Recent gigs – Störung Festival 8

My oficial round-up just came out on Resident Advisor , so here I will only add a few details.

Firstly, Finn of Tomland who played every day all day and then also at two additional shows around Barcelona before hand. We paid tribute to his SonuoS label by opening this weeks Cabeza de Vaca   show on Dadub with an Yves de Mey remix of Valanx.

Here is a DJ set from FLIM Open Air 2012 which shows you the kind of sound that he wielded to great effect and gets him gigs like a celebrated slot opening the Echochord club in Copenhagen and in his home town on Malmö.

 
 

The three best acts of the festival were (in no particular order).

 

Yui Onodera

Japanese ambient artist and former architect played on the opening night, mixing field recordings and cinematic tones into a shoegaze-style cloudscape. He has played and recorded with the likes of Celer and is running the Critical Path  label who are just about to release a 2CD compilation of ambient music by 15 different artists all based around the recording and manipulation of field recordings. The release comes with a 16 page booklet and features artists such as forementioned Yves de Mey, Lawrence English, Janek Schaeffer, Simon Scott (former drummer from Slowdive with releases on 12K and more) and of course Onodera himself. The CD is out 5^th June and can be bought from Whereabouts Records to begin with.

 

Mathias Delplanque

Frenchman Mathias Delplanque was one of the most difficult to pin down and therefore one of the most enduring performers of the festival. His music is both outwardly abstract and yet intensely intimate, claustrophobic even. His album “Chutes” from which the track below comes from is stunning. Released on the French Baskaru label it feels like an intense dialogue of glyphs and symbols written out like an evanescent audio story board.

 

Jacob Kirkegaard

Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard performed one of the most physical sets, alongside Mika Vainio (brute and guttural physical noise) and Francisco López (geometric sounds arranged in three dimensions). His set was a perfect complement to these two, using physical force (at times) and great spatial accuracy. At one point I actually started to get anxious almost, because I could hear the intersecting point of the sine waves in the most precise, smallest point in my head that was an unshakeable magnet of consciousness and attention. Only once he started to move it about the room and smooth it with more languid ambience did I calm down. I managed to buy his album “Imperia” recorded with Tobias Kirstein which perfectly captures some of the elements of the performance. The original was released in 2011, but the vinyl issue did not emerge until 2012 on the Posh Isolation 091 label from Denmark. The album was recorded at Barseback Nuclear Powerplant in 2004. The powerplant is located in Sweden just 20km from the Copenhagen. After years of pressure, the Danish government have finally managed to close the plant down.

 

A special prize to Czech artist Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace) who played half the set under blinding strobes with quadrophonic sound, but performed the greatest of aural tricks by weaving though the air above the audience a metal flag, that created a sound that was beyond three dimensions of space. He also performed “underwater” meaning, suspending objects and contact microphones in a tub of water. Very special indeed.