Flussi 2015

The festival

Avellino, a small town in Campania, is the capital of the province of Irpinia. It seems that for some years now, this area has been witnessing a kind of cultural awakening, despite the countless problems gripping southern Italy. This enthusiasm, which drives the younger generations, has been bearing fruit for quite some time, but only recently have more people started to notice. One can't fail to mention MasFest or the Laceno d'Oro International Film Festival, which seems to be slowly returning to its former glory.

But above all, Avellino has Flussi – International Media Arts Festival.

The event was born from the idea of a group of people, friends, passionate about the new frontiers of electronic and digital arts in all their forms. Flussi is organized by the Magnitudo cultural association, a sort of collective/network that tries to bring together everyone interested in carrying forward this ambitious project. The first edition took place in 2009, and since then the festival has grown steadily: the network of collaborators working alongside the historic members of the Magnitudo association has expanded, support has increased, and after a lot of work the results have finally arrived. Every year Flussi proposes a theme meant to spark reflection on the influence and consequences that modern technologies have on everyday life. It offers a well-defined point of view from which to explore digital culture, spreading it to an ever-growing number of people, trying to let the human side prevail over the technological one, with the aim of getting people to communicate through technology and create a connection between the analogue BPMs of human hearts and the digital ones of machines.

It's easy to see that there's a common thread running through every edition, from the first, "Digital Transition", to the latest, held from 26 to 30 August 2015. It's a festival that doesn't just offer a remarkable number of live sets and DJ sets — this year the line-up included as many as 36 artists, whose performances were split across three notable locations: the Indoor Stage, namely the Teatro Carlo Gesualdo; the Esp Stage, that is the Casina del Principe, a piece of the city's history dating back to the era of the Caracciolo family; and finally the Main Stage, the large terrace above the "Gesualdo" offering unique views of the city, from the historic centre to the Lombard castle, all the way to the Monti Picentini regional park. At genuinely low prices (the pass cost just €20, and both the first and last day of the festival were completely free, as was the show at the Teatro Gesualdo and all the performances at the Esp Stage), Flussi offered six workshops. Among them, the most engaging was "Conduction" led by Maestro Elio Martusciello, who, conducting an orchestra made up of the most disparate instruments and without using any written score, tried to stimulate the musical creativity of its members, attempting to draw out from the Hyperuranion perfect, unchanging notes otherwise unreachable by individual musicians.

As every year, there was no shortage of installations — eight in total — the most intriguing being: "La Linea" by Mauro Ferraro, a tribute to the eponymous cartoon from the 1970s that let anyone who "played" with it become part of the cartoon world, and "Kitchen" by Rino Petroziello, which, through a blend of analogue and digital, explored the frequencies of dishes and food, trying to highlight the auditory dimension so often overlooked in the kitchen.

Flussi also pays attention to social issues: in past editions through workshops extended to the most disadvantaged groups, and this year through "Conduction", open to people and musicians with disabilities.

The essence of the seventh edition of Flussi, the international festival of electronic music and digital arts now firmly established, is captured in a single word: Realityvism. As stated on the festival's website: "Digital culture has by now been declared by many to be, if not dead, then at least in deep crisis, or effectively moved into its post- phase... It's now clear that the digital machines we use to create, communicate and expand ourselves are exactly the same ones that place us within a framework of exploitation and value extraction whose existence and boundaries we barely perceive. Realityvism, a hundred years after the theory of relativity, is instead an idea of radical realism, of an extreme materialism in which man is no longer the measure of all things, and things (if taken seriously) reveal to us the manifold singularities of the Real, a paradoxical, wild, contradictory universe-world that, in its folds, in its glitches, in its thousand planes, still offers ample room for resistance against the processes of anaesthesia and homogenization produced by the algorithms of power."

The report

It's 26 August, and the festival's opening act is just around the corner. It's 8:50pm and I'm half an hour late. Luckily I find parking just a few hundred metres from the entrance of the Teatro Carlo Gesualdo, the occasional venue. There's no crowd; the last arrivals are seated and the lights go down. The organisers had been clear: starting at 9pm sharp — they manage to run just one minute over. There won't be a recorded sell-out, but very few seats will be left empty.

