Last week I was in Berlin on our annual study trip - three tutors and 30 students - ostensibly to attend the 25th Transmediale Festival.
Berlin has so much to see in terms of design and the creative arts, and we managed to cram in visits to The Berlinische, the Bauhaus Archive, the Pergamon and Neues Museums, and Buchenstabmuseum. The Bauhaus Archive in particular was superb, and featured, much to my delight, an exhibition called 'Werbegrafik 1928-1938' by renowned graphic designer Herbert Bayer.
A personal highlight however was an evening's entertainment at Transmediale, in partnership with Berlin’s annual contemporary and electronic art and music festival
CTM, as Dinos Chapman gave a performance of 'LuftBobler' to a packed audience in the HKM auditorium.
The CTM festival theme of ‘Dis Continuity’ was aimed at exploring the connections between past
and present musical movements in the context of DIY pop culture and
academic research, and featured over 150 performances, concerts and
installations, split across the city’s iconic industrial arts venues
including Berghain, Stattbad and Kunsthraum Bethanien.
Myself and fellow tutor Richard Bisset went along to see if Chapman could live up to his growing reputation as a musician and techno producer. Chapman duly delivered, with a superb 90-minute live set, augmented by a series of spooky custom-directed
films, featuring (one assumes) the artist himself dressed in a white rabbit suit, exploring urban and rural landscapes, via a mixture of overlays, collage and digital colour effects.
Chapman began making experimental
electronic music re-creationally a decade or so ago, and his music is apparently inspired by 'insomnia, horror movies, and boredom'. Which is a very good mix, and might explain why Chapman was recently
described by The Wire as 'a sort of David Lynch of the
dancefloor.'
The actual music reminded me a lot of early Aphex Twin (circa Selected Ambient Works 85-92), with a mixture of spaced out trance percussion, cacophonic noise and intermittent melody. In that sense it didn't seem particularly ground-breaking, but it it did manage to feel energetic and, more importantly for a major visual artist moving into a new medium, relevant. Get a flavour of the work with this video:
