John Quin attends a festival of interdisciplinary performances at Luckenwalde, featuring Bendik Giske, Rae Hsu, Nazanin Noori, Discovery Zone and more

Luckenwalde lies about 30 miles south of Berlin, easily accessible for the city’s residual clubbing community. But, given the placards tied to lampposts advertising candidates in an upcoming mayoral contest, the town feels a million miles away from the capital in terms of political tilt. Here the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, slogan Deutschland Aber Normal – ‘Germany but normal’, whatever that means) have a 35.2% share of the vote as of this year, more than double their rivals. The beefy baldy guy on one of the posters looks like he’d enjoy kicking your teeth in; another is a dead ringer for Hermann Göring. As for the place itself, think 1943: cobbled streets, badly rendered concrete buildings, the remains of an old Stalag POW camp. Here we enter the psychogeography of The Great Escape where the descendants of the Gestapo might wish you ‘Good Luck’ (in English, natch) as you sneakily try to board a bus. You see yourself running the streets like a rat in a trap before getting caught and sent back behind the wire. Cooler!

Nowadays Berlin’s hipsters hide away from the ever-growing neo-fascist madness at E-WERK, an old coal power station built in 1913, now repurposed as a regenerative source of electricity production and a not-for profit art space. Next door is its partner, an old Stadtbad, a disused Bauhaus-inspired swimming pool with a strikingly modernist interior whose architecture recalls that of Erich Mendelsohn, of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion and Luckenwalde’s own (once renowned) hat factory, a couple of hundred yards down the road. The Stadtbad is now drained, and a crowd sits awkwardly on the cold and old chipped tiles as they dip down to the deep end where tonight’s acts perform. The space is strikingly lit in electric blues and magentas. All’s cool in the pool.

Given E-WERK’s commitment to sustainability and environmental protection there’s plenty of worried references to planetary instability in the blurbs for this evening’s events. We are told the acts aim to “redirect technologies of violence towards artistic expression”. I understood the key exemplar of these brutal technologies to be AI – and the general level of unease over what its use might infer as regards our Earth’s survival.

©Kathleen Pracht

The first performer, Rae Hsu, entitled their presentation ‘Enter the Wetware’: a mutated TED talk of sorts, asking us to download a QR code that gave entry to something called an ‘Empathy Machine’. The screen behind Rae then showed messages like: “I am a Language Model, An Anguish Model”. There was weird talk of what to do with two litres of water and baskets and flesh and mushrooms and microchips. A discombobulated voice told us: “I’m not intelligent enough to be sure,” and I found my head nodding in agreement. Another voice asked: “What’s comprehensible?” and I thought, not this. The phrase “Thirsty Bots Drink Shamelessly” rang out like a demented Laurie Anderson arguing for the radically incomprehensible. And then my brain turned into a flashing Antipathy Machine. Time for something uncomplicated. Time for a drone…

Nazanin Noori delivers the goods. She’s a multi-talented Iranian performer making electronic improv her website calls ‘post ambient hardcore’. We get a continuous drone for over thirty minutes with shards of sound like sheet metal being ripped and torn. An occasional seagull screech and apocalyptic siren emerge from the din. Noori makes mountains of noise that hit the tympanic membrane like an asteroid, one aimed squarely at your pineal gland. Imagine, too, the Cocteau Twins decelerated to 16 rpm. There’s also something of a cathedral organ swell in Noori’s attack. Curiously, her all-encompassing racket is oddly calming – spiritual, even – and as overwhelming and incessant as watching an endless series of huge waves crashing onshore. She closes with a crescendo of what might be amplified cimbalom strikes to perhaps the best audience response of the night.

Discovery Zone (aka J.J. Weihl from Manhattan) plays tracks from her 2024 album Quantum Web from behind a transparent screen illustrated with disembodied Bruce Nauman-esque heads. And more distorted computerised voices repeating the word ‘Supernatural’ along to tinkly bright keyboard swirls. These tunes recall happier times: the blissed out early 90s, with bands like The Beloved or later chilled groovers like Glasgow’s Happy Meals.

©Kathleen Pracht

There’s an intermission of sorts where Paraguay’s Kira Xonorika, a self-styled ‘futurist’, wears an emerald bubble suit and cavorts with Agent, a robot dog, a real K9. The robot has an arachnid-like walk, a sideways crab crawl just made for the classic Freudian descriptor, Unheimlich. Agent is uncanny, one scary wee critter. Maybe Agent is one of those aforementioned ‘technologies of violence’ we might redirect to artistic expression. Xonorika’s performance was fun, as is another of her works, the film Deep Time Dance, shown in the E-Werk space next door. We’re told the video is a hallucinogenic take on a Guarani prophecy from the Jeguakava clan. Picture a South American variant on Manga-like mutants with cute eyes accompanied by jungle noise, birdsong and ameliorating waves of new age synth. And nary a sign of thirsty bots drinking shamelessly.

Lastly there’s Bendik Giske, a class act saxophonist from Oslo. As with Jon Hassell’s trumpet experimentations, Giske has you doubting you’re listening to a sax such is his skill in the manipulation of sonics. Making the most of the Stadtbad’s acoustic, Giske blew gales, hurricanes, of foghorn honks and breaths. He’s been compared to Albert Ayler with his wild circular-breathing exertions, but his own muscular efforts are enhanced here by the slick amplified percussive clicks of his fingers on the keys. Giske’s performance was truest to the Kraftwerk Mensch Maschine reference of the evening’s title. Watching Giske play, watching him stretch the limits of his instrument, you could imagine him evolving from Halb Wesen und Halb Ding (‘Half Being and Half Thing’) into a Halb Wesen und Über Ding (‘Half Being and Over Thing’). A superior hybrid of human and machine, a bit like Steve McQueen trying to escape on his motorbike…

All of which provokes a final thought for the bots. Hang about, all you neo-fascist voters in Luckenwalde! Remember Über Ding doesn’t mean über alles!