Berlin Atonal

This year too, the Berlin Atonal festival proved to be an essential date for all lovers of electronic music and contemporary electroacoustic research: from techno to noise, passing through the latest developments in post-industrial electronic music.

From August 16 to 20, the premises of Kraftwerk Berlin, a huge disused power station in the Mitte district, and the adjoining spaces of the Tresor club hosted a fairly varied cross-section of ongoing research, blending past, present and future with specially commissioned audio/video performances, premieres and presentations of new releases.

We followed the five intense days of the Berlin festival for you. All photos are by Helge Mundt and Camille Blake, courtesy of Berlin Atonal.

Wednesday, August 16

This year's festival was masterfully opened by pianist Reinhold Friedl, who, together with composer Iancu Dumitrescu, organized a concert in memory of Romanian composer Ana-Maria Avram, a key figure of spectralism who tragically passed away this year. Friedl performed two compositions on the Stage Null: Dumitrescu's "Piano High Energy" and Avram's "Klavierutopie".

Afterwards, on the main stage, Kathinka Pasveer performed Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Oktophonie". The spaces of Kraftwerk, a modern post-industrial cathedral, provided a fascinating spatial setting for the German master's composition: eight groups of speakers spread Stockhausen's piece, literally enveloping the listeners.

Worth noting was the collaboration between Japanese producer ENA and German sound artist Rashad Becker, moving between minimal sound geometries and reverbs that here too created an almost zen atmosphere, clearly echoing Becker's recent "Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II".

Also notable was the concert by PYUR, aka Sophie Schnell, fresh off last year's excellent debut album "Epoch Sinus". Here Schnell presented a performance titled "Oratorio For The Underworld".

To the delight of all library music enthusiasts, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop closed out the Main Stage evening with a journey through their long career (which began way back in 1958) as undisputed pioneers of a certain kind of electroacoustic experimentation, still at the root of much contemporary music today. Many vintage videos were projected during the ensemble's lengthy performance.

Meanwhile, in the somewhat cramped spaces of OHM, Swedish musician Mats Erlandsson delivered an excellent drone music set. Also worth mentioning was the DnB dj set presented by Demdike Stare, a fine appetizer for their performance on the Main Stage on Thursday.

The highlight of the second part of the evening was the concerts by Carla dal Forno and Wolf Eyes at Stage Null.

The rising star discovered by Blackest Ever Black doesn't disappoint live — if anything, she impresses with her ability to originally combine refined melodies, between synth-pop and wave echoes, with light drone-ambient darkness lurking in the background.

Wolf Eyes’ set was one of the festival's absolute highlights, a mix of noise and psycho-jazz, an extremely acidic post-industrial take on transfigured sixties melodies that recalled a little the no wave experiments of bands like The Contortions, Mars and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.

Naturally there was an afterparty in the adjoining Tresor with Moritz von Oswald, Sigha and CEM, for anyone still in the mood to dance.

Thursday 17 August

Thursday's lineup also opened with a concert dedicated to the memory of a late artist: Mika Vaino. For the occasion, Lucio Capece, Mattin and Morten Olsen performed the brand-new piece "Trahnie Farewell".

Worth noting, in the first part of the evening on the Main Stage, was the LCC set, effectively backed by video work from Pedro Maia, and the gorgeous live set from Abul Mogard, an immersive, literally post-industrial ambient-drone experience crafted by the elderly former steelworker turned Serbian artist.

The live set by Demdike Stare benefited from an excellent video component courtesy of Michael England, which was really the main reason it was memorable. Perhaps we expected a little more from the English duo and, honestly, we preferred their dj set the night before at OHM.

The real peak of the evening, though, was the performance by Damien Dubrovnik, who presented their excellent album "Great Many Arrows", released this very summer on Posh Isolation. Somewhere between twisted romanticism and harsh noise, Danes Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard staged a "theatre of cruelty" able to conjure melodies of aching beauty amid the peaks of Rahbek's distorted screams.

The second part of the Stage Null programme was equally excellent, thanks in part to an inspired live set from JASSS, a young artist worth keeping an eye on. After a couple of solid EPs for Mannequin Records, she's now close to her debut full-length for Swedish label Ideal Records. Judging by what we heard in her live set, it promises to be a remarkable album.

Mick Harris needs no introduction: drummer for Napalm Death, mastermind behind landmark projects like Scorn and Lull, as well as a member of Painkiller, the free-jazz/grindcore group with John Zorn and Bill Laswell. At Atonal he presented "Fret", a solo project built on a pulsing, noise-laden strain of dub industrial that took no prisoners. It was hard to stand still in front of the rhythmic blasts and basslines pouring out of Stage Null's powerful sound system. It was without doubt the high point of the evening's second half.

