DISK/CTM at Nuits Sonores 2008
// Date: May 8 - 11, 2008 // Venue: various venues, Lyon, France   Nuits Sonores in Lyon is one of the bigger festivals ins France dedicated to electronic music – maybe even the biggest. It features all varieties of up-to-date club music in a frayed-out program of about 300 artists at around 30 venues. There is some rock music too. The 2008 edition featured one stage dedicated to the loose fields betweeand kraut rock with concerts by Battles, The Wire, Buzzcocks, Kling Klang and others.   One of the most exciting things about the festival is its firm tradition to find and open-up new venues for the festival each year. Those are mostly abandoned buidlings, used only temporarily for the weekend of the festival. This year the organizers found an old factory complex as their main venue, which hosted four stages in different buildings. As Berlin was the focus for the 2008 edition, the festival-team decided to name all rooms and stages in this venue after places, bars and clubs in Berlin. Which was slightly irritating, as it showed traces of a clumsy appropriation, with the Panorama bar e.g. beeing located in Prenzlauer Berg or the Maria club in Kreuzberg instead of Friedrichshain. But apart form that it primarily showed how much Berlin has become an icon within the world of electronic music. So much in fact, that it serves as a pure marketing brand, abstracted from the actual people and content that helped create the reputation in the first place. Accordingly the program only featured a rather small percentage of Berlin artists (Namosh, Einstürzende Neubauten, Efdemin, Apparat, Raz O'Hara, Richard Ruin and a few others).   As part of the Berlin focus, club transmediale was given carte blanche to work on one of the venues, the Piscine du Rhône, a public bath alongside the river Rhône, build in a futuristic style sometime in the seventies. Jan Rohlf decided to cover-up the 25m windowfront with the work "Genrelist" and install the arcade-type game-machine "Genregenerator", developed over years together with Berlin artist friend Maverick. Furthermore he created two large format wall drawings. "Genrelist" is a simple alphabetical list of, at the moment, 1600 individual existing music genres, found as part of music writings and descriptions in magazines, on flyers and posters or in the web. As there are no indicators where one genre ends and the next one begins, looking at the large scale typographic composition, one can't help but recombine the words into new and often strange, funny or surreal music genres. The work thus renders visible the dialectic processes of differentiation and collectivism, between separation and affiliation within pop music.   Needles to say that, as an archive of found terms to describe music, the "Genrelist" contains political "incorrect" music genres such as "Nazi Rock" or "True Aryan Black Metal", simply due to the fact that they exist. Unfortunately it turned out the the word "Nazi" still seems to be a taboo in France, no matter in which context and with what agenda it may be used. The organizers of the festival developed the paranoid fear that the above mentioned music genres could offend politicians and journalists visiting the festival, so that they decided to censor the piece of art by cuting out characters without even consulting the artist. We want to express that we consider this an act of vandalism against the art work and the artist. These actions lacked any understanding for the intentions of the work and supressed any positive discussion and discourse that might have been raised by the work. This attitude does not at all comply with our own understanding of the role of an organiszer or curator of a cultural event, who in the first place should defend and explain the work of the artists he or she has invited and not censor them in an act of premature submission to a request he does not even know if it exists for real. We can only say: controversy is good. It is the starting point of many things, it is something to be welcomed and not something to be averted.   > Photo documentation on Flickr.   More information on the festival: > www.nuits-sonores.com	> May 08, 2008
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