Opening the first day of the festival is Herman Kolgen, an artist who lives and works in Montréal, Canada. He's a figure with a career spanning more than twenty years, known for his multimedia creations. Described in the field as "a true audiocinetic sculptor", he shapes his works with the intent of merging sound and image into a carnal, spiritual, reciprocal synthesis. The result is extraordinary, rare in quality and singular in aesthetic. His performance is introduced by an announcer who previews a set made up of three acts, with no pause between them.

The first act is "Dust", a work inspired by the photography of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, and in particular by "Élevage de poussière" from 1920. In the first 35 minutes of the performance, changes in the state of matter are explored. Pigments are suspended around a magnetic field. Chance collisions give rise to fibrous networks and composite objects, hypnotic in their complexity. Sound particles are indissolubly paired with luminous aggregates in an order of things that erases every point of reference. It's an exploration of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible. We move from images of matter in its most imperceptible dimension to the human eye, to others showing decaying objects and bodies — though clearly visible — presented from unusual perspectives. The sound categorically lacks melody and at times rhythm, a trait that also characterised the rest of the performance, except for a fleeting, illusory moment towards the end of "Dust", when the lifeless matter shown throughout the first part of the show merges with water, which seems able to bring it back to life. But the artist offers no definitive answer — perhaps there isn't one. The first act closes by bringing the viewer back to the matter shown at the start of the show, which has in turn taken shape and a kind of "life" of its own, giving rise to what might look like a cluster of X-rays.

The second act is “Aftershock”, inspired by the consequences of shifts in the form of geometric figures that no longer depend on the concept of measurement, but are tied to issues of their own deformation. The Canadian artist explores post-apocalyptic scenarios reminiscent of the landscapes of films like “Mad Max”, in which, however, no chance of survival is granted to the human race. The earth is contaminated by nuclear waste and devastated by brutal seismic events; it is the “cartography of rupture”. The structures that have outlived humanity are in decline, unstable, and where they have managed to break free from their foundations they float in the atmosphere; the planet's geo-physical balance seems to be irreparably compromised, the Earth has lost its gravity (an oddly fitting coincidence, given that the symbol of Flussi 2015 is an apple). Fifteen minutes of catastrophe.

The performance ends with “Seismik”. For this part of the show Kolgen uses software of his own creation that records magnetic fields and seismic activity, through instruments placed in front of his station, clearly highlighted, in the darkness of the stage, by the light of the projectors. The peculiarity lies in the fact that these signals are different at every live show, since they are picked up in real time. At every performance “Seismik” is always different, and the Avellino performance was characterized by signals coming from Indonesia, Honduras and Alaska. The captured signals are converted into an abstract, relentless sound. It is an inexorable and dramatic descent into the underground, into the rubble of what remains of matter and of the Earth. In this dystopian vision, the only form of life seems to come from the collision of waves generated by magnetic fields, which now dominate the planet. It is an act that invites the audience at the Teatro Gesualdo, over nearly forty-five minutes, to leap into the unknown; the Canadian plays with physical concepts, creating a cerebral and emotional tension that leaves spectators breathless.

Herman Kolgen's show, returning to the concept of “Realityvism”, was certainly the performance that most closely matched it, through a reflection that imposed no moral judgment on what the consequences of the “modern world” might be. It ends with five minutes of thunderous applause from a rapturous Gesualdo crowd, and with the artist, perhaps even a little surprised, thanking them enthusiastically.

The first day of Flussi was also the one that kicked off the performances on the Main Stage, the terrace of the Teatro Carlo Gesualdo. From 11pm, Jealous Party took the stage with their “punca”, a duo made up of Mat Pogo and Roberta WJM, formed in Florence in '95 and based in Berlin for several years now. Their live show is musically defined by experimentation and improvisation, blending funk, r&b, error music, and noise. But above all it's Matteo who grabs the audience's attention with his physicality, his dancing, his shouting and the questions he poses during the set, with which he attempts to establish a sort of dialogue with the crowd. The first day of the festival closes with the performance of SendeFlos, a trio made up of Stefano Moretti (Sender), who handles analogue synthesizers and drum machines, and the Flos duo (Stefano Castagna and Luca Formentini), who weave melodies through unusual instruments of their own creation, classic instruments and various sound-processing methods. Theirs will turn out to be the most emotional and intimate performance of the first day of Flussi 2015.

