Zen Sounds 070: Berlin Atonal 2023
Zen Sounds 070: Berlin Atonal 2023
Highlights from weekend one of this year's performance and audio-visual art festival edition
Prologue
Atonal has a long-standing history in Berlin’s experimental music and arts scene. Founder Dimitri Hegemann, a key figure of the city’s electronic music movement, organized five installments between 1982 and 1990, hosting legendary acts like Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria!, Test Dept. and Psychic TV, at music club SO36 in Kreuzberg.
After focusing on his techno club Tresor in the 1990s, Hegemann relaunched Atonal in 2013. He’d found a new venue, an abandoned powerplant in Mitte, which seemed like the right location for a revamped version of the festival. I visited it there in 2016 for the first time and saw the late Mika Vainio perform, a couple of months before his untimely death. A recording of that live set was released in album form in 2020.
This year, Kraftwerk hosted Atonal’s first edition in four years. Arriving at the festival site, I felt right at home in the diverse crowd: Ravers, goths, progressive metal and jazz heads, noise freaks, art lovers and artists, poseurs and intellectuals. Just all kinds of weird nerds and nightflies from different backgrounds, genders and demographics.
Though I had a festival pass for the first weekend, I surely didn’t get to see all performances, and I didn’t even set foot into one of the three clubs (Tresor, Ohm, Globus) on the site. The rich program turned out to be quite an overstimulation for me, so I’m just going to recount a few of my personal highlights, instead of trying to give a full-fledged event report.
Valentina Magaletti & Holy Tongue
The Italo-British drummer, a mainstay of London’s improv scene, opened the festival on the small stage downstairs. Performing behind a thick veil of smoke, without much stage light, Magaletti landed somewhere between industrial sound collage, free jazz, dub and ritual trance music in her 30-minute, largely improvised set.
Later that night, she would return to the same stage with Al Wootton and Susumu Mukai, her co-pilots in experimental dub outfit Holy Tongue. Their album “Deliverance and Spiritual Warfare” was one of my favorites of this year so far – I’ve recommended it here in the newsletter. Their skeletal mix of dub beats and post-punk textures matched perfectly with the setting on Kraftwerk’s ground floor, drums and bass still thumping through the gloomy concrete hallway when I finally left the building.
Laurel Halo with Leila Bordreuil
As a long-time fan of Laurel Halo’s, I knew that the L.A. based artist and composer had recently worked on more ambient jazz and soundtrack-type stuff instead of the club-rooted electronic tracks she’s still widely known for (and plays out when DJing). At Atonal, she introduced her new album “Atlas” (out next week) on grand piano and electronics, with collaborator Leila Bordreuil on cello.
The two artists wove a dense ambient tapestry of unsettling, weirdly dissonant sounds and free-form improvisation. I particularly enjoyed how the audience reacted to this brave excursion into the unknown – they understood quickly that they wouldn’t get any experimental techno beats today and seemed genuinely curious about Halo’s new musical direction. Afterwards, I overheard someone saying her music usually wasn’t their cup of tea, but this concert had converted them to a fan. Well, I didn’t need to be converted.
Rainy Miller
Rainy Miller hails from Preston, a mid-size city between Blackpool and Manchester heavily hit by deindustrialisation and unemployment. Part of the UK’s experimental grime scene, he's produced for Blackhaine and released his acclaimed sophomore album “Desquamation (Fire, Burn. Nobody)” last winter. Drawing influences from noise, trap and drill music, Miller created an impressive body of work dealing with trauma, pain and depression.
Bringing his emo-drill sound to Atonal, Miller didn’t feel like spending too much time on the stage. Instead he started his performance from one of the high balconies, and then moved relentlessly through the crowd in a hoodie, carrying two bottles of beer in his left hand, gripping the mic with his right, rapping in people’s faces, getting down on his knees, shaking uncontrollably. Afterwards he’d write on Instagram, “murdered myself for you”, and yes that’s exactly what he did. I really felt that Miller laid bare his soul, and as I am a highly sensitive person, the performance deeply affected me. I still had goosebumps the next morning when telling my wife about it.
Caterina Barbieri & Space Afrika
Closing off Thursday’s main stage program, British ambient-techno-turned-ambient duo Space Afrika shared the stage with Italian multi-instrumentalist and composer Caterina Barbieri, featuring visuals by Berlin-based designer and artist Marcel “MFO” Weber.
Barbieri started in the first half singing and playing guitar, later resorting to the synth work she’s mostly known for. Joshua Inyang and Joshua Reid – the two producers from Manchester making up Space Afrika – hid behind a table with electronic devices, firing off their dubby, smoky soundscapes that always seem to evoke urban back alleys. One of them constantly walked up and down the stage, nodding his head, vaping.
