Sunday, December 14, 2008

Club Transmediale '08

Thursday, January 31st, 2008

Efterklang, Islaja, Machinefabriek, Conrad Schnitzler, Ignatz, Groupshow


Despite having lived here for six months, I still find it remarkably easy to get lost in Berlin. And so it was trying to find Maria, walking along some wind tunnel of a street looking for a bridge. Eventually, pointed in the right direction, we arrived at Maria a la CTM, a cavernous place buzzing with people, small holes in the wall with Japanese girls selling okonomiyake, others records, others enormous wooden cars.

In one such corner, buried deep at the back, was Herr Conrad Schnitzler. In the program it said he was helming something called a ‘cassette orchestra’, and I was intrigued, thinking it might be similar to what The Flaming Lips did a few years ago with the stereos of forty pickup trucks in a parking lot. Instead, Schnitzler’s show was more like some kind of endurance event as he modulated a few shifting drones while two-tone visuals of 3D computer-drawn images rotated behind him. I checked back in a few times in between the other sets to find him still there, sometimes leaving the drones running while he had a chat to a friend, amiably holding court for the whole night.

Out on the main stage, Machinefarbiek got things started with a huge bowed drone drawn out of a machine of his own invention, the sound orchestral in its size and scope, the kind of thing that stopped people talking. Just when it reached its peak, Zuydervelt turned it on itself, breaking it into pieces, each echoing a part of what had gone before, the whole thing rumbling to a halt sooner than most would have liked.

In keeping with the theme, Zuydervelt’s thin, bespectacled Dutch guy was duly followed by a rangy Nordic lass in a gold sequined top, proceeding, without introduction, to blow a few melodica drones into a delay, layering them with pre-recorded loops, then singing over the wash in a language probably of her own creation. Islaja is gifted with the timid gaze and sure movements of a true eccentric, and to the uninitiated like me her show is a truly intoxicating one, equally as likely to feature angular Knife-esque electro-pop as some chewed up 80s scenery that sounds, as my partner said, like a Foreigner song played backwards. Playing without pause or false steps for the whole set, songs lapped over one another, loops brought into one song would start the next, the whole thing utterly fluid, as unpredictable as it was effortlessly melodic. By the end, Islaja had schooled us in the kind of showmanship that comes entirely from the sonics themselves, the only concession to the crowd a whispered thank you at the end.

In the afterglow of whatever it was Islaja had just done came Ignatz, the unassuming Belgian continuing the night’s theme of relating to the audience entirely with the sonics themselves, wandering on stage and launching straight into half an hour of loose, fluid acid-folk, some early figures reminiscent of Ben Chasny’s Six Organs of Admittance, but rawer, with the roots rather than the flowers. Songs came coloured in a kind of knowing primitivism, punctuated by distant vocals, tailing off into bursts of feedback; others began as pretty, almost careful delayed figures, giving Devens the chance to add layers and accents before burying them in fuzz.

Ignatz had the look of a man playing for himself, which, however that sounds, wasn’t a bad thing — it gave the audience the feeling they were privy to something private, almost like hearing a noise on the street and stealing over to a bedroom window, peeking in through a crack in the curtain to see someone happily lost in their own noise.

Expectation, more often than not, is a tawdry mistress. As the organisers of this year’s CTM probably intended with their banner of ‘Unpredictable’, a lack of anticipation can be liberating, freeing you from the need to be satisfied by any kind of familiarity. Walking into Maria, I hadn’t heard anything of the artists except Jelinek’s Loop-finding-jazz-records and a few mp3s from Machinefarbiek’s website.

I had no idea who Efterklang were; I thought they might have been some cerebrally dark man-band I’d seen at the Volksbühne last year. But that all went to wash when they came out on stage in suspenders, looking like the droogs from A Clockwork Orange, if those same droogs went to conservatory and had happy, stable home lives instead of a forced exposure to Mozart and a penchant for ultra-violence.

Their set brought to mind the kind of abused words advertising copy has long robbed from legitimate human experience — mesmerizing, joyous songs rich in detail and played with feeling, not an arch hipster pose in sight, the whole band clearly enjoying their music and each other, returning, apparently, from a long hiatus to woo a crowd that only grew in size and appreciation as the night wore on, this the most effusive display of any kind from Berliners I’d ever seen.

The eight piece band took in fractured, rich laptop, xylophones, Grizzly-Bear-esque six-part choral harmonies, bowed saw, dual percussion, violin, humility, horns, piano and guitars, each song played with a melodic sensibility more light than dark, but never predictable, never allowing its open-eyedness to calcify into twee, the kind of thing post-rock might have been if it kept pushing the envelope, eschewing any tendencies toward overblown heart-pumping soundtrackery, the songs ranging from wave-like ambience to head-nodding syncopated breakdowns, turning on a dime without a false step, the band seemingly as surprised and ecstatic as the rest of us. For the encore, the now-exhausted band came back on and gave it up once more, the trombone player and violinists jumping to the front of the stage and beating out frantic rhythms on the guard rails.

Unfortunately, a kind of gravity pulled us back towards shitty jobs and warm beds before the Groupshow came on, us antipodeans still unaccustomed to the Berlin practice of beginning things when the body temperature is at its lowest. Still, heading out into the stiff wind coming off the Spree, we were sated, now knowing a little better how to get home.  

Originally Published here.

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