August 27th kicks off the sets at the Esp Stage. Often the festival's surprises are precisely the artists performing in the intimate courtyard of the “Casina”. On the bill are White Noise Generator, Alessandra Eramo and finally John Duncan. The latter is among the foremost exponents of “sound art” and for more than twenty years has probed the psychophysical limits of the individual through electroacoustic recordings, sound installations and performance art. His set is an existential, metaphysical inquiry. At 10pm the performances at the Main Stage are set to begin; having picked up my pass (the wristband is fantastic) and passed through the entrance gates, I head towards the stage overlooking the terrace, the floor is very spacious, so much so that the organizers thought it fitting to arrange little armchairs that almost look like an installation. Facing the terrace stands Palazzo De Conciliis, better known as the place where Victor Hugo lodged in the early 1800s; on one of its facades, which seems to have been designed ad hoc for the purpose, visuals are projected throughout the festival that literally glue onlookers to the terrace balustrade. It's the night of Gondwana, born Andrea Taeggi, who has lived in Berlin for a few years now and is also a member of Lumisokea. His set is based on improvisation, and is defined by various elements: electro-acoustic sounds, techno structures, expansive rhythms that at times accelerate. I can hear the influence of Ben Frost's work. What he creates is a dark, hypnotic atmosphere.

Right after, it's the turn of Janek Schaefer, who during his set uses modified vinyl records, live sound sources and a shruti box. This too is a live set defined by the artist's improvisation, which brings to life an evocative soundscape.

Leafcutter John is the solo project of John Burton, also a member of Polar Bear, who captures the audience's attention the moment he steps on stage. Behind him, where every artist is usually accompanied by visuals, images of his own equipment are projected instead. He makes use of a sort of Theremin 2.0 of his own design, in which the input to the machine comes not from hand movement, but from light projected onto it. He holds LED lights that seem to dance in his hands: with every change of their color and of his movements, the sound changes too. He also interacts with the audience, asking them to point their phone flashes at his equipment, and whoever was running the mixing desk didn't need to be asked twice, helping bring the Londoner's show to life through strobe lighting.

Closing the night is NHK'Koyxen, the surprise of the day. Japanese, splitting his time between Osaka and Berlin. His is a rhythmic set, built on electronic bass sounds, with a clear influence from big beat and the early-90s English scene. Everyone's dancing, and he wears 3D glasses: he must have rewatched “24 Hour Party People”.

Third day of the festival, August 28th, the most anticipated day. At the Esp Stage, Radford Electronics, Michael Vorfeld and Dave Phillips are on the bill. I can't manage to catch them all, I still don't possess the gift of ubiquity; I even check whether it's been added to the “InFlussi” app that the organizers have made available for the occasion — nothing. I'm told they're working on that too. The streets around the historic center already signal that there will be a big turnout; I arrive at the Main Stage right on time. From the gates you can already sense that the atmosphere is slightly different from the other days, the floor is almost full right away, and “total black” reigns supreme.

The evening opens around 10pm with Ossatura, a historic Italian group, pioneers of avant-garde music. They perform with a drum kit and an accordion, and it's Elio Martusciello himself, of the “Conduction” workshop, who handles the electronic instrumentation. Next up is another Italian, Giulio Aldinucci. The sacred is the central theme of his set, explored throughout his latest album, the first Italian work to venture into this kind of experimentation. His is an electroacoustic ambient sound, comparable to artists of the caliber of Lawrence English and Tim Hecker. By the time his set ends, it's a few minutes past 11pm and the crowd starts pushing further and further toward the front of the stage. I'm no exception, and together with a friend I manage to find a spot in the terrace's nerve center, which will soon become the mouth of hell. Retina.it take the stage, and the crowd is already applauding. The Neapolitan duo is made up of Lino Monaco and Nicola Buono. Over their career they have explored various genres: dub, wave, avant-garde electronics, techno. Their sound is refined, a craftsman's work built from the ground up; they're sound fetishists to the point of building the very modular synths they use for their work. They handle the synths with extreme ease: to be a pioneer in this field, you can't settle for a sound that's the result of a software “compression” or a standard preset. The descent into Hades begins. The performance gives off dark vibrations, the basslines are constant, continually whipped by synths, distortions, metallic chords, delay and reverb. But they don't give in. It's techno. They stage their latest EP, “De Occulta Philosophia Vol.1”, which seems geared toward the search for a lost spirituality. We're in Avellino, not Benevento, but the Sabbath takes place all the same. Nicola, in a past life, must have been an alchemist; Lino, a shaman. At the peak of the performance Lino, evidently in touch with some deity, is overtaken by a hand gesture that spurs the crowd to dance even harder. To put it in the words of Oppenheimer Analysis, we were “The Devil's Dancers”. It was a beautiful set — perhaps it should even have been the one to close the night.

A little over an hour and the descent is complete, we've reached the lowest point of the underworld. We've arrived before his majesty Samuel Kerridge. Samuel is a British producer from Manchester whose football allegiance isn't publicly known, but you'll all agree with me that the Red Devils suit him best. Since 2011 he has been based in Berlin. He released his debut album in 2013, “A Fallen Empire”. In early 2015 the label “Contort”, which he co-founded, released his second work: Always Offended Never Ashamed. Kerridge himself describes it as a natural evolution of his concept of music. If the first album can be placed within the varied world of techno, the second distances itself slightly from it, taking on influences from industrial, noise and dark ambient. He sought to give more space to the elements that make up his tracks, letting them breathe. It's a work that shows greater control, more refinement, and further heightens the “heavy” character of his pieces. The live set he offers us will share the same traits. Samuel takes his place behind his station at the center of the stage, the show begins.

You instantly sense the exaltation of power and violence. Just a few minutes into the performance and he rushes to adjust the monitors, believing they were positioned wrong. Having made sure there's no issue with them, he asks for the sound system's volume to be turned up. And he's right to. From that moment on, the speakers no longer transmit music, but start erupting a black magma fit to tear your chest open. The floor trembles. Every so often a guitar, made to resonate by the artist, seems to beg for mercy. We are all called to order through instructions delivered by the Englishman via a microphone that looks more like a military radio transmitter, which are then sampled and relentlessly rebroadcast, as if Judgment Day were about to arrive. A Soviet MiG flies over us, chasing an American bomber. It seems something is about to happen, that that apocalyptic balance is about to shatter, but nothing happens, there's no turning toward rhythms more conventionally techno — it's the strategy of tension, the wall hasn't fallen yet, it's the Cold War, and you hope it never ends.

Unfortunately the show comes to an end, the audience is backed against the wall, it was as disorienting as it was beautiful. The evening is over, the long-awaited day did not fall short of expectations — quite the opposite. My friends and I try to grab a photo with Samuel, we manage to, and we even exchange a few words. He tells us that people in Berlin had already spoken highly of the festival, that he was struck by the location, and he confesses he would have liked to play a little longer.

On August 29th the Esp Stage program features: Andrrzej Zaleski & Aspec(t), Ute Wassermann and Erikm. People are still talking about the previous night, and at the Main Stage the mood isn't all that different. I take in the sets by Mia Zabelka and John Chantler & Stefano Tedesco while lounging on the sofas at the back of the floor: it feels good, and the sky is a sight to behold, with a full moon out.

At 11.30pm it's Tok Tek's turn, and from the images of his instruments projected onto the screen at the back of the stage it's hard to tell what he's about to do. He builds or modifies them himself, which is why he's been described as practicing “illogical hardware bending”. There's a bit of everything at his station: a turntable with a doll at its center spinning unsettlingly, toys, a melodica, microphones and two joysticks that are the pride of his collection. This set, too, is pure improvisation, with the artist alternating moments of absolute stillness with frenzied rhythms.

Closing out the day is another much-anticipated artist: Edwin Van der Heide. The parterre is flooded with smoke, which will prove essential to the Dutch artist's show, playing in southern Italy for the first time. His set is called "Laser Sound Performance": the lasers projected into the smoke are generated by the sound waves flooding the dancefloor. Their lights sweep across the entire colour spectrum, giving rise to shifting shapes - it's a revolution in the visual, which thanks to this combination of sound, laser and smoke becomes three-dimensional. At one point I think I see the cover of "Unknown Pleasures" projected. Extraordinary.

