loved it. Check them out.
Sunday AM I attended the kumihimo weaving workshop, which I had gotten up to the night before as mentioned, but learned and tried a bit more, making a 16-strand keychain for myself, then heading out of town on the train with some new friends.
Overall, this was a great weekend, art, code, ‘academic’ but not too academic talks, live coding, weaving, workshops, raving. Really nice.
Everest is my friend and most of my Berlin friends were at this too, including long lost friends, new friends, and old friends. Everest was a bit jetlagged and had been setting up until the opening, but I liked the feel and seeing all their work, that I had mostly experienced online previously, in person in an exhibit.
I feel so self-conscious about showing my artwork, made on a computer, with an audience i usually consider online-first. So this reassured me about my old Babycastles days and my own approach: just set up some screens and make it varied enough and an interesting enough use of the space, and trust your audience will be able to view the screen as ‘primary’, it’s okay. While it was a ‘minimal treatment’ it was still interesting. Everest set up old broken internet pieces starting from the right of the gallery entrance and then more recent and working pieces as you moved around the space.
They also used a variety of screens to break it up, from old CRT monitors to large flatscreens on a pole to videos on regular monitors. And they have printed books, print-outs taped to the wall. Some interactive works, some works you ambiently browse through a book, some works you look at on the wall. Works for me.
We hung a couple hours, talked and talked. It was great to meet Nimrod, and later Tilman in person.
I moved on to SAVVY but there was a LOUD Dj and it covered up the ability to enjoy any of the artwork, especially since it was all didactic “this work is about X” type pieces. Doesn’t mix well with ‘cool beats’. (I’m being snarky).
Afterwards: drinks with friends and bike ride home in the rain at midnight. When I got home i played ping pong and ate salad greens with herringsalat.
Wasn’t sure what to expect. I put on a nice shirt. But it was more or less mostly the same art scene crew I’ve seen at all the other art scene places in Berlin these past couple months so t-shirt/weirdcore woulda coulda shoulda been fine. Was meeting a freunde here, and got there a few min early. Security wouldn’t let me in because it wasn’t yet time but I saw other people in there so “accidentally” I walked around and went in maybe through restaurant staff entrance to get to my friend. We sat and waited and then people started streaming in a couple minutes later.
I thought there would be some opening inside the museum but no. In fact, i don’t think any exhibits were open. It was really just a ‘traditional’ hang out party typical networking drinks thing, on the patio out front. So just drinking smoking n chatting. But….the DJ that opened played the whole 3 1/2 hour event, and she was incredible.
The opening sounds I was confused. Dogs barking. Lots of barking. Was laughing and my friend was like “That’s DJ Marcelle.” Slowly rolling unfolding over the event, with the crowd mostly not noticing the set so much on account of the volume being so low. (Excorp note: see my previous complaints about volume levels of Hamburger Banhof shows.) But as the night went on, the darkness came on, and the beats became footwork triplets or beat repeats, dembow and reggaeton, the crowd was moving - still chill but vibin’. We sat down on the museum stairs adjacent, flashed some smiles and waves with Marcelle and more and more people plopped down next to us to join or danced in front of the stage while all around them smokin and drinkin and ..
Whole set was great. When it ended, lots of people including my friend went up and bought her latest vinyl single. I appreciated she had a sign that proceeds would be donated to support the Palestinian Childrens Relief Agency, in keeping with her playing of parts of Nan Goldin’s speech from the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in fall 2024.
Goodbyes and then I rode home along the canal, a solo biker with nary but the occasional canal-side dream under the moon.
This was a nice and relaxed audio night at Pedalmarkt, the second of these events that I’ve attend. It’s inspired by the Show Us Your Screens live code show and tell night also held monthly (at Offline). There was a small crowd and it felt very much like a group of friends. The opener was actually a talk on Amateur radio, including some light theory, what you can do on the radio bands, QSL cards, different formats. There were good audience questions. After the opener there are 10 minute sets by the visitors. Host Andre kicked things off with a performance using a portable shortwave radio and a web-based Software Defined Radio (SDR). He added granular synthesis and other effects to the mores code, and Single Side Band (voice) communication and FT8. I hadn’t heard FT8 before and decided it sounded like aliens, even before the effects were added. After this performance was a twinkly guitar + laptop drone-y performance that I enjoyed as well.
