Mogwai / Forest Swords - Live 2026.11.09 Theater des Westens, Berlin, Germany

I saw Mogwai last year on their tour for The Bad Fire, and while I enjoyed the show, I bought the ticket last-minute and got a pretty bad seat in the back of an upper balcony. I feared I hadn’t gotten the full experience. This time around, I bought early and sprung for a good seat. It was worth it!

Forest Swords turned out to be one guy at a desk with a compact electronic rig. He had a Mac laptop with the lid almost closed but didn’t touch it and instead just manipulated some smaller controllers. Initially he made pretty, relaxed, meditative soundscapes. I felt soothed and enjoyed the relatively comfortable seat and the light show flourishes. There were occasional hints of noise and edge, but it never took on a dark tone. He gradually got more rhythmic and eventually even introduced a drum machine, but that drifted too close to generic techno and I got impatient. I liked the first half quite a bit, though.

Forest Swords.]

Mogwai again appeared as a five-piece with touring guitarist/keyboardist Alex Mackay and a strong lighting rig, albeit a different one from last time. There was also a large Palestinian flag and a trans pride flag. Despite mics set up for guitarist Stuart Braithwaite and keyboardist/guitarist Barry Burns, only one song had vocals (“Ritchie Sacramento”, one of their best) and Stuart’s only other words were to express thanks. The music speaks for itself.

The set covered a lot of ground, and there were only two overlapping songs with the 2025 concert. The first half of the show favored relatively newer songs, but the band gradually moved backwards in time, favoring their earliest material. The final three numbers all came from the first two albums, and they also played both sides of the even earlier “New Paths to Helicon” single from 1997. The A-side wasn’t a surprise given that their upcoming Happy Tears compilation features a remake of it, but they curiously played little else from the collection. I’m not complaining; I like just about every song they did. The weakest link was “Titles” from their Black Bird soundtrack (2022). It sounded like soundtrack work: it had no real peak and sounded too much like background music.

[Mogwai performing “Helicon 2”.]

Thankfully, the sound quality and mix were superb. I had none of the complaints from last time. They performed well and the music was full and intense. The heaviest bits, like the jolts in “You’re Lionel Richie” and “Like Herod”, went hard, just like they should. It was a treat to see Stuart and bassist Dominic Aitchison swap instruments for “Helicon 1”, and to watch Burns and Mackay both have turns starting a song on keyboards before moving to guitar mid-song (as on “Don’t Believe the Fife” and “Lionel Richie”). I was amused to be able to identify the era of songs by the amount of keyboards and who played them. Burns prefers keyboards, but he only joined in 1998, and past member John Cummings, who departed in 2015, seems to have preferred guitar. Hence, I imagine that Mackay generally plays Cummings’s parts, and Burns plays guitar parts on the early songs written before he joined, which typically had few keyboards. I also realized that the band never play what I would characterize as a solo. They play deeply interlocking parts, and that’s a major key to their magic.

I was enthralled. This was the experience I had hoped for. I clearly wasn’t the only one; this was one of the most reverent audiences I’ve ever seen. I saw few phones and heard no chatter. It’s understandable. Every moment had to be savored.

Setlist:
01. Heard About You Last Night
02. Hi Chaos
03. Small Children in the Background
04. Ritchie Sacramento
05. New Paths to Helicon, Pt. 2
06. Titles
07. Don’t Believe the Fife
08. Scotland’s Shame
09. New Paths to Helicon, Pt. 1
10. Auto Rock
11. You’re Lionel Richie
12. Like Herod
Encore:
13. May Nothing but Happiness Come Through Your Door
14. Christmas Steps

Scores:
Forest Swords: B
Mogwai: A

P.S. Thanks to Mirah!

[Mogwai performing “Helicon 1”. I apparently only took pictures of the two songs for which Stuart sits.]

Soul Vomit: Further Discussion with Laurentius the Profit

As recently mentioned, I interviewed Laurentius the Profit about her book and album, both titled FUCK LIFE — When On High, for Bandcamp Daily. Our conversation was quite long and went in many directions, not all of which I had space for there. Here are some more excerpts from the interview.

Patti: Can you tell me more about the connection you felt with the cave while living there?
Laurentius: I can approach it from many different angles, like the contrast between the modern world and with AI, or even earlier with social media technology. When I was a kid and the iPhone came out, I felt super disconnected. Capitalism makes me feel so disconnected from being human. But in the cave, it was different. Caves are our first home. The first tomb. I was sleeping next to an open grave. The Dead Sea Scrolls were found hidden in caves. Buddhist texts were hidden in caves. Jesus resurrected in a cave. Muhammad talked to God in a cave. There’s a lot of cave stuff happening in history. Where I was living in Cappadocia was a valley where monks would go to get away from civilization and society. They would climb and carve out the highest, most impossible places to reach. They were trying to meditate. Just live there without seeing anybody. But then they got followers, and the followers would carve out churches underneath them. The monks went there for peace and quiet, but then a community assembled around them.