It's August 30th, the fifth and final day of the festival, and at the Esp Stage the sets start earlier than usual. Things kick off at noon. There's Vincenzo Giordano, followed by Mariano Sibilia, the only musician from Avellino included in the Flussi 2015 line-up. As far as I can remember, despite his young age - he was born in '92 - he's always been playing. Driven by a passion for techno and new technologies, he's managed to put it to good use and deepen it through his studies at the Cimarosa Conservatory. His tracks have been included in the tracklists of notable artists, Adam Beyer being a prime example. A genuinely interesting set: compared to his early days, the BPM has dropped noticeably and the rhythmic line is spectacular, vaguely reminding me of "Silent Shout" by The Knife.

An hour later it's Mogano's turn - one of his tracks, "Anunnaki", was even remixed by Kerridge. A relaxing set, with a baby girl just a few months old playing alongside us, putting us all in good spirits. The average age of the line-up hovers around twenty, another bold move by the organisers. And while Mogano is about to wrap up his performance, another young artist is wandering around the Esp Stage courtyard, meticulously setting up his station. This is Dylan Iuliano, twenty years old, whose project is called The Delay In The Universal Loop. He already has two albums under his belt and a tour across the US and Northern Europe. His show is sacred and profane, it's nostalgia, sunshine, eternity, synthesizers, vocalisations, green streaks of hair. He'll be followed by NISE, Neapolitan sound saboteurs, E-COR ENSEMBLE, and maestro Elio Martusciello with "Conduction".

Having moved for the last time to the Main Stage, we catch the show by Caterina Barbieri, built on modular synthesizers and voices, and that of DRØP & FAX. The duo made up of Andrea Bifulco and Andrea Familari conjure up an evanescent set, marked by microsound, epileptic rhythms and glitch, with magnetic visuals of their own creation.

Around 11pm I board a flight to Marrakech, find myself among the Saadian Tombs in the lower Medina, cross the North African desert, and find refreshment in the markets of Zanzibar. I decide to cross the Strait of Suez, visit the Old City of Jerusalem, travel along the Kings' Highway in Madaba, and sail the Tigris and Euphrates. Arriving in Iran, I enter the Shah Cheragh mosque in Shiraz and lose myself in the temples of the Indus Valley. In the Indian jungle I see elephants and ride tigers. The Taj Mahal, with its minarets, leaves me frozen in awe. I reach the summit of Everest. I rule the world. All in just under an hour, thanks to Petit Singe and his incredible set, which blends the digital sounds of modern technology - especially in the rhythm sections - with Afro-Eastern melodies. For me, it was the finest discovery of the seventh edition of Flussi.

Back on the terrace of the "Gesualdo", we get ready for what will be the festival's closing act. Luciano Lamanna is at the console - sound engineer, founder and director of "Love Blast", resident DJ at LSWHR. He comes out swinging right away. It's "Musick". The set is built from a combination of vinyl, analogue instruments and experimentation, a mix that allows for grand-scale variations on classic tracks. How could we not recognise "The Bells", one of the set's high points, completely transformed. An hour and a quarter later the performance ends, the crowd demands an encore, and Lamanna obliges. At 1:30am the last note is played.

Once again this year, Flussi has reached its conclusion. These were intense days, designed so that the evening shows were "merely" the closing acts. As every year, the organisers have managed to put together a line-up that's varied, rich and far from predictable. Flussi doesn't chase after club-filling names; the members of the Magnitudo association instead try to seek out and showcase tomorrow's talents. A prime example is Mount Kimbie: they played at Flussi in 2010, and I didn't know who they were. By 2014, I found them among the big names at Berlin Festival. At Flussi there were people who had travelled miles and miles to reach the festival, because they hadn't found such an offering anywhere else, and others who didn't know a single artist on the bill but were there out of curiosity to discover new ones.

Excitement is already building for next year's edition - thanks, Flussi, and see you soon!

Ride the wave of great music

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