Man, I woulda coulda shoulda probably gone to an earlier night and seen more folks I know, but you know what, this was great, and I saw stuff I didn’t know about, ’cept for the headliner. Literally all the acts were incredible. I’ll just list em: Anthony Linell, Jokkoo Collective, Topdown Dialectic, Heith, Merzbow / Iggor Cavalera / Eraldo Bernocchi. Let’s run it down. Anthony Linell played dark ravey night Berlin music but in the best way, synthy driving grooves. The lighting in the huge warehouse was perfect. Jokkoo Collective played some neo-afrofuturist by way of late cyberpunk / The Matrix rave with 6 musicians and vocalist. This started looser jazzy and then because a baddie bop rave thingo. The audience soaked up these two performances. 2000 people there? More? Topdown Dialect. Modern abstract Dub-probably I needed to be turnt to enjoy it more but i werent turnt and I went down and played games, got tofu douhan to eat, chatted with friends. Topdown Dialectic was just gorgeous and immersive shimmering flashing lights and driving beats. I hadn’t been able to properly get a taste online prior, and so was caught off guard by how beautiful this was. Incredible. I was front left crew, maybe immersed in about 20 feet from the stage. Just jamming. Heith came next: again I didn’t know who this was or what to expect. It was 2 people, playing like raved out Drain Gang style with the vocals and delivery of a descendent of Crystal Castles but like….they played harmonica, EWI, some weird vocal computer thing and so it was jazzy (not the right word), spaced out, groovey-and intense. I loved it. Everyone was wayyy into it. Thing 2000 people eye rolling back in the head. I found the experimental games by Jenna Sutella and played them. Very good! Last act was Merzbow/ Iggor Cavalera/ Eraldo Bernocchi. I’d seen Merzbow at Knockdown a couple yrs ago and didn’t love the live set. Harsh repetitive broken guitar without the fun of Merzbeat. Not tonight: it started subdued, footage of a forest (which looped the whole set, oh well, a missed opportunity) with nature sounds, then a rising merzbow-ian (i’m allowed) noise crush white noise thing. I should mention the other dudes. They were present. They subdued masami a bit, played together, hard to distinguish what they were doing until the iggor calavera dude (from sepultera - can’t remember what they sound like) switched to the drums about 40 min in and started slow drumming like the Boredoms in Boadrum 88 that I saw in like 2008 and thought sucked despite Andrew WK and every famous drummer ever being there. Anyway within a couple min the drumming increased and became a wash and Masami kept going. Was this the best ambient set I’ve ever seen? Not even close. But it was distinctly merzbow and enjoyable. One funny thing: Merzbow barely acknowledged the audience. They were the headliner on the closing night. As they finished their track he unplugged his modified guitar looking thing, walked off. The other two embraced and bowed, maybe Merzbow barely acknowledged, then was off. Go cash that check Merzbow lol.
Berlinners enjoyed it but said the minimal lighting and use of video projection was a missed opportunity and that maybe the slashed culture budget was to blame for that. I didn’t know about that aspect so for me the huge space I hadn’t much experience in took center stage, and I liked the setup and the great sound system. A win despite the, gulp, 55euro entry fee!
For real though this was the long night of the museums, where Germans get drunk (politely) and stumble around the Natural History Museum looking at gems with a scientific interest, not like those Cali commies. I visited the New Synagogue - don’t let the name fool you, it’s from the mid 1800s. I learned its history, what happened prior to and during the holocaust, sang some during havdallah. It was an interesting experience, mobbed by German visitors who seemed eager to learn about its history. There was cantorial singing which sounded beautiful but distant. It was a powerful experience seeing the reconstructed synagogue, collected artifacts, and interpretation.
I only went for about 30 minutes, to see my friend Lor perform. She is a powerful singer and rapper, paired here for the first time with a frame drum player. There were some sound technical difficulties and I could tell they were frustrated, but I didn’t notice it as an audience member and said that to them, that the audience enjoyed it very much.