P: How did you get interested in writing about religion?
L: Well, while I was living in the cave church, I met an archaeologist and we had a lot of discussions. I started to realize how much religion and society are intertwined. The development of religion mirrored the development of society. I’ve always been interested in how the government controls us as human beings. We’ve been spiritually colonized and mind-controlled since society began. Monotheism was just part of that. The system tries to take away our humanity and make us forget who we are. If you live in a city, you can be critical of the system, but you are in the system. If you have walls around you, you are in the system. In the cave, I don’t pay rent. Every single day when I wake up there, I just fuck the system. It’s a hard feeling to describe with words, which is why I had to record the album there. But the authors of religious texts were also trying to describe something that they couldn’t describe. There’s a lot of evil, genocidal bullshit in the Bible, but also there are moments of beauty. It’s a complete representation of humanity: the good, the bad, the ugly. It shows you the whole range of the human being.

P: Your book gets deep into Christianity, but also references other ancient religions and texts. How did you get interested in those?
L: Once I got into the Bible, I could not escape it. Reading it is not enough. You read it, and you have so many questions. I got into Babylonian and Canaanite texts to look for answers. The Bible was written over hundreds of years by many different authors, and it was cherry-picked what stories they wanted to show. Every version of the Bible has different stories and leaves some out, and the translation from an ancient text to a modern one influences it too. You lose a lot. I don’t think I see it totally how it was originally written. I don’t think anybody can. But the more I researched the history of the Bible, I started to see parallels in the texts that came before it. It’s the ripple effect. The stories are just echoes.

P: Can you give me an example of these connections across religions?
L: Ancient Babylonians were really into astrology. They saw astrology more politically, like what the gods were going to do to the kingdom. It was thought that if the gods would attack, they would target the king. So they would take the king from the throne, hide him, and put a fake king on for 100 days. During these 100 days, the gods’ evil would to go to the fake king. At the end of the 100 days, they killed the fake king. This is basically a Jesus-like martyr figure who takes the evil and dies for the people. Another one is Sargon of Akkad, the first known dictator, or at least the first famous one. He founded the Akkadian Empire, which wiped out the Sumerian culture. He has the same origin story as Moses.

P: The protagonist in your book has four names, most of which reference ancient religions. Why so many name changes?
L: I wanted to explore the fluidity of identity. It’s so often used against us. We are just a collection of our experiences and our memories. We’re always changing. But when somebody misidentifies you, particularly if they do it on purpose, that is a special type of cruelty. They just boil you down. The character is called by a number once she gets into the system. She also has some rebirths. The old her is still there but part of it dies.

P: She and the one person she befriends are both musicians. What’s the significance of that?
L: Music is so powerful. There’s a reason why musicians and artists are suppressed in totalitarian governments all over the world. They touch something that they’re not supposed to touch. If you’re a dictator, how do you regulate people and get them to conform to the behavior that you want? In some forms of Christianity you’re not allowed to dance. You’re not allowed to play board games. You’re not supposed to have feelings, desires, or fun. In the book, they’re supposed to sing hymns. They’re supposed to sing for the Lord. They’re not supposed to sing from their hearts. When musicians try to influence society, they get in trouble.

P: The book also includes drawings. What do those contribute to the story?
L: I wanted it to be really first-person perspective. This is what she’s seeing. She doesn’t know if it’s an illusion. They’re Mesopotamian, Assyrian, Babylonian reliefs. She doesn’t know what she’s looking at. So instead of saying exactly what she’s looking at, I had to show it. I wanted the reader to experience what she’s discovering, what she’s observing. Maybe they’re hallucinations. I don’t even know if they’re hallucinations.

P: And you made a short film. How does that fit in?
L: The book is dystopian fantasy, but the short film is more documentary. I wanted to show the process and also the landscape that inspired so much of the book. I just wanted to capture it. I was documenting what the cave meant to me and what my life was like.

P: Why did you want to explore so many different mediums?
L: With writing I’m more structured. With music, not at all. And if I try to structure it, it falls apart. It doesn’t work! Music is from my soul. Writing is more from my mind. Drawing is more observing and then connecting to the physical world. I had to make a big project because I’m not satisfied just with one medium. I have to organize my thoughts, and I cannot organize it with just music.

