“The past is now part of my future, the present is well out of hand”.
(‘Heart And Soul’ – Joy Division)
Netmage started 10 years ago in the millennial year when Bologna was selected as one of the 9 European cities of culture. It takes place in the heart of the city within an elegant 13th century palace. Paradoxically, although the assembled artists are at the cutting edge of experimental avant-garde sound and vision, the historic setting doesn’t seem incongruous. On the contrary, the post-everything music and images are, as the programme notes say, “never absent of references”.
These are my notes and impressions from day 2 of this three day event.
Each of the six performances I saw comprised one extended piece . None of the artists spoke or sang (unless you count humming and growling) and seem intent on maintaining a studied detachment from we mere spectators.
Amid all this cooler than thou aloofness, the warm glow from the music of Finland’s Es was the most welcome. Es is the chosen pseudonym of Sami Sänpäkkilä who ,as founder of Fonal Records, has overseen some of most original and inspired releases of the past decade. Live, as on record, Sami has more leanings towards classical music than abstract noise. From his electrical box of tricks he produces a meditation of keyboard patterns that, like the accompanying looped video of lake and branches, is built around repetition, creating a soothing yet unearthly effect.
More anonymous were Sweden’s Ectoplasm Girls (sisters Nadine and Tanya Byrne) who sit monitoring the sounds programmed into their Mac-books while ghostly black and white images confirm their stated fascination with “death, dreams and darkness”. They use a lot of mirror effects with faces and shapes morphing into each other and in one animated sequence, a black substance slowly spews out of their mouths of the girls like something out of The Exorcist. These dark visual themes continue with a solo piece by Nadine (under the name The Magic State) who produces some nice spooky reverb effects tin the style of Liz Harris (Grouper) while on the screen we watch a blindfolded naked women being pelted with dried paint balls like some bizarre initiation ritual.
In a separate , and larger, performance space I endured half hour in the sonic company of a beefy Korean, Hong Chulki whose abrasive slabs of feedback and pulverising amplification merited a public health warning. My threshold for this kind of stuff is usually quite high but I found this too much to bear and watched most of his performance from a safe distance.
After this, Aaron Dilloway -ex guitarist and tape manipulator with the uncompromising Wolf Eyes -came across as light relief. He took a while to get going but once he was up and running the pure physically of his performance was compelling. With mic wires in his mouth it was like watching someone conducting some masochistic endurance test to establish his tolerance to the noise making machinery.
The evening wound up with Italy’s very own My Cat Is An Alien (MCIAA) who are the Opalio brothers (Roberto and Maurizio) from Turin. They played a soundtrack to Roberto’s 8mm film Light_Earth_Blue_Silver wherein a 2 meter high wire alien figure is seen being dragged across the Alps. This, I read afterwards, represents “a possible symbol of existential transfiguration of the last human being on Earth”; not an interpretation that would otherwise have occurred to me. MCIAA are the only artists to use convention instruments – electric guitars and drums – although the guitars are not played in any remotely conventional manner. They are used instead like elaborate props alongside other objects from their toy box which included a multicoloured plastic drill, a pretend ray gun, a Darth Vadar lightsaber, Polaroid camera and spinning cymbals. It all looks a bit farcical but MCIAA’s processed cosmic improvisations are in earnest and they create an atmospheric dissonance that combines free jazz, ambient drone and Krautrock.
So what to make of the evening’s experience? The programme notes proclaim that the event “is searching for other worlds, other sounds and visions, respecting the tension between what has been and what takes place within us”. The ‘what takes place within us’ is in layman’s terms a reference to our emotions and to write in such an abstract manner is entirely in keeping with the detached tone of the electro-noise experimentations. These doesn’t exactly warm the soul but do a good job of soundtracking the pathos and paranoia of the modern world.