A whole mess of folks played this one. It was a ‘noise show’ but this was a nice venue! On top of a 8 floor building of (subsidized) studios and such. The speakers were huge. There was a large and a cute cozy makeout couch, a patio for smokers. The night started with Auguste Vickunaite who loong loopy fuzzed out tape loops. I was distracted during TRJJ or missed their set. Gajek played fuzzed out guitar. Inkasso and ML played a KILLER harsh beat Vatican Shadow type deelio and the audience was grooving hard. Smoke machines were pumpin all night and you could really get lost in the space and the sound. Nosedrip closed out and I believe played between acts. Overall the night rolled right along merrily and it was the nicest noise venue that still felt like a venue in a long time. Oh, and a plug for the insane speaker setup. Probably 20k Klipsch speaker setup in the space. How?
This was an art show and performance, invited by my friend, who ended up coming way late, but my other friend joined me. She took like one look and was like, this is going to be a bondage performance art thing, which I didn’t realize at all but she’s German and realized it instantly from the wood pieces set up.
My friend Nina was visiting from LA and performed along with 5 other performance artists. This was a real salon, in a smallish DIY space not near anything else, in Wedding. Like, no food nearby, no stores. Not even beer. No spati within blocks. The night started off with a ritual led by Nina. We closed our eyes and she explained she would put a caper in our mouth. So sweet, she interrupted her trance-inducing incantation to ask if anyone couldn’t eat it, and (I’m slow) I asked if it was vegetable and Nina knows me so well she said “it’s not shellfish” since she has a great memory despite me not living in LA for 8 years and she knows I’m allergic to shellfish. So anyway, I did the caper ritual and that kicked things off so well. Many poetry readings, prose readings, films, Nina performed music alongside her incredible edited abstract video art. This was a nice night.
Led by two friends, a performative walking tour equal parts political / dialectic lecture and girl in a Godard film. This was a tour through ‘memories and ghosts’ and grounded in the writing of the artists, who read their parts or silently led our unruly throng of rambunctious artists from around the world. Maybe there were 25 of us? Afterwards I led a parade of bikers to the biergarten and got Matjes herring platter. SO good. Some men were playing a pretty ok few blues numbers as well but thankfully we were able to respectfully talk to each other anyway as we were across the garten from them and everyone else was talkin too.
I found this on the echtzeitmusik newsletter only an hour before the show and I looked up the spot (a latitude and longitude listing) and found it was only a 10 minute bike ride away. Perfect. It listed the spot as across the river from the band. I was running maybe 15 minutes late but sure enough, the location led me to a seating area in the shade across from a graffitied building, a warehouse? 4 musicians were noodling around, setting up. Marina Cyrino – amplified flute; Tony Elieh – bass, electronics; JD Zazie – turntable, CDJs; Matthias Koole – guitar, electronics.
This was a noodly plinky electronic-y one. It was a bit cold and the obvious audience at first was just me and a couple sitting on another bench. It started mild and nonchalant but after a few minutes as the boats rolled by it picked up steam, with the guitar noodles and electronic sample drums and stabs building some momentum. The flippery floppery never turned into a groove or varied much at all, but due to the environment, I didn’t mind and seemed to work despite the same-y-ness.
Some families came by, but they quickly moved along when they realized it was skronky freejazz. As other riverside strollers went by, they occasionally stopped. Even a raving screaming roaring drunk man with some mental health issues came and watched and bellowed, cursing out the band while the rest of us applauded.
The sound was not quite loud enough to overpower the tourist boats that rolled by every couple minutes, but it was nice hearing the music merging with the rest of the environment. This was a cool setup. I love outdoor shows, and this idea of playing at a distance from the audience was unique and I’d love to hear it again. They had an intermission and announced on their loudspeaker there’d be a 15 minute break. I biked off in search of Doner kabob but had some trouble finding a place open on a Sunday (typical Germany problem). Then when I found a spot there was a line. All that is to say by the time I got back, they must have played a second shorter set because they were already packing up. I sat a little bit, ate my kabob, then rolled home satisfied.
So this was my first time there. I was told it would be mostly tourists, but that it had a great sound system, good rooms. We got there at 02:30, there were 4 of us together. No problem getting in. Crowd skewed a bit young, lewks were not as intense as elsewhere, and to be honest I hadn’t done the intel on who was DJing so was at mercy of my friend’s choice here.
