Two legitimate responses to the excesses of 21st century capitalist imperialism and its attendant populist gaslighting include contemplative withdrawal or confrontational fury. The music by the artists at the 15th edition of the three day Transmissions festival (Tagline: “Exploring the sound”) in Ravenna, Italy provided potent examples of both.
In the foyer of Teatro Rasi, the festival venue, was a small exhibition of mobile phone photos taken by Adriano Zanni. These are shots of the petrochemical plant in Ravenna’s Piallassa Valley which Michelangelo Antonioni used as the setting for his celebrated film ‘Red Desert’ (Il Desert Rosso) in 1964. Writing about this film for The Village Voice in 2017, Bilge Ebiri states that Antonioni’s vision “can never be reduced to simple laments for the spiritual pollution of the world.” Zanni quotes the Italian director as saying that “even factories can be equipped with great beauty” and his ‘ Red Desert Chronicles’ portfolio is presented in romanticized terms as “a theatre of dreams and hopes, toil and work, a stage of majestic grandeur.”
Also playing on a loop in the lobby area of Teatro Rasi was a ten minute film by Célia Hay , a French born artist who is currently a PhD student at the University of Dallas, Texas. Her film takes its title, and derives its soundtrack, from ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’ an immersive three hour composition by Kali Malone (featuring Stephen O’Malley and Lucy Railton) which Pitchfork praised as her “microtonal mission statement.”
Hay’s Super 8mm film was shot during the 2020 lockdown in the ruins of a hydraulic tower and engine house in Birkenhead Docks at the Wirral peninsula in North West England. This grade II listed building was constructed in 1868 but was damaged during bombing in WWII and has been derelict for over 50 years. Hay calls it “an empty chamber of industrial energy.” Plans for redevelopment and redefinition of the site have, to date, come to nothing. The latest scheme which proposed turning it into “a world class centre of excellence” was deemed unviable in 2023.
Images of these abandoned locations and semi-desolate landscapes provide powerful visual metaphors for our increasingly sanitized modern world in which the “mind-forg’d manacles” of industrialization are gradually being replaced by digitalization and artificial intelligence. In ‘centres of excellence’ nothing physical is produced but instead they offer recreational pursuits for holidaymakers and leisure seekers. Disused buildings become haunted spaces for a past that exists as a living memory for some but it more frequently rendered in nostalgic terms for others conscious that factory work is no longer central to working class lives and culture.
These images were the backdrop to the modern electronic music at the festival curated by Kali Malone. Of the performers, only Britain’s Lucy Raiton relied solely on the sound of a conventional musical instrument, playing and caressing her cello to produce languorously extended bow strokes. In the context, hers was a radical gesture since the other artists were significantly more plugged in and wired up.
Audiences experienced music tailored for the head rather than the body. Beats were not so much broken as unceremoniously blasted to oblivion. The sounds explored were of a type that is more likely to clear a dancefloor than fill it. For example, the harsh noise sets of Danish artist Puce Mary and Brooklyn-based Leila Bordreuil were reminders that music doesn’t necessarily have to be reassuringly hummable or overtly affirmative.
I sometimes find it hard to quantify what pleasure I draw from being exposed to this kind of challenging sonic excess. If I were to be asked to summarise the appeal I would call it ‘transporting’. It takes my mind to other places even though these imaginary destinations may not always entirely comfortable zones. This state of unease is part of the point, I think. One time you could count on ambient music or post-rock to evoke cosy images of nature like those found in forests or oceans. In times like ours, where urban decay is the norm and the threat of climate disaster looms over the planet, the connection between harsh noise and haunted spaces makes perfect sense. This is why the analogue photos of Adriano Zanni’s and the eeriness of Célia Hay’s short film were so perfectly attuned to the festival’s ethos.
One of the performers on day two was Swedish composer Maria W. Horn who has been called a ‘spectralist’. This is an interesting title to work under since it conjures up the thought of ghosts (‘spectres’) as well as linking to the category of spectral music in which the sonic stretching of time is a common component. In a spoken word piece during her performance, Horn declares: “There no antidote to the opium of time.” This reveals that the transient nature of her music is uppermost in her mind while suggesting that time might also be a kind of drug.
In a public interview with Kali Malone at the festival, an Italian journalist’s first question related to thoughts and preoccupations with time that Malone’s music evokes for her. In a Guardian interview, Malone said of the epic ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’ “I want to create an immersive environment so that when it’s over, you don’t know how much time has passed.” Her music certainly challenges the attentive capacity of listeners. In this sense, a link might be made to the concept of highly focused listening developed by the late American composer Pauline Oliveros which continues now after Oliveros’ death in 2016 through the Centre for Deep Listening.
In slower moments of Kali Malone’s music there is a meditative, trance-like quality. As a conclusion to the festival she gave a flavour of this in a world premiere performance with Glasgow-born Drew McDowell . McDowell arrived in Italy from his New York home with his own ghostly accomplices as, according to the festival programme, “he mines the hallucinatory spaces that exist between reality and celestial otherness.”
All this conjuring up of spectral presences and out of body sensory experiences suggest spiritual (though not necessarily religious) states of mind. This makes it ironic that earlier this year, Civitas, a right-wing Catholic fundamentalist group should take exception to the Kali Malone’s music on the spurious grounds that she is somehow “profaning the sacred”. In May 2023, Malone was due to perform at the 17th Century Church Saint-Cornély in the French town of Carnac but this was cancelled by the local authority after protests.
The motives behind such an extreme reaction were undoubtedly political rather than religious. Claims of profanity are a smoke-screen to mask more sinister attempts to deny free expression and impose a narrow definition of what is permissible on sacred sites. The substrata of faux outrage and violence underlying these events in France serve to justify the noisier, more confrontational aspects of experimental electronic music that compliment, rather than contradicts, the quiet reflectiveness of Kali Malone’s drones.
The abstract expressionistic nature of the music at Transmissions XV meant that there were no tidy narratives or concessions to the mainstream. Nevertheless, the artists embodied a community of sorts by collectively challenging the real or imagined boundaries determined by conventional notions of good taste and easy listening. As serious as your life.
