A rather unusual and sui generis occasion finds the Austrian artist playing a date in Florence for the International Feel Festival (which had already hosted Alva Noto and would go on to feature Carter Tutti, Nurse With Wound and others): a live score for a silent film originally released in 1927, "Berlin: Symphony of a Great City" by Walter Ruttmann. This work assembles, in a frenetic collage, the civilized life of the German metropolis from a perspective that was experimental for its time. The film was structured entirely like a musical, or rather orchestral, piece, following the city's characteristic moments through various crescendos and intermediate passages: its subway, its factories, the railway, the restaurants, the shop windows, the traffic, the marching troops, the workers heading into work, and so on. A film that could distill into images the sound of labor and of becoming, in a rational and lyrical quest for expressive force, forever caught between Bach and Wagner.
Beneath the monochrome projection, Fennesz built up a synthetic, granular, highly metallic bed of sound, over which he grafted distorted, saturated guitar riffs. A white noise that didn't precisely follow the images, but laid down a parallel line of interpretation.
The syncretism between images and sounds achieved a fully contextualized totality, in which improvisation and feedback fed autonomously off the frames and their rhythm. Rather than a simple live score, with its citations and its linear, carbon-copy emotionality, Christian's performance was an interpretation, a metabolizing of the film's already-musical rhythm.
He thus brought a film up to date, one that still holds up today thanks to its mechanical realism and its organic pulse.
The night's final encore, coming at the close of Act V, felt more like a tribute to the audience than a coherent extension of what came before, offering an abstract, conceptual window of thought well suited to the museum where we were all gathered, with its giant statues and irregular spaces.
Ride the wave of great music
Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.
This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by OndaRock Staff, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Latest live reports
original design & development by
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
Edoardo M. Cappuccio
redesign by
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta
Gabriele Brombin
Anna Quaranta