It was def Berlin club house - basic 4x4x4x4x4x4x4x4x4x4. “Longtime readers” know that’s not my jam but it wasn’t bad, it was catchy and I got into it. We started on the upper floor, drank some mate, did a little dance.
I don’t think they had Function Ones but some a strong sound setup as expected, maybe slightly too loud (Ohm for example tuned the volume correctly). After an hour we went down to the main dungeon-ish room maybe at 0330 or 0400, wall to wall packed of course. This had a nice feel, dark and mysterious, big warehouse room with tunnels and such snaking out.
We made our way to the front, mostly carefully. This room was dark, sweaty, lights skittering, elbows out. So packed it felt a bit like rats in a cage. Here the beat was better. We moved for a couple hours. Time passes slow and fast. Flashing lights. Roll your ankles up, keeps the body cool. Little trick from Ian.
I was ready to go before Ian was, but I hadn’t come by bike, phone almost dead. Thankfully I knew the way to go. It’s starting to get light out. I join the laaate night partiers/early risers on the Ubahn, switch to the S24, then a short walk from the Sbahn. I’m walking up to the building and I see a fox! A good sign! Walk in. No one up. It’s breakfast, time for bed.
This was my own party so I’m biased: it was perfect. First, how can you go wrong starting with a BBQ? We had ribs, turkey, sausage, crusty french bread and hummus, cheeses, salad, drinks, a nice spread.
Around 2130 began the music. Patrick started with an experimental music set, using lots of processed vocals. Meanwhile SarahGHP was live coding visuals using La Habra. At an early point it became clear a natty speaker was crapping out, popping and ticking. We tried changing out the cable, but ultimately just had to turn down a bit. This was a setback to be sure, but we kept the music going despite the issue.
Next up was ExquisiteCorp with a dark brooding set. Opening with a wall of drones that built, then devolved into spinning blips, closing out with staccato jittery beats. The visuals by SarahGHP were a good match. Afterwards a live set by Lor on vocals and looper. Absolutely gorgeous singing, heartfelt lyrics. Huge audience response after her set, again despite our crappy house speaker situation.
Rounding out the night was a house set by DJ Blackmoonchild out of Detroit. Kind of a perfect end of the evening while evenyone kept eating and drinking til the early hours.
a tale of two cities:
first from a friend (who i think is anonymous but i wanted to quote anyway):
dang we had all the hit songs tonight from #autechre : angry bass bees, FM robots take out the trash, sleeping house allergic to own chimney, Really Really Big Steps, metalic puppies going mental at daycare, 303 acid riff bullied by white noise burst, electro house track you remembered from a dream, 7/8 thing that gives you heart arrhythmia
secondly, my own take! let me start by saying someone gifted me a ticket. i should also couch things and say my favorite autechre album is from 1995 (Tri Repetae) and while I’ve dipped into their music in the past 20 years I haven’t generally been able to listen to a whole album of theirs or a whole one of the 4 sessions from their NTS performances. so while i was excited to see them live, and enjoy talking to sean online, and i admire that they’ve been consistently and increasingly making more abstract music over the years, i am not a diehard fan. it pains me to say this. okay, that out of the way, let’s advance here.
i have no idea who opened the concert. i came halfway through their set and waited in line to buy a scotch and soda. next came tim haswell. he was okay. i’m doing him a disservice but i would shorthand mention there were some merzbow moments, some scribble scrabble moments, some brief low end drone moments that were shorter than i’d like and hard to hear. i kept wanting like a Deru or Tim Hecker moment (I’m sure that sound-alike Hecker confusion happens a lot for him) but of course that didn’t really come.
Finally, as the printer paper signs outside the door of the venue indicated, Autechre’s performance will be held entirely ‘in the dark’ so they started to pull a curtain shut, though of course some light could still stream in. Autechre began playing, and I heard the same Max patch style I associate with them, with wobbling synced and unsynced beats and danceable moments.
