A L`armé! XII Finale (Day 3)

By Martin Schray

The last day of the twelfth and final A L’armé! festival was all about Monika Döring, an icon of Berlin’s cultural life. The German daily newspaper taz called her the “soul of the party“, Karina Merin claimed she was “the mother of Berlin’s experimental music“. Döring became legendary as the concert organizer of the Loft in the famous Metropol club in the 1980s. She died in May at the age of 87. Visitors to the festival knew her because her make-up and outfits immediately caught the eye. She also seemed to know everyone - and everyone knew her. Now pictures of her hung everywhere and photos were projected onto the screens as a tribute to Döring’s invaluable influence. Many of her favorite acts came together to create an evening of music in her spirit. The final evening was curated by her longtime friend Karina Mertin, who proclaimed the evening’s motto in her announcement - “Long Live Monika!“ - in her announcement.

One of Döring’s favorite acts in recent years has been the hÄK/Danzeisen duo. Bernd Norbert Würtz alias hÄK operates modular synthesizers and self-soldered circuits. Philipp Danzeisen plays drums augmented with triggers and sensors. Ultimately, this duo is something like the philosophy of the festival in recent years. The classic free jazz duo with sax and drums (i.e. melody and rhythm) has been shifted towards electronics and rhythm, meaning textures and percussion. In this duo the electronics are crass and shrill (a reminiscence of the first day of this year’s festival), there were initially short snippets that pop up and whizz through the room, only to quickly disappear again like evil spirits that have gone astray. Sirens, kamikaze planes, full-brake cars, rotors, gongs, echoes, blows on metal, permissive ricochets - the duo offered all of this that night. A promising start in the evening. 

Even though Monika Döring liked electronic sounds, she remained attached to rock music - as long as it was uncompromising in attitude, energetic and massive in sound, like that of Caspar Brötzmann. The Wuppertal guitarist and bassist already was a guest at previous festivals and initially played a solo set before bassist Farida Amadou joined him. Brötzmann transferred the Hendrix approach he used on guitar to the bass, using trills, feedback and harmonics and hiding small melodies behind the dark surfaces. With Farida Amadou, a portion of funk and funk was added, especially through the use of a wah-wah pedal. This gave the music rhythmic shifts - e.g. accelerations and delays. Monika Döring would have loved it.

The musician of the evening who was most closely associated with Monika Döring was certainly Gudrun Gut. She was one of the first members of Einstürzende Neubauten in the early 1980s, was active at the Geniale Dilletanten festival and founded the bands Mania D, Malaria! and Matador. The central platform for most of her activities is the label Monika Enterprise, which is not called that for nothing. As an overture, Gut presented a mix of folk music sounds, pop, accordion samples and New Wave - it almost sounded like a modern mass. But then it continued with techno and disco house, with echoes of the 1980s (Malaria! and D.A.F.) - my very young seatmate called it hopelessly old-fashioned. But the audience gladly accepted the invitation to dance and the light show supported this, so that it looked as if the whole hall was jumping. Gut herself is well aware of the pop music approach of her gig and one wondered whether she was not the real exception in all this weird, unconventional music. In any case, she delivered a stringent 30-minute set, which the audience celebrated with lots of applause. 

 

Then you really had to hurry to get a good seat for the next set (Sven-Åke Johansson on drums and Jan Jelinek on modular synthesizer). In view of a packed program, this was a real point of criticism. The audience was chased back and forth between the two venues, as they were not allowed to take drinks into the Hall, but had to make sure they had water due to the poor ventilation in the smaller Saal. Musically, it was once again a clash of electronics and drums, but completely different from the first set of the evening, which was mainly due to Johansson’s lively drumming. The man is one of the central protagonists of European free jazz of the 1960s, and at over 80 years of age he’s still active in a wide variety of contexts and collaborations. Johansson has been playing together with Jan Jelinek, a kindred spirit in the field of electronic music, since 2017. The duo unites two generations and two sound languages that share a common sensibility. Johansson is imbued with the anarchic spirit of jazz and also relies on obscure, sometimes absurd ideas, while Jelinek knows how to constantly re-contextualize the microtextures of rhythms and sound. It is astonishing how elegantly Johansson, who only got on stage with the help of a walking stick, can play. At the same time, Jelinek gave the music plenty of room to breathe and Johannson plenty of room for free development. Perhaps this duo is the best example of what A L'armé! has achieved over the years: The combination of the first generation of free jazz with a new generation of electronic and noise artists. One of my festival highlights!

Back in the bigger Hall, there was a duo set of two artists of the raster label - Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender a.k.a. Byetone. Here, too, there is a connection to Monika Döring. In the late 80s, she was interested in music from the GDR and came across the avant-garde pop of AG Geige. In the early 90s, AG Geige developed into a nucleus for electronic music: the label raster, which continues to have a significant influence on the global techno scene. Frank Bretschneider and Olaf Bender (both raster artists) are exemplary for this development and were among Monika Döring’s favorite acts. Bretschneider’s gig initially was reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, the music was almost without beats, but there were heavy basses that made the floor vibrate. The whole thing reminded me of hailstones hitting the ground. As there was no audiovisual support, the focus was clearly on the music. Only towards the end did the beats come in, providing a perfect transition to Byetone’s gig, which was generally a nod towards Berlin’s club culture. Parts of the festival took place at the famous Berghain Club in the past - and these two gigs would certainly have fitted in better there. The hall emptied out at first, but then filled up again towards the end of the gig - another sign of club culture. Musically, Byetone’s set was interesting, but also tiring.

Keiji Haino, who performed one of his legendary solo sets, concluded the concert in the hall. Pure expression between meditation, ritual and departure into the unknown - that’s what it was about. It was a real break with the two techno sets before, because Haino initially worked without beats, it was more performance art than music. When he used his voice, you could listen to a person in extreme agony, at brute volume, with frequencies that almost exceeded what was reasonable. But then he would seamlessly switch back to Japanese avant-garde pop as if it were the easiest thing in the world. He also works with blatant dissonances that overwhelm parts of the audience. When he switches to the guitar and plays very simple, open chords for a long time, it is again reminiscent of Japanese folk tunes. Haino showed the full range of his spectrum, especially when he finally stepped on the distortion and brought the crass sounds back in through the back door.

Grischa Lichtenberger, Robert Lippok/Lucas Gutierrez and Electric Indigo concluded the festival in the Saal, but I decided to call it a day with Keiji Haino.he last evening was a worthy farewell for the festival and for Monika Döring. A L'armé! rarely made it easy, that's what made the festival so exciting. We will all miss it. 

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See: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3