P: What was the recording process like?
L: It was amazing! I had candles all around. I was in an ancient church, drinking some wine. There was a lot of volcanic ash dust, so my throat was dead by the end of it. I could hear my voice and guitar playing with the space. I kept wondering, how many people sung here? I was trying to capture not just the music but the space, the feeling. The cave has it’s own reverb, but then I added even more. I really wanted it to be a reverb soup. If I would do another album, maybe I would go a bit fancier and get some recorded layers in different churches. That would be crazy. Imagine the reverb! It would not have worked for this album, because it wouldn’t fit the story in the book. She is alone. She is just by herself, singing with her guitar. And that’s exactly how I recorded it. I wanted to become the character.

P: How do you write a song?
L: I love improvising. Usually I just come up with some chords and just start improvising immediately. There are some songs where I recorded the first improvisation and I like it more than the final recording. It feels more natural. There’s more emotion. I’m totally into the melody, and then the words come naturally. If I think too much, they become bullshit. So music is just like vomit, basically. Soul vomit.

Laurentius the Profit’s album and book, both titled FUCK LIFE — When On High, can be found on Bandcamp here. A short film about the background of the project is available on YouTube here.

Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts - Willie Nelson & Family - Live 2026.09.24 Highmark Mann, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

I missed Neil Young in Berlin last year, although I happened to be on the Teufelsberg that evening and could hear it wafting over. When I listened to a bootleg recording, his voice seemed rough and the band seemed a bit worn out. I was still sad I missed it. It’s usually better in person.

This show was opportune given previously-made travel arrangements. I got lucky, as Neil hasn’t toured in a year, and this was just one of two warm-up shows leading up to Farm Aid. I arrived too late to see any of the opening set from 19-year-old viral country pop star Ty Myers, but I don’t think I missed much. I did have the pleasure of seeing Willie Nelson & Family. Willie is 93 years old and looks and sounds it, but he was still warm and vibrant.

The name of the backing group can be taken literally, in that Nelson’s son Micah now plays guitar and provides backing and even some lead vocals. Waylon Payne, son of longtime Family member Jody Payne, also does the same. The group also includes longstanding members Mickey Raphael (harmonica), Billy English (drums), and Kevin Smith (double bass).

The band did a lot of work to lift up Willie, who is clearly aging, although he still tours regularly. He’s frail, a bit like Johnny Cash on his last albums. His voice is thin but still works. He’s given up on rhythm guitar, but still plays leads on his acoustic. His style has become clipped and loose, but it was still great to see him go for it. Micah and Payne filled in a lot of the gaps. Payne sang lead on two covers and Micah played three songs, one of which he’d cowritten with his dad (“Die When I’m High (Halfway to Heaven)”), a humorous but heartfelt song about Willie’s well-known habit. Another was “Everything Is Bullshit”, a solo song with a darker, heavier edge that still retained a touch of humor, particularly in Willie’s “bullshit” echoes.

The band rolled through songs at an incredible pace. They packed in 21 songs in just over an hour. Micah’s were highlights, but so was the Tom Waits cover “Last Leaf”, a touching song about aging. “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” made for a rousing crowd singalong. Neil Young came out for his duet part on “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” (changing a lyric to reference data centers), and Myers and Philly native Kurt Vile came out to sing along on the medley of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and “I’ll Fly Away”.

I loved the collaborative nature of the set, particularly that the band traded parts and seemed genuinely comfortable and fluid with one another on stage. I wish I’d seen Willie when he was younger and sprier, but this was a noble path for him to take. He’s still the star, but he’s graceful about his band’s support.

[Willie Nelson & Family.]

Neil Young appeared with his recent touring band The Chrome Hearts, which is basically old hand Spooner Oldham and half of Promise of the Real. Ironically that included Micah but not his older brother Lukas, who founded and led POTR. For most of the set, Neil played acoustic guitar or piano, and with Spooner on keys and Micah also frequently on acoustic guitar or piano, they were less intense than when I saw Young with POTR in 2019. They had more of a country rock feel, and at least initially stuck to that side of the back catalog. (When I first saw Neil in Dallas in 2014, he played solo acoustic, so I was happy to witness a different configuration.) Bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo rounded out the band.

“Long May You Run” was a beautiful opener, and “Human Highway” is also one of my favorites. “Comes a Time” was yet another solid classic that I’d not yet seen him do. “Casting Me Away from You” from Neil’s brand-new album Second Songs was written in the 60