Their entire set was an hour and a half exactly. The first 40 minutes were fine, workable, but I kept wanting things to be more danceable. Their beats are pretty consistently made from the same ‘stuff’ (I’m sure someone could say in the comments if I had that - SQUARE WAVE or whatever, FILTERED WHITE NOISE BASS DRUM idk). I realy like more variety of samples, and kinds of synthesis but they are playing in the midrange and low end, and the club’s PA system was not up to snuff for the size of the room and the amount of bodies there. At least 1k there, and yet the sound was a bit muddy undiscernable in the midrange at times. That said, no one else said anything about this.
I had expected the performance to go an hour. At the 45 minute mark I was having fun and while I had been vibing the whole time I broke out into light D&B dancing. I was on the only risers in the space and while it was dark and I couldn’t see the stage, which I’m sure was just Sean and Rob on their lappies “checking email”, it was nice to be a bit higher. I tried to take a photo but it was too dark. I went from interested and dancing, to appreciating things breaking beats, exploding, to getting bored, back to interest and things changed a little bit, then, okay, when will this end, to “I like this a lot.” That’s also what happens when I watch Tibetan Monks chant for 90 minutes. I know this. The whole performance was 89 minutes by my count.
I enjoyed it, I really did. But I also started to think about this show and maybe Autechre’s music kind of like - please don’t punch your screen - a kind of ’experimental Drill’n’Bass Grateful Dead, in the sense of there are certain beats/non-beats and sounds and approaches that they use as their kit of parts, and you’re going to hear them (or listen at home) to appreciate variations on these kits of parts. Honestly, I hope this doesn’t sound like I dislike them or think it’s junk: I actually really appreciate this approach. It’s almost like performing generative music rather than letting the machines autoplay, “the old fashioned way.”
At the end of their set one friendquaintence said it was the best concert he’d ever been to. He went and bought a shirt. They were jokingly minimal. On the front: Autechre Twenty Twenty Five and a blue oblong ellipse.
Other friendquaintences also loved the show. They started talking about going to a Takemitsu / Xenakis concert coming up, not my faves, though I can appreciate them historically and “intellectually” and I think there’s a similarity there too.
What can we deduce from this? I am an ass, and Autechre is great. Bring on more blurry broken beats. Tschüss
Our friend Blackmoonchild was DJ’ing this afternoon easy breezy affair. Biked over with Chinendum, enjoying the wind and sun. We got there and ran into Blackmoonchild herself looking for the entrance. Made sense we were all together because she sent a dropped pin. She tried calling the number she had for the place. I didn’t hear thumping bass so I figured we weren’t exactly close (real heads know that’s how you find a “secret party”).
After a little to-do we found the route down a long twisty path through the skate park, past the shipping containers. Inside an open air dance party space that reminded me of some of the parties in Kingston perhaps.
Blackmoonchild jumped into it with detroit with techno, Detroit house and even a bit of footwork thrown in. Some highlights include a rework of Art of Noise - Moments of Love and a couple tracks I didn’t know from DJ Assault that were unmistakably his.
I have to say, I danced the full 2 hour set top to bottom and then some, and not just because she was a friend. The crowd was up and down, looked good, having food, enjoying the weather, sipping and dancing, ambling around, and lounging. Perfect sunday afternoon ‘brunch’ dancing vibe.
“This is what berlin was like 20 years ago.” This was a packed place, some kind of Berlin cohousing association that had recently taken over the space and would be modernising it.
It was a kind of celebratory party, with attendees from all of the other cohousing spaces. There was a silly passphrase to get in, in English, that I didn’t take seriously, but then there was a large group of people that couldn’t get in because they didn’t know the password. Legit.
I was confused because everyone looked, hmmm, don’t know how to describe it… I had been told most of the people were artists but they didn’t dress like artists from the US, which of course makes sense, and so I couldn’t quite place things at first. There was a disconnect (only in my head, not for anyone else) between the dingy, graffiti-covered walls everywhere, makeshift bathrooms in landings, worndown century old building - and the dress of the people. Maybe to state the obvious: no one wears jeans or t-shirts. All wear dresses, skirts, trousers, button down shirts. Nothing wrong with that, but fairly different from what I see back home, and definitely different than the club scene here I’m used to.