After the engaging live set by Nene Hatun, an artist born in Istanbul and now based in Berlin who currently records for Bedouin Records (a label based in the United Arab Emirates), it was time for a dj set from English producer Pessimist, who, perhaps not helped by the late hour, struck us as slightly subdued. A shame, given the man's strong track record, but we'll reserve fuller judgement until we've heard his recent album out on Blackest Ever Black. 

Friday 18 August

Attendance was especially strong on Friday night. Atonal was packed out for what many considered the highlight of the festival. Indeed, with a lineup featuring, among others, Main paired with Regis and Roly Porter alongside Paul Jebanasam, not to mention Danish noiser Puce Mary, there was no way to miss it.

The evening kicked off in fine style straight away with Yair Elazar Glotman presenting "Blessed Initiative", an album released last year in which manipulated tapes and field recordings were reworked and reassembled using a KYMA, an innovative sound design workstation. The audio/video performance was thoroughly engaging, with Glotman closing out by playing a shofar, a Jewish ritual horn, live.

Next up was the much-anticipated live debut of a new project set for release on Raster, the mysterious duo Belief Defect, deploying tight, pitch-black electro-industrial rhythms built on dystopian visions. It was an intense, anxiety-inducing live set, one of the most interesting debuts of the year. The duo presented their very first album "Decadent Yet Depraved", an excellent work capable of redrawing the boundaries of Olaf Bender aka Byetone's label (a record that wouldn't look out of place in the catalogue of labels like Hands or Ant-Zen).

Puce Mary presented a performance titled "A Feast Before The Drought", following on from her latest LP "The Spiral", which confirmed, if there was ever any doubt, her status as the undisputed queen of power electronics — naturally in her own personal, visceral version, one that places the body and its drives front and centre. It was one of the most intense and powerful live sets of the festival, thick with screams and industrial clangour, on a par with that of fellow travellers Damien Dubrovnik. The Danish noiser held nothing back and managed to captivate Atonal's vast audience, who rewarded her with a long round of applause.

The collaboration between Main aka Robert Hampson (Loop) and techno legend Regis didn't disappoint either, with a set spanning noise, drone and pitch-black techno. It was a performance that built to a crescendo in its closing stretch, perhaps more thanks to Regis than Hampson.

What can one say about Roly Porter and Paul Jebanasam? A truly overwhelming experience, amid fog and infernal lights, capable of white-noise assaults, sudden accelerations and skewed post-dark ambient trajectories that turned into something alien. The performance was titled "Altar", and one can only hope this partnership leads to some future release.

The programme at Stage Null was also packed, featuring Italian artist Marco Shuttle, who presented his new album "Systhema", released this year on Donato Dozzy's label, "Spazio disponibile".

At Tresor, alongside Anastasia Kristensen, Shed and Pinch, Richard Fearless also played, and things carried on well past dawn.

Saturday 19 August

On Saturday we caught the live set by Anthony Linell, accompanied by visuals created by Kimberly Ihre. The performance leaned towards more ambient territory than the work the Swedish musician has made under the Abdulla Rashim moniker: somewhere between Donato Dozzy and a certain strand of Scandinavian dark-ambient tradition, all accompanied by watery imagery projected onto the screen.

Right after came the performance by Fis and Renick Bell, a duo who worked with compositional algorithms generated by computer using open-source software, the results of which were somewhat reminiscent of certain Autechre abstractions.

The performance by Shackleton together with Annika Henderson, backed by Strawalde and Pedro Maia on visuals, was without question one of the best performances of Saturday. It served as the presentation of their album "Behind The Glass", a sort of ritual journey through percussion and avant-trance drift, owing a clear debt to late-period Coil. Far more engaging live than on record, the performance featured Takumi Motokawa on keyboards and an excellent Raphael Meinhart on percussion. Anika's voice meshed beautifully with Shackleton's music, narrating tales of love, submission, desire and fate as though they were surreal fables.

We were also pleasantly struck by the performance of Swedish duo Roll The Dice, intense, dark downtempo with industrial undertones. The set drew on their excellent latest album "Born To Ruin".

The pairing of Powell and artist Wolfgang Tillmans, on the other hand, was extremely disappointing. The English producer was disarmingly bland, while German photographer Tillmans had the very bad idea of trying his hand as a vocalist over Powell's techno: like a drunk Underworld cover band. The sonic side of things was certainly one to forget, verging on unintentional pseudo-situationism. The images created by Tillmans and projected during the performance deserve a separate discussion altogether.

