LOST Festival

At this point a truly respectable history has been built up around the musical events staged at Franco Maria Ricci's Labirinto della Masone: an esoteric refuge within which a suspension of everyday reality is effectively achieved, so as to lose yourself entirely, for a few hours, in a parallel reality of music and unnatural lights, of dark and compelling aesthetic totalism.

Illustrious precedents such as Sunn O))) and Ulver – seemingly isolated cases – did nothing more than pave the way for the even more ambitious and structured LOST Festival, the first edition of a site-specific format that we can only hope will be repeated in the future with equal grandeur.

It's sunset on Saturday 8 June: yesterday the biggest draw for the audience was the return of a historic project like Cabaret Voltaire, while tonight awaits a rare and formidable drone/electronic triptych, with two guiding lights such as Tim Hecker and Ben Frost, as well as the up-and-coming Maria w Horn.

           ® Stefano Zerbini

The Swedish sound artist opens the program. It was hard to imagine how she would adapt the "para-liturgical" sonorities of the elusive "Kontrapoetik" to a summery, open-air setting - a subliminal crossing of ethnographic research, soundtrack work and both analogue and digital experimentation. Well, Horn's distinctive narrative appears here in a maximal and unsettling guise, largely built on low frequencies and the dull thuds that make up its hieratic rhythmic fabric.

As on record, the "spoken" sequence remains the fulcrum of the set alongside a relatively conciliatory meditation built on organ sound, while the surrounding sections keep alive the impression of a far more visceral and contemporary ritualism, amid raw layers of electronics expelled frontally with violence. There's no way of knowing whether the set devised here was an exception in response to the peculiarity of the festival and its location, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a surprising introduction to the event's subsequent "poetic" peak.

           ® Stefano Zerbini

For several months Tim Hecker has been performing alongside Japanese musicians from a gagaku ensemble, a divergent element that has given the companion albums "Konoyo" and "Anoyo" a deep and unmistakable sonic identity. The physical presence of the percussion and wind instruments – first on stage the shō, already revealed to the West by John Cage – further accentuates the searing, melancholy character of Hecker's concept, a mirror of an existence out of joint and beyond redemption, one which the ancestral calls of the Konoyo Ensemble seem to question with a vivid, present-tense warning. Hecker's "direction" sinks the acoustic voices into his now-familiar bass saturations, shot through with sublime yet disenchanted melodic nuances, forged as they are in the grieving awareness of postmodern existential chaos.

Less than five minutes pass after the warm applause before the crowd spontaneously gathers at the centre of the portico, overlooking the pyramid set at the edge of the bamboo labyrinth: facing the mixing desk, cordoned off, Ben Frost takes his position, while all around him the amplifiers light up like totems, broadcasting the unreleased octophonic set "Widening Gyre 360° Surround Sound Show", presented at LOST in its Italian exclusive. More than a live show, it's a dizzying sound installation that simulates the movement of sound in concentric waves, spreading out from Frost's station into the crowd, enveloped by a constant - and often violent - lapping of sonic waves.

Excerpts from his latest album, "The Centre Cannot Hold", blend with glimpses of a near future that seems to converge on that "aesthetics of collapse" already explored by Paul Jebanasam, Roly Porter and the most deconstructive strain of hi-tech music. Frost's dystopian machine seems to feed on itself through implosive masses that regenerate via their own driving force, in a whirlwind that only occasionally allows time to look up at a magnificent starry sky - one that, to our eyes, remains equally split between menace and ecstasy.

           ® Stefano Zerbini

Between the consistently flawless organisation and a star-studded line-up, it would be hard - and perhaps even unfair - to find fault with anything: still, given the many different experiential elements on offer, such broadly appealing events inevitably draw in a share of more casual attendees too, which can test the patience of those trying to stay focused on the musical performances, however thunderous. It's a compromise worth accepting nonetheless, more than repaid by yet another indelible memory tied to the Fontanellato labyrinth, a dark treasure chest (no longer) hidden away in the province of Parma.

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