Knowing that this will be the last A L’armé!, you enter the festival grounds, a little wistfully. Stumbling straight into musicians (Paal Nilssen-Love waving from afar), record dealers (Gerd Busse from No Man’ Land) and festival directors (Louis Rastig), who are all very relaxed at the wonderful location, the Radialsystem directly on the Spree river. Everyone - especially the audience - seems to want to enjoy the festival one last time. Even the weather is perfect (not as brutal as in summer 2018, when you were almost barbecued in the halls).
A L’armé! has not really been a stabilization or confirmation machine of what was already known, as the festival’s liner notes say. Maybe it was like that at the very beginning. Rastig and Karina Mertin, his partner in crime in the program design, have always sought new paths, allowed uncertainties, created movement. The program always wanted cross-connections between music and audiovisual art, the music should create collaborations and encounters between different, challenging styles. Uncertainty was the program.
This can best be seen in the audience: it is more international and diverse
than ever. You can hear French, Italian, English anyway, Polish, Japanese,
the audience is younger than at comparable festivals. This is all thanks to
Rastig and Mertin.
On the first day, the focus was to be on noise and electronics, as it turned out. The day began with a double concert by Leila Bordreuil, who performed on the cello and various electronic devices, and Steffi Narr/Oliver Steidle and Saou TV. Bordreuil immediately delivered a thoughtfully structured set that began with lots of feedback and drones. It quickly became clear that she was expanding the possibilities of her cello not through playing techniques, but primarily through volume and noise. When she then switched from Tangerine Dream-esque ambient techno passages to shrill, fiddling noise, strongly reminiscent of a brutal version of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, it was too much for some festival-goers. They possibly joined the wine bar on the first floor. Bordreuil finally let her piece literally implode and then returned to the drones from the beginning. All in all, a clear, cleverly structured performance.
Steffi Narr on guitar, Olli Steidle on drums and Saou TV as V-Jane then
directly followed Bordreuil’s performance. For their performance at A
L’armé!, the two musicians collaborated for the first time with multimedia
artist Saou TV, who expanded the musical dialog into the visual dimension
with live projections. However, the techno effect of the first performance
was reduced to almost zero by Steidle’s drums, especially as they sounded
very tinny and reverberant. Nevertheless, this project also focused on noise
and electronics; there were constant drones in the background that form the
necessary surfaces for improvisations. The improvisation in the first part
was structured by three recurring chords that Narr constantly incorporated.
However, when she brought the guitar to the fore, you can hear echoes of
Sonny Sherrock’s playing or that of Ava Mendoza. The second part of the
performance was then much more contemplative, Narr used the violin bow and
the visuals by Saou TV lost the icy coldness and comic quality of the first
part in favor of alienated images of nature and clouds.
Then the audience had to move from the hall to the auditorium to see
Antumbra. Elias Stemeseder and Christian Lillinger could be heard on their
regular instruments (keyboards and drums) as well as on electronics - the
common denominator of the first evening with noise. Sampling, serialism and
film music all play a role in Stemeseder’s and Lillinger’s performances.
Their pieces, created on drums and piano, various keyboards, spinet,
synthesizers and samplers, unfold in disharmonious progressions, through
rhythms that always seem to disassemble themselves. As a continuation of
their previous projects Umbra and Penumbra (respectively: shadow and half-shade), Stemeseder and Lillinger go one step further with their latest work
Antumbra (pre-shade). Lillinger often crumbled Stemeseder’s loops, their music
was brittle, blatantly abstracted compared to the two performances before,
there was much less noise to be heard, the approach being a much more subtle
one. Their music also had an unmistakable psychedelic character, there were
echoes of Krautrock (Faust) and references to early Pink Floyd, AMM and last
but not least Sun Ra. If you needed a label, crazy space music on
drum’n’bass would perhaps fit the bill. Christian Lillinger was almost
unstoppable, nothing could keep him on his drum seat, he kept jumping up,
jerking left and right. His twirls happened at the speed of light, it was
hard to believe that there was no machine at work here. The set was
definitely an early highlight of the festival.
Back in the hall, the main act of the evening followed: Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino, who was a guest at the first A L'armé! festival with Peter Brötzmann, performed together with baritone saxophonist Sofía Salvo and Paal Nilssen-Love, who has become a regular festival guest over the years. One could expect brutal noise attacks alternating with unpredictable outbursts (a Haino specialty) from the Japanese-Argentinean-Norwegian collaboration. The wall of amplifiers behind Haino already indicated enormous volume - and you weren’t disappointed. Nilssen-Love’s set was augmented by several gongs and Salvo struggled to combat these two monsters with her sax, but by initially taking on more of a bassist’s role, this was hardly noticeable. Haino was the star of the evening, feedbacking and droning, but also letting the Hendrix out at times (“Foxy Lady“). Salvo finally stands up to it and shows that she can also play the fire blower. In the second part of the set, Haino sings more, the trio shows a softer, almost tender side that would be very suitable for a Tarantino film. All in all, the three delivered a noisy orgy of metal, drone rock, free jazz, Japanese pop, Tibetan meditation music and sheer madness. A worthy end to the first day.
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