CTM 2018 Prelude

Festsaal Kreuzberg | CTM Festival 2018 Prelude 
Jan St. Werner "Spectric Acid"
Sote presents "Sacred Horror in Design" feat. Tarik Barri, Arash Bolouri & Behrouz Pashaei
23. September 2017 | VVK via Eventbrite & KOKA36

Commissioned for last year’s CTM 2017 festival, "Sacred Horror in Design," sees Ata 'Sote' Ebtekar collaborate with celebrated audiovisual composer Tarik Barri and performers Arash Bolouri (santoor) and Behrouz Pashaei (setar) on a project merging electronics with traditional acoustic instruments for a "Persian techno-apocalypse." 

"Sacred Horror In Design" challenges familiar tropes of tonality and rhythm and rebuilds the unknown via polyrhythmic, polytempic and polymetric patterns. The project takes on the paradoxical task of preserving the beauty of tradition while bending and morphing existing patterns into unique shapes that may eventually become another form of folklore in the future. It melts and twists the proportions of reality both visually and aurally, resulting in a two-pronged movement united in its divergence. Nanoparticles build microstructures, which in turn construct macro networks in a mega system for a magical, textural multi-timbral environment.

"Sacred Horror in Design" has been released this summer as an album of the same name on Opal Tapes@. 

Opening the night will be Jan St. Werner, who will premiere his new album, "Spectric Acid", out now on Fiepblatter / Thrill Jockey Records. A record both brute in force and exacting in its sensitivity to perception’s effective limits, "Spectric Acid" offers fresh glimpses of the deft compositional grasp Werner has developed across over two decades of practice, whether in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria or on his growing log of solo records.

On "Spectric Acid", Jan St. Werner summons flux and fragmentation, building up blistering, locomotive beat structures around the correlation of musical spectra, that borrow from the structural techniques of the Spectralist school of the 1970s. Their movements triggered in part by peaks in frequency envelopes, rhythms buckle and fracture according to a complex logic that slides past aural perception and harmonic resolution; a "phenomenological alchemy" (Radulescu) takes shape among unsteady synthesizer whirls and stammering percussive phrases. The effect is deadly, paralytic; but listeners willing to surrender to Spectric Acid’s movement might find themselves taken to wider horizons of trance. 

Kindly supported by Goethe-Institut.