Let’s talk about the music and the hang. The genres listed were the usual suspects: electro, techno, house, eclectic, disco, and mutant pop. Actually, I didn’t get to hear mutant pop I don’t think, and I’m not sure what that would mean (Negativland? Evolution Control Committee? Danger Mouse? Neil Cicierega? Bootie? Girl Talk? Are you impressed?). Inside were different rooms with DJs, mostly house. I wanted to find but couldn’t find the techno. There were also bar rooms. Out back another bar, a fire people were sitting around, and then a couple hundred people sitting anyplace they could. Inside the place was pretty packed as well. The house DJ was not bad, and despite being fairly tired, I made a best effort at dancing for an hour or so before taking a break to sit by the fire outside and later heading out.
If you don’t know floating try to picture the ewok village. With half a dozen bamboo and “eco-village” x hippie burner buildings are constructed semi-permanently, connected via a series of piers and walkways suspended just above a gross miasma pond of runoff from Tempelhofer airport / field.
You enter on a back road at the park. The path looks confusing, why are all these cars parked everywhere? There are like 1970s veedubs and caravans (“do people live in these?”) parked all around. I saw some lady looking confused and so I asked her if she was looking for Floating. Yes she was. Visiting from Estonia. Ok. So I led her and Xiapei with me up the path til we got to the 3 story staircase/jungle lookout over the expanse of the mires of Floating U.
The name and description of the event made it sound archaic and spacey and it lived up to its name, but in a good way. In the afternoon was a workshop where people built all kinds of radio antennas to transmit and receive from. At least that’s my understanding. The workshop sounded cool but I didn’t want to be at this thing all day from 2pm to 11pm so figured I’d check out the performances. We arrived a couple minutes into the first set. It was nice, packed, but hard to hear standing so far back. For the second set I grabbed some wine and sat down next to Hainbach the synth wizard and “synthfluencer”. I introduced myself to him and his partner and we hit it off. They were really nice, and super knowledgeable. We talked for a while and exchanged contact info. Will invite them to open studios next month.
Haven’t mentioned the music. I think I missed Kris Kuldkepp’s performance. They used the constructed antennae from the workshops made during the day I believe. The performer Wouter Jaspers (founder of Koma Elektronik) basically was tuning into all these transmissions scattered around the Floating University Property. There were dipoles, monopoles, and many others I don’t know the name with eccentric antenna patterns (didn’t see a Yagi). The sounds of the animals (birds, frogs, crickets) blended with the radiophonics making a warm, pleasing semi-alien planet soundscape. So lovely. I actually almost fell asleep I was so relaxed. It went on a for a long while. and at the end, peace. Hainbach was pleased.
This was a trip. Doors opened at 11 and we made it there a bit later. Trouble getting in, their machines with ticket info were down but eventually okay. Organized by AN(8)X which represents and supports subcultural groups within the Asian diasporic and LGBTQ communities in Berlin.
Held in a warehouse ruins converted to decadent spa-club. For the music think techno, gabber, nightcore, brazilian funk, rap. Emphasis on the hardstyles. Almost all women DJs and a dance floor that reflected the music. Total goth-town. They even played the classic goth rave footage projected while everyone danced. There were two rooms, pretty loud. Outside was a huge outdoor with cabanas and such. There was also homemade chinese vegan food, which was really tasty. We went dancing for a couple hours, then swam in the pool with the giant floaties. It was freezing at first but soon we got used to it. When we came out, I didn’t feel like paying 5 euro for a towel so used another item of clothing to dry off and went back into the dance floor.
This was when the real brainmelting beats started. DJ Sarah Bonito played an extreme but pleasurable 2 hour set of hard style music, particularly gabber, with lots of interludes, breakdowns, etc. Somehow she kept the energy up for 2 hours. The crowd was so fired up, lots of jumping, hands, screaming. Forgot to mention the hands hanging down in the passageway to the second room.
Only other thing they could have added is an outdoor pool-side ambient DJ but it’s okay. Our friends left but we kept dancing a bit longer before we were ready to go. Made it home right around sunrise, satisfied.
