24 Jan 2012 — Henning Lahmann
Starting Monday, January 30, Berlin will host the thirteenth edition of
Club Transmediale (CTM), the "Festival for Adventurous Music and Related Arts" that arguably is Germany's most relevant event entirely focusing on music (it is paired with the
Transmediale festival for media art). Until February 5 and across various venues, the festival will, under this year's theme
"Spectral", "devote itself to a musical and medial review of historic aesthetic designs and all unfulfilled utopias and dystopias", to quote the mission statement: "Ever since unspectacularly leaving the last millennium behind, the feeling has been creeping up on us that, in the face of the simultaneity of a permanent state of crisis and an exponentially expanding technological archive, our entire future now lies in the past. There is no renaissance on the horizon. Instead one has an overriding impression of staggering through or colliding with collective and private phantasmagoria." Hardly surprising, then, to see artistic trends such as "drag, witch house, hypnagogic pop, hauntology, analog synthesizer music, neo-industrial, and drone music" being the main focus of the CTM 2012 program, thus indeed providing a very timely response to the recent backward-looking developments in underground music.
Below, we've done some cherry picking, for the complete program and schedule you should go
here.
Zodiak Revisited, HAU, January 30 to February 1
Last summer, I wrote a brief, rather grim essay on Berlin's music scene and the city's heritage in that regard (it will be published in the first edition of
Decoder Magazine, so if you're curious you should support their
Kickstarter now), among other things lamenting the lack of true appreciation of Kreuzberg's short-lived yet highly influential
Zodiak Free Arts Lab, which served as one of the starting points for the development of kosmische and kraut in 70s West Germany. Most likely in part due to last year's reemerged and repeated evaluation in online media, perhaps most prominently through
Altered Zones, this has started to change, and it is a delight to see the CTM organizers jumping at the opportunity (after all the HAU 2, one of the festival's principal performance spaces, is situated in the building that once housed the Zodiak) by initiating
Zodiak Revisited, a series of two discussions and three concerts featuring some of the founders and successors of this unique experimental venue.
Conrad Schnitzler,
Cassetten Concert (c) Archiv Conrad Schnitzler
Tri Angle Showcase, Berghain, February 2
A festival that aims at evaluating the otherworldly and the aesthetics of the past in the music of 2012 cannot afford to omit
Tri Angle Records, the label which like no one else popularized the darker, eerie and haunting realms over the last one and a half years. On February 2, Berghain's main room will set the stage for
Balam Acab (who reportedly sucks live, but we'll see),
oOoOO, and
Holy Other, supported by
Kuedo and
Puzzle. For more details check the event's
Facebook page.
≠ (not equal), Berghain, February 3
Berghain's recently launched
≠ (not equal) series (with a surreal event on 11/11/11 featuring Demdike Stare, Andy Stott, Raime and Tropic of Cancer) stands for similarly black aesthetics, hence fitting perfectly into this year's CTM theme. Their night on Friday, February 2 will host performances by
Opium Hum,
Ben Frost with Shahzad Ismaily & Borgar Magnason,
Mika Vainio,
Morphosis,
Roly Porter (feat. visuals by
MFO),
G.H., and
Ancient Methods. Check further details
here and watch the trailer below.
Further Recommendations
Other concert highlights include:
Mark Fell (Berghain,Tuesday)
The Haxan Cloak,
Cut Hands (Berghain Kantine, Wednesday)
Stellar OM Source,
Heatsick,
Ital (Berghain Kantine, Thursday)
The
Joshua Light Show feat.
Oneohtrix Point Never (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Friday)
Co La,
James Ferraro (Berghain Kantine, Friday)
Grouper with
Jeffre Cantu-Ledesma staging
Circular Veil, a seven-hour nonstop "audio hypnosis"/"sound environment" (HAU 2, Saturday)
Tim Hecker performing his album
Ravedeath 1972 live on a church organ (Passionskirche, Saturday)
The
Joshua Light Show feat.
Manuel Göttsching (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Saturday)
Shlohmo,
Salva,
Hudson Mohawke (Gretchen 1, Saturday)
Pole,
Hieroglyphic Being,
Kassem Mosse (Horst Krzbrg, Saturday)
30 Years of Touch Showcase (Passionskirche, Sunday)
CTM.12 Discourse Series
Of the accompanying discourse series (
further info here), we would like to point to the talk of
Geeta Dayal with
James Ferraro and
Daniel Lopatin "about their approach to the weird psychedelics of increasingly hyper-real realms of consumerism and communication" (HAU 3, Thursday), and to the
discussion between
Mark Fisher and the Iranian philosopher
Reza Negarestani about "the impact of hauntology and the current capitalist state of siege" and "the effects of xeno-communication" (HAU 3, Saturday). Both events are hosted by
The Wire.
