Friday the 2nd of december I’ve been to Maastricht for Audioscope 6, an initiative of Intro in Situ.
Were playing: Asra (Holland), Wilhelm Von Trippenhoffen (Holland) and Asmus Tietchens (Germany). Based on the info I got my prognose was as follows: Asra: boring serious stuff, Wilhelm Von Trippenhoffen: big fun, Asmus Tietchens: close eyes sleep a bit. This pretty much turned out to be the case.
Asra were two serious looking guys behind a table, one doing something with a moog, and the other one doing something electro-accoustic with a piano-harp and blowing in an odd-looking stereomike. Throughout the entire gig, which lasted at least 40 minutes their facial expression never changed, except for a faint smile during the fade out (!) at the end. The music can best be described as ambient drones, I wouldn’t call it “broken music” at all – the newsletter I got said “they feel the need to perform in some kind of theatrical setting where the visual element connects with the aural element” but I didn’t really see a visual element during the show, so maybe something went wrong, or I didn’t look hard enough.
Wilhelm Von Trippenhofen was fun (he was in fact the reason why I came over to Maastricht in the first place) and surprising at the same time. Frontal nudity smoking a joint through his nose, his ear and his ass, greeting the audience as a German avantgarde kunstler would do, followed by 3 cut-up coverattempts, including Queen and Bob Dylan. All in all his performance lasted 7 minutes, but had more body than Asra and Asmus put together, and was utterly absurd forming an ironic and refreshing counterweight to all the seriousness of their sets. His biography reads as follows: “After its doubtful popdebut ‘Mambo step und other lieder’ (1975) Wilhelm von Trippenhofen (1972-1999) built up an extensive oeuvre of, as he says it itself: ‘ wichtige partiturliteratur for very important people avec Kopfschmerzen ‘. Since his tragic dead in 1999 he has acted with The Royal Philharmonica Orchestra or Emlichheim.” The URL I’m referring to is that of Los Dansing Queenc, a site that hasn’t been updated since a long time. I’m not sure if Los Dansing Queenc still exist – till now I’ve only seen shows of him as lead singer of Thuth. Soon on display in a living near you!
Speaking about Asmus: his bio looks rather impressing and, like the Dutch “Bekaert Staaldraad” Dick Raaijmakers (who back in the sxities was pioneering electronic music in Holland) he claims that his first encounter with experimental music was when one night, as a kid (he is born in 1947), he was fiddling his radio under his bedsheets and accidently tuned into a radiobroadcast of one of Stockhausens’ compositions. Compare that with Trippenhofens’ bio and one can only conclude life is indeed absurd. During his performance Asmus sat behind a mixing table and basically mixed three CD’s that he had brought with him. Live aspect was almost nill, and after a while you kinda figured out what sound came from which CD (one with electronic glitches and twitches, one with synthesiserdrones and one with dry strokes, as a cupboard tumbling over). The effect it had on the audience was that of a boring lecture: some were couragous enough to leave in the 30th minute, others either fell asleep or slid into an hypnotised state of lethargy. Some people actually like being in the latter state. I’m pretty sure there are some Asmus or Asra records out there that I would probably like, but performance-wise Asmus, like Asra, is one of those band or people that are far too focused on sound and in a live situation have trouble truly reaching out to the audience as all their attention goes to the creation of a sonic bubble, an aural world hoovering some 2 meters above the audience.
A neat aural detail btw was the projector showing a slide eaten by fungus: it produced a rather interesting sound throughout all 3 sets. Playing on the way back was “dissecting-table”, a CDr of Gerald Fiebig and Pille Weibel from 2003.