TBH arrived very late with Stepan, he bookin’ it on scooter and me on the bike. Before I was in another event at Z and he had arrived and was looking for something to do. Both of us like party concerts, especially free ones, so we were ready to move even tho we’d get there late. Each place, nation, space, zone has their own formal and informal rules and our travel was somewhat between the de facto and de jure, so we made good time and arrived at the second to last performer.
Found our friends easy enough and became part of front left crew. Scene was a crowd but def not elbow to elbow like at the Hamburger Banhof Stingray and Ellen Allien. It was fairly dark as we arrived and Berlin crowd was in their 3am outfits. NGL i liked it better than HB. And we could actually hang. Evita Manji did some dark Crystal Castles-esque (showing my age here) singing overtop broken plastic sounds from the laptop. I particularly dug the hyperpop ballad of a couple tracks with sparkly glitchy voice but i didn’t mind the depressing sadxgirl stuff either.
There’s a red light glowing outside, not that kind. Ambience. It’s the liminal space kind. Me and another dude approach the area carrying instrument cases. We size each other up. He’s got 5 years on me easy, maybe 10 years, but his face is friendly. Anyway we’re all older than small children, who should not be out right now carrying synthesizers to a… a what? a jam band thing? “It’s my first time.” Despite looking like the “right” place and Google maps agreeing, it’s unclear to me how to get in. It’s all sealed up. “Two minutes” says the other guy. Oh, we’re two minutes early.”
Which is the door? Two minutes later a portal opens, more like a vault door swinging out. I’m hungry and should have gotten kebab already (I don’t and stay famished til I leave 3+? hours later).
Inside a few people are clustered around a table. How’d they get in? It’s amateur night in that our names aren’t on the bill but we don’t say that and I go to the table to unpack. I think Jayrope told me to show up on time so there’d be table space left. Ah, they plug me in. More people showing up. They ask my name and see that I am running stereo so label two spaces Lee Mod for modular. More people arrive by the minute. It’s true. They come on time. 15 men! A woman is also participating too. She doesn’t set up on the table with us. Is this her way of staying apart, or does she feel pushed away? Oh, she’s doing video synthesis. Another two people show up with Vidiots stuff too and the three of them are sequestered away from all of us making the noise.
Someone asks if I take midi. I don’t. Do I want a pulse? It would be rude to say no. I tell them I mostly make ambient music, washes, pads. But I take the cord and plug it into a mult. I ignore it for a couple minutes and just drone with the Plinky
The pulse increases, there are a dozen of us making noise, a quarter on modular, half on drum machines and the like, and another quarter on other hardware like pedals and boxes. It’s working. We are beating and breathing as a hive. For the next 3 hours we slacken and pulse and fly and slow and throb and dub. We break beats.
The guy two to my left mutters something at me. He doesn’t like my English. He starts smoking and ignores me. I have a compressor that no one else has and can dominate if I need to. but I am a good boy and play along. We have spectators! That’s nice. An audience is very into it. Dancing breaks out. I take some breaks to move around the space and just listen. At some point I grow weary. I am hangry and need kebab. I pack up, say goodbye to new friends, nod and tschuss everyone. “See you next time!”
I show up about 20 minutes after start and the tiny shop is packed with people. Believe me there are seats for 15 and maybe another 10 of us standing or sitting on the floor somehow. I have my arms wrapped around my knees to compress myself. First acts are warm and inviting. Guitar, peaceful, soaring, naked sound at first. Then a duo of beautiful improv, highlight is the bowed electric bass. A talk on building an electric guitar from scratch. I didn’t fully follow it but accepted it was happening. Everyone had a short set, so be it.
The headliners were Silver Galaxy, consisting of Anna-Maria Van Reusel on synth and Dennis Slypen on guitar and pedals. They were absolutely incredible - my ears in pure pleasure, even more than if my mouth was eating ice cream or my favorite pizza. That’s very happy. One of the best performances I’ve heard in years. Both are virtuosic musicians. Totally “in the pocket.” OMG, I had to play after them. Thank goodness there was a break first. I played a short set, which received a good response, and afterwards I enjoyed talking with folks about the music. Thanks to Pedalmarkt for putting together such a cool event and to Anna-Maria and Dennis for giving me a ride home with my synth. We live two blocks from each other!