Far better to catch Daniel Araya over in the OHM spaces. The Swedish artist delivered an excellent acid-techno live set built around the Roland TB-303 and TR-606.

At Stage Null we caught Hypnobeat, the historic project dating back to the Eighties, namely James Dean Brown, here joined by young German producer and DJ Helena Hauff. An incredible build of old-school techno powered by rhythms drawn from a Roland TR-808 which, used in that way, genuinely induced a state of hypnosis.

Another excellent live set came from producer Broken English Club (now on L.I.E.S.), serving up a new take on electro-techno industrial EBM capable of making even the dead move. Disappointing and flat, on the other hand, was the set by Russia's Inga Mauer.

Moving to the packed spaces of Tresor, we caught the solid live set by Ulwhednar, the partnership between Abdulla Rashim and Varg: pure Scandinavian techno-ambient with shards of post-industrial white noise, for an immersive, enveloping experience, even if the room was truly too crowded.

Also worth noting was the closing set at Stage Null, with the techno-EBM DJ set by Schwefelgelb.

Sunday, August 20

On Sunday, Sweden's Varg presented a series of young artists under the Nordic Flora banner. A first batch of concerts was staged at Stage Null, the second at the Main Stage. Here's the verdict: the start was fairly interesting, with young SKY H1 (who releases on Pan), moving between ambient, grime and various contaminations (at one point in the set there even appeared a sound fragment reminiscent of a piece by The Orb).

Next came a performance by Varg featuring spoken word by American artist Chloe Wise, complete with videos, somewhere between situationism and deliberately kitsch aesthetics drawn partly from the world of the internet and partly from that of high fashion. All in all, it would have been fun had it lasted less.

America's Swan Meat struck us as fairly interesting in her blend of post-grime and falsetto harsh-noise screams, though still a bit green. She also seemed to be having microphone trouble at the start of her set.

Oil Xl, another very young hopeful who put out a track on the "Mono No Aware" compilation (also released on Pan), came across as fairly evanescent, offering up an ambient that was harmless and bland.

Moving upstairs, we caught ECCO2K, a Swedish rapper, designer and producer moving between cloud rap and slowed-down trap built on auto-tune, somewhat inspired by Yung Lean's style but lacking his charisma: another set that was fairly dull and predictable.

Thankfully, things were rescued first by Matty Bye on keyboards (a composer of modern scores for silent films) duetting with Varg. Then came the pairing of the ever-present Varg and Swedish singer AnnaMelina, who hit intense emotional peaks with a sort of diaphanous cloud pop-downtempo that, helped along by good stage design, somewhat salvaged the Nordic Flora stage. We appreciate the courage of offering something that strayed a bit from certain stereotypes aimed at the black-clad crowd (us included, obviously), but it could have been pitched and paced a little better.

The evening was given a bit of a lift by Pact Infernal, a mysterious dark entity suspended between techno drone and dark-ambient, its components well blended together. Between them and Belief Defect, our dark side was fully satisfied.

The performance by China-born, now Berlin-based Pan Daijing (also on the Pan roster) was wonderful, the peak of the evening, amid cathartic explosions of noise and dramatic tensions involving the body and physicality: dance, video and sound experimentation, just as we'd always hope to see here at Atonal. "Fist Piece" is the name of the performance, which also featured a collaboration with soprano singer Yanwen Xiong.

Also very interesting was the live set by Emptyset, who benefited from an excellent sound system and a fine lighting display that complemented their deflagrating techno-noise industrial beats perfectly.

At this point, we can call ourselves satisfied, if a bit tired from having followed all five days of a festival that certainly gets people talking: an event with a genuinely international scope, capable of drawing in crowds from abroad and not just from Berlin, and above all not just techno fans (even though they were well represented, perhaps even too well).

Diversifying, evolving, engaging in dialogue with the Arts (capital A) is necessary if you don't want to remain anchored to the past, amid complaints about gentrification and regrets over small subcultural niches that are now on their last legs. Those who moan that there's no new music, that nobody takes risks or puts themselves on the line, simply don't come to festivals like this one.

Beyond innovation, there was also room for a glorious past, well represented here: from contemporary electroacoustic music (with performances of pieces by Stockhausen and Avram) to library music (the historic Bbc Radiophonic Workshop), not forgetting the post-industrial experiments of masters like Hypnobeat and Mick Harris. Sure, there were also some off notes, like the Powell and Tillmans pairing or some parts of the Nordic Flora stage, but these were balanced out by many sharp performances, in which the setting, the lights, and the video projections at Kraftwerk Berlin also played a fundamental role.

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