last week the Sonar festival 2009 took place in barcelona. the most obvious trend to observe was that there are much more live performances going on rather than simply djing, so lets summarize. Day 1 featured Tim Exile with a show entitled "we are the robots", where the musician was accompanied by an essemble of 4 robotic instruments.(video) later that day we watched french experimental hiphop producer Debruit who is also worth mentioning for his fine cut-up sound.

the second day got interesting when viennas Dorian Concept rocked the stage and got wobbly with Bombsquad (listern here) who in my opinion played the best dubstep-set at sonar... and it got really interesting when Ryoichi Kurokawa (video) performed an eclectic audio/visual show using four laptops.

the third and last day was one of the electronic performers. The Raster Noton showcase, featuring SND, Byetone, Atom™ and especially Alva Noto, who performed using a gigantic audiovisual live patch(max msp or homebrew i guess), was nothing less than cutting edge (video1-interface / video2). Furthermore you should check the sound of Lukid, who kept the dub-heads knodding in the dome.

At night the Animal Collective turned the stage into a big playground and brought psychedelic overkill. Followed by Beardyman (video), whose very unique way of performing is worth watching. Props also to Sinden form the UK for bringing some oldskool jungle to the sonar night.

listen:
dorian concept - sonar set
debruit - sonar set
lukid - sonar set

peaceout

if you're interested in art and especially photography there is something interesting happening over the next months; the "summer of photography" organized by kunsthalle wien in cooperation with eikon magazine starts today with a talk and discussion about "surfaces and depths" by thomas ruff - wellknown photographer and prominent graduate of the famous school of bernd and hilla becher - at 7pm.

below you find the whole program of exhibitions and talks as a pdf. that whole thing started with the exhibition of thomas ruff in "halle1" (may 21st - september 13th), ending with a show on portrait - photography as stage; robert mapplethorpe to nan goldin in "halle2" (july 3rd - october 31st). check the pdf for talks, discussions, ... might be interesting for the one or other. best, lens

download diskursfolder (german)

Some of you might have been there this weekend, Lens mentioned it in an earlier post: Into The City / Asian Village as part of the Wiener Festwochen going from 8th of may til 14th of June.

Here are some of my personal impressions:

I started my little tour on Saturday, May 23rd with a delicious snack from one of the street kitchens hosted by the Thai and Indonesian embassies at Gumpendorfer Straße in the 6th district (which was the center of asian village and closed down for automobiles the whole weekend).
At about 7pm I went to Semper Depot to see/hear a sound/dance performance by Singapur artists sonicbrat (sound), Lim Chin Huat (Motion) and Lim Woan Wen (Light). The show, which lasted about an hour featured a dark light setting with multichannel sound art / piano improvisations and a dance performance. The combination of the three worked quite well in my opinion, although I'm not much of a fan of lenghty and dreamy piano variations. That aside the performance was a success, especially the middle part, where resonances of space were fathomed out, and the ending with its unique lighting, almost turning the poles of semper depot into some kind of dark forest.
After that we went out on the street again to hear a performance by Stereotyp, Cee and AraByrd from Malaysia which was a defintive banger and got the street crowd moving pretty intense. Ranging from Dubstep to Techno to HipHop, Stereo and Cee broke genre borders once again and AraByrd found an answer to every one of their tracks.

Now to my sunday highlight which started at noon, also at Semper Depot. Some of you might have seen Daito Manabes YouTube videos already, yesterday he held a 20 minute performance with a colleague which was quite impressive to see live be honest. Called "Face Visualizer, Instrument and Copy" they hooked themselves up to electrodes which stimulate their facial muscles according to the sounds played. Here's my own short documentation, taken from the middle of the show (Daito is the guy on the right):

That's all from my side, after the performance I went out to enjoy a wonderfully sunny Vienna City sunday. Lens J. might hit you up with a more precise update this week. Stay tuned!

... pointing out corporate bigwhig misdemeanor (see my last post), here's another example: 

Sony Pictures CEO Howard Stringer supposedly hates the internet for reasons beyond our imagination as you can read in an article over at cnet.

... no comment |-(