aufgemischt! @ CTM.10 Blog

From January 28 to February 7 the CTM.10 (club transmediale) will take place in Berlin. Through the whole time, aufgemischt! will keep you up-to-date and will share some first impressions directly from the festival with you. TEXT & PHOTOS: Thomas Vorreyer

Samstag, 30.01.2010, 21 Uhr: Der erste vollständige Tag des CTM.10 hat uns erst nach Sonnenaufgang wieder in unsere Betten fallen lassen und deshalb folgt mit Verspätung eine kleine Rekapitulation der zurückliegenden Nacht.

Mit gleich drei Bühnen wartete das WMF auf, wobei die dritte mit Andy Blake hinter dem DJ Pult unter einigen Publikumsschwankungen. So war der Raum etwa wie leer gefegt als in den ersten Morgenstunden sich alles vor die Hauptbühne drängte, als Janine Roston alias Planningtorock (Bild oben) ihr neues Album Planet 9 live vorstellte. Eindringlich und mit allerhand Mystik aufgeladen zog die Künstlerin die Anwesenden regelrecht in ihren Bann während hinter ihr in slow motion u.a. eine Blonde Frau ihre Haare um sich wirbelnd durch einen Wald sprang – wohl auch wegen solcher Visualisierungskonzepte und einiger Klanganalogien kollaborierte Planningtorock zuvor mit The Knife und Mt. Sims beim Soundtrack zur Darwin-Oper Tomorrow, in a Year. Mit der Show von Karin Dreijer-Anderssons Kunstfigur Fever Ray kann sich Planningtorock jedenfalls durchaus messen lassen.

Bereits zuvor hatten übrigens Felix Martin und Al Doyle von Hot Chip, mit denen Roston auch für die Aufnahmen von Planet 9 zusammengearbeitet hatte, am selben Ort aufgelegt.

Im Obergeschoss begann zur selben Zeit die Italians Do It Better! Nacht auf der zweiten Bühne. Den Anfang machten wie gewohnt Desire mit Sängerin Megan, Schlagzeuger Natty und Johnny Jewel am Synthesizern, gefolgt von Jewels zweiter Band Glass Candy mit Ida No, während Mike Simonetti vor und nach den Auftritten auflegte. Wurden die Megan und Ida noch zuvor vom Festivalpersonal – laut Eigenaussage – als “American princesses” bezeichnet, so wurden sie jetzt vom Publikum umso euphorischer Empfangen. Jewel hatte seinen Beats noch etwas kräftiger gestaltet und die beiden Damen wandelten die angestaute Wut ausnahmslos in eine energetische und agile Performance um. Da scheint es kaum verwunderlich, dass sich die Italians-Crew mit ihrer beinahe halbjährlichen Reisen nach Berlin eine lebhafte Fanbase erspielt hat.

Ein ausführlicher Bericht folgt in den nächsten Tagen samt zweier Interviews mit Ida No und Mike Simonetti. Im Anschluss findet sich die Fotogalerie zur Nacht und das Line-Up für den heutigen Abend im WMF.

30.1. CTM @ WMF
Floor1 in collaboration with Man Recordings & Melt Booking: Sinden (UK), Drop the Lime (US), Daniel Haaksman (DE), Ku Bo & Joyce Muniz (AT), Schlachthof Bronx (DE), DJ Manaia (PT), VJ Sniper (IL/DE)
Floor 2 in collaboration with Surefire: Brackles (UK), Falty DL (US), Paul Spymania (UK), Loops Haunt (UK), Rustie (UK)
Lounge: Dubco (UK)

Friday, January 29, 8 pm: Could you imagine a real festival without mud? Hardly likely I guess, so even in January Berlin welcomes the CTM.10 and its international audience with tons of mud slush on its slippery pavements. Too bad one missed to bring a pair of gumboots!

After the CTM was already yesterday night officially openend at HAU2 with performances by Jacob Kirkegaard, Transforma and Hiroaki Umeda – in cooperation with the CONTEXT Festival “Anästhesie der Gefühle” -, the festival starts it’s programme at the former Hungarian cultural center .HBC with the A MAZE. Interact festival (see above), that aims to combine music and art with the electronic video game culture.

Around 6 pm the place is still occupied by bustling construction works, so I use my time to be one of the first persons ever to wage trying out the salientsound project. Dressed in a rubber tunic and standing on a plateau in a dark room a song from Atom TM’s new album is played to my ears through a stereo system, but from the time to time parts of the track, too, are transmitted onto my neural cortex via ultrasonic by a computer system named PURE (Pulsed Ultrasound Remote Engine) – so I can hear sounds which, considered in a physical sense, aren’t existing as sounds. During the experiment the probands have to press a red buzzer in front of them whenever they think that PURE got switched on.

Although I am always right each of the four times I press the button, I can merely feel any difference between the acoustic and the ultrasonic signal. Indeed PURE seems to be an interesting system with great opportunities, so expect some proper coverage on it on this site around Monday.

Leaving the dark chamber I follow the corridors to the various video game art of A.MAZE. One wall is covered categorization and chronicle of popular music video games installations from the electronic Stone Age to now, while the festival visitors can act as the Beatles in a current commercial video game or play karaoke in a shower next door.

From the variety installations especially two should be highlighted: The first is the Spatial Soundsculpture, where you create melodies and sounds with a video camera reading black-and-white pixel codes – like the qode code used for cellphones - on a white wall, the second one is called Ludic Sound Play (see above), where you lead a ray over a 2D-matrix, on which enlightened frustums embodying the instruments / melody sequence are placed.

Just on 8 pm I leave the .HBC heading to the next S-Bahn station to go to Hallesche Ufer. On my way I pass the building at Spandauer Straße 2, where further installations and events of the CTM.10 are located. But my way goes to the HAU2 at Hallesche Ufer, where the CTM.10 Opening Night Reprise with a rerun of last night’s programme is about to start.

The first performance is by Danish sound artists Jacob Kirkegaard and it’s simply fantastic: Kirkegaard went to the sand deserts of Oman to find the so called singing (or booming) sand there, which he’s now presenting in his performance Sabulation with some fascinating black-and-white video recordings of moving sand scarps at dunes. He backs these clips with sometimes loud and hollow droning, sometimes rustling and roaring audio recordings from the same place. Again and again the spectator’s eyes are looking for a steady consistent spot in a sea of falling sand to hold fast onto, but within seconds the just now secure piece get’s hit by a new stream and falls deep into the abyss while the sound is menacingly rising. It’s an endless cirlcle in which even the most beautiful sand reliefs get deflate after some time and the scarp is throwing constantly changing shadows like human faces on the screen.

Seldom both the beauty and the transience of the Sein were as stirringly reproduced as they get here by Kirkegaard with some simple grains of sand representing mankind.

Operators by Berlin’s art collective Transforma follows and creates to massive basses a hectic flood of pictures, in which a chaotic Pong game vanishs into a half-documentary view of a masked person performs with neon lamps (the Pong bars) and variously moves, examines and throws away coloured glass and metal sheets.

The program ends with Hiroaki Umeda’s Adapting for Distortion. At 11 pm the night program at the WMF will kick off with Planet 9 and Italians Do It Better!, see the complete line-up below:

Floor 1: Planningtorock (UK/DE), Felix Martin & Al Doyle (Hot Chip, Dj Set, UK), Jackson (DJ Set, FR), Mount Sims (US)
Floor 2: Glass Candy (US), Desire (US), Mike Simonetti (US), Noot (CA/DE), DJ TV DiSKO (CA/NZ)
Lounge: Andy Blake (UK)

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