Berlin Atonal

Where most European cities have the rising vaults of cathedrals, Berlin has its cavernous, defunct industrial spaces, many of which live on as clubs and performance venues. In their afterlife, they are not dissimilar to churches, but in place of swaying censers, fog machines spill smoke through the concrete halls, the cloudy density cut through with spotlights rather than the beaming sun. Berlin takes partying seriously, and Atonal, one of the city’s foremost experimental music festivals, continues this tradition as nothing short of a sacred rite. Though, since its 1982 inception, it has been known as a locus for experimental electronic sound, the festival is also an all-night rave. Its multi-stage show takes place in Kraftwerk, a massive, west Berlin power plant built at the same time the Wall was being erected. For most of its history it heated the homes and businesses of Berlin Mitte, but now, for five nights every August, its hollowed-out recesses house screenings, installations and concerts. For the techno-noise devotee, the festival is an exhilarating combination of established acts and upcoming talent. There is also something left over for the traditional experimental music fan, if such an oxymoron exists. Amid cultish-titled acts like Pact Infernal and the grinding syncopation of ambient techno, the performances that stood out were the ones that didn’t take themselves too seriously—in particular, Powell and Wolfgang Tillmans and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. An exception was the collaboration between Fis and Renick Bell, whose live programming set was dry enough to avoid the mysticism prevalent in the ecstatic experience of Berlin club culture.

The festival opened with a nod to its avant-garde roots before it launched into a week of electronic noise. On the opening night works by Romanian composers Iancu Dumitrescu and the late Ana-Maria Avram were performed by pianist Reinhold Friedl, best known for employing experimental playing techniques that utilize the piano’s interior. The aggressively percussive performances were accompanied by electronic drones derived from pre-recorded noise and live mixing, resulting in a sound that lay somewhere between early experimentalism and the industrial dystopia that formed the larger part of the festival. Despite a lineage tracing back to the process-oriented explorations of John Cage, the music seems to have reified into a style complete with its own symbolisms and connotations. Friedl’s performance led directly into Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Oktophonie, an eight-channel electronic work that forms a part of his operatic cycle titled Licht (1977–2003). There couldn’t have been a more fitting launch to a festival steeped in apocalyptic pseudo-religious tropes. Stockhausen’s mythological opera is firmly situated in the grand gesture of German tradition, particularly that of the Gesamtkunstwerk, where multiple artistic forms are combined to create a “total art work,” best typified by Richard Wagner.

“Wagnerian” is an apt description of Atonal, whose glut of theatrics, volume and venues was in itself a Gesamtkunstwerk. In addition to the two stages and the subterranean Tresor, one of Berlin’s most famous nightclubs, the other two on-site clubs, Ohm and Globus, played all night, while the power plant’s Schaltzentrale (Control Centre) functioned as a “quiet” room with beanbag chairs and a soft ambient soundscape. Overall, the atmosphere was imposing, the mood dead serious, and for this reason the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was refreshing with its tongue-in-cheek performances that made fun as much as they had fun. The group of 65+ British gentlemen created the soundtracks to many BBC television and radio shows, including the original Dr. Who. Unlike many of the artists, who performed live composition, the Radiophonic Workshop produced a more traditional set where they featured short pieces interspersed with audience interaction. They were, however, anything but square. Their use of electronic tropes—whirrs, beeps and buzzes— was as ironic as it was well-crafted. Wolfgang Tillmans, performing with Powell, stood out for a similar reason: a sense of humour, short numbers and audience interaction. In a languid German accent, Tillmans repeated halting phrases as if remixed from other songs. His visuals broke the trend of moody abstraction so typical of the other performances, with his screening images of funny-looking puppies and at one point the clumsily skewed video of a running tap.

The festival as a whole was a haptic rather than aural experience. The volumes were so impressive and the pitches so extreme that the boundaries of the body seemed to dissolve into varying intensities of vibration. The set from Renick Bell and Fis, though also featuring a complex system of halting clangs, came off as more analytical, and, true to the early experimentalists, gave the audience a glimpse into the artist’s process-oriented approach. John Cage envisioned scores not as notation representing what a piece is to sound like, but as a set of instructions for the performers. In Bell’s case, through a practice of live coding and algorithmic composition, he writes instructions for sounds themselves. As he types, he projects his coding for the audience to watch, giving his work a direct sense of cause and effect—something many of the Atonal performances, cloaked in visual theatrics as they were, lacked.

Mentioning the films screened during the festival is to risk relegating them to an afterthought, but since each suffered a soundtrack of dense techno, their function was simply that. An exception were the screenings on two evenings, an hour and a half before the music started. The diverse mix reached as far back as 1929, and of note was Polish animator Julian Józef Antonisz, whose darkly funny shorts from the ’60s and ’70s were made by drawing directly onto film. Thereafter, videos and films continued to be projected throughout Kraftwerk, some on screens and others directly on the rough concrete walls.

As an intense experience often saturated in quasi-spiritual pathos, Atonal can thrill just as easily as it can numb. You have to carefully pick and choose what to see, though it means taking in a fraction of what the festival has to offer. Nevertheless, the selection is big enough to interest both a cerebral audience and those who come just to dissolve into some dark electronic bliss. ❚

The 2017 Berlin Atonal festival took place at Kraftwerk Berlin from August 16 to August 20, 2017.

Dagmara Genda is an artist and writer living in Berlin.