You can catch them again at Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht in November, where this work is going to be reproduced. They’ve also just announced a collaboration with Rainy Miller, “A Grisaille Wedding”, due Nov 16.
Shackleton/Zimpel & Siddharta Belmannu
Sam Shackleton, a producer of electronic music with roots in dubstep and techno, played with Waclaw Zimpel, a Polish clarinetist with roots in free jazz and global music. For their outstanding performance on Friday night, based on their new album “In The Cell of Dreams”, they enlisted Siddharta Belmannu, a relatively young singer of Indian classical music. The trio gave one of the most intense concerts of the weekend.
The trio created a deeply enchanting, spiritual, psychedelic set of just three or four extremely long, meandering songs, sounding like an occult Fourth World ritual. I closed my eyes for the most part and let the music take me into a state of trance, almost like a guided meditation. “This is music that (…) blocks out the white noise and bullshit of the outside world”, The Quietus wrote about their album, and having experienced it as a performance as well as through listening to the recorded music numerous times since then, I have nothing to add.
Venus Ex Machina
Venus Ex Machina is the stage name of London-based composer, sound designer and multidisciplinary artist Nontokozo Sihwa. She has released two albums on AD93 since 2021, oscillating between experimental techno, ambient, noise and sound art, inspired by classic UK industrial (Throbbing Gristle, Coil) and the contemporary global electronic underground represented by labels like PAN, SBKVLT or Hyperdub.
Her Atonal performance “Lemurian State” started with a dark ambient build-up and culminated in a long, noisy techno jam, at which point the artist left her place behind the boards and danced wildly across the stage. In an older interview, I found Sihwa talking about dance music’s role as a coping mechanism to deal with life in late stage capitalism, and that statement made total sense to me in regards to her gripping performance.
Florentina Holzinger presents Étude for Church
Chopin thought of an étude as “a musical composition of considerable difficulty, designed to provide practice material for an instrument and its player.” Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger and her team of dancers have performed “études” in public spaces, the idea being to “create scores for bodies as instruments”.
I witnessed her 15-minute performance “Étude for Church” two times – on Thursday and on Friday – and this is what I saw: A heavy iron bell hung above the stage, and a woman appeared to hang upside down from its center, like a mallet. After she had swung from side to side within the bell for a while, two performers were let down from the ceiling on ropes and started hitting the bell with hammers, while the woman inside of the bell turned around so that only her legs and feet were visible.
Meanwhile, women were moving around the crowd holding huge incense pots, and then two more performers appeared on stage, attached to hooks in their bare flesh beneath the shoulders. They were then suspended from the ground, until they started banging and kicking on large metal sheets in the air, leading this étude into a massive final crescendo. Close to where I stood, a young man collapsed. Luckily, he was on his feet again by the end of the performance.
Loraine James
Last year, the London-based electronic music producer had an amazing run with her ambient techno album “Whatever The Weather”, followed up by her commissioned Julius Eastman homage “Building Something Beautiful For Me”. At Atonal, she introduced her new album “Gentle Confrontation”. Visuals in the background showed details of typical London housing estates. (James grew up in an Enfield tower block, overlooking the city skyline.)
James has said her new album is influenced by “math rock and emo-electronic such as Dntel, Lusine, and Telefon Tel Aviv which drew her back to her adolescence”. Her set was a mix of ambient tunes and groove tracks, drawing from jungle, juke, techno and basically all sorts of electronic music, with surprising, almost Aphex Twin-style beat programming and outlandish sounds. The ravers among the crowd were frantically nodding their heads and making stank faces whenever a new beat dropped.
There’s a Bandcamp listening party for Loraine James’ new album going down on Wednesday Sept 20. You can RSVP at the link.
Aho Ssan
Aho Ssan is a sound artist based in Paris. I first heard him on a collaboration album he made with Berlin-based Kenyan artist KMRU last year, “Limen”, which I really liked. The new solo record he performed at Atonal, “Rhizomes”, will be released on October 6. It’s not really a solo effort though, as it’s full of interesting conceptual collaborations – as a life-long fan of experimental hip-hop, I particularly enjoyed the tracks with UK rapper Blackhaine and L.A. trio clipping. It all holds together due to Aho Ssan’s highly overdriven beats and apocalyptic soundscapes. The experience was enhanced by dark, psychedelic visuals by Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, who previously worked with Arca and Black Midi.
It was actually the last show I saw before leaving the festival on Saturday, and I had to watch the second half from a bench in a far-away corner of the venue. I was simply too overwhelmed with all of the interesting but challenging sounds and emotions of the past three nights.
Until next year…
Happy weekend!
Credit is due
All photos in this issue of Zen Sounds were shot by Christoph Voy, professional photographer based in Berlin. Please visit his Instagram and website.
© 2023 Stephan Kunze (text), Christoph Voy (images)