Tonight 10 pm at Hau 2/Berlin: Henning Rice & Florian Schäffer of The Von Duesz will join the Berlin Artists Borngräber & Strüver on the CTM-Festival.

Berlin musicians Borngräber & Strüver describe their minimalist pieces as "21st-century electro motoric kraut", which pretty much sums up their musical frame of reference and general orientation. Borngräber & Strüver lean on the levers of current sound design in order to heave the Berlin School legacy into the present. And not only in terms of their music but also as curators of the m=minimal label, they are very well versed in Berlin’s current range of musical levers. As special guests for their CTM concert they have invited Henning Rice and Florian Schäffer.

SPECTRAL - CTM12 Festival for adventurous music + related  arts  30.1 -15.2.2012 Berlin

// Festival theme

 

A reversal is taking place on the fringes of today’s pop culture: drag, witch house, hypnagogic pop, hauntology, analog synthesizer music, neo-industrial, and drone music all focus on the energy of negativity and unconsciousness. Throughout these various styles one explores revisitations of past music and media and their unfulfilled utopias and dystopias, conjures eerie presences that rise from the deep material structures, and rejects the state of lively present with bitterness, euphoria or everything in between. Deceleration, decay, fumigation, noise, deformation, liquefaction, mystery, nostalgia, kitsch, emptiness, loss, withdrawal, the longing for transcendence, mundane alchemy, and xeno-communications are the buzzwords of an aesthetic that counters the relentlessness of hyper-capitalist production and its incessant demand for positive engagement. Parallels can be drawn to current protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Anonymous. In both cases, the avoidance of a positive alternative vision is formulated in an unsettling response to a confusing situation: Engagement that does not call for anything specific makes an essentially impossible demand, and thus poses what is perhaps the most radical challenge to the current social order.

 

In this sense, the reawakened interest in the uncanny and in the ephemeral qualities of analog technologies and real materials must be understood as a response to a fundamental malaise when everything has reached a dead-end. Faced with a context of exponentially growing archives and crisis as a permanent state, it seems as if the future of Western societies and their pop culture is doomed to lie in the past. Everything seems to already exist, to have been done before, and is endlessly repeatable through rapid advances in technology. True novelty is nowhere to be found. Despite all this, we find ourselves compelled to engage in breathless activity. What remains is an obsession with the technological and cultural artifacts of our own recent past. Lacking any future perspectives, art, music, and society constantly draw from ceaselessly recycled sources of media, forms, and materials. The combinatorial game and crude tinkering with the found, DIY media archaeology, and turbulent bricolage at flea markets, archives and the dumps of global civilization thus become a last resort, where a master plan is absent by necessity. But it is precisely such uneasy contexts that prevent us from settling comfortably into the past and ultimately becoming ghosts; as there is no rest in sight, the search must continue. Where the medial surfaces have not been smoothed over and the tension of the material is retained, where no deliberate artistic strategy is pursued, where the monstrous and hallucinatory effects of media are laid bare, lies an opportunity to leave open the cracks and fissures through which a future newness may still seep in to confront us.

source: ctm12

Tags: electronica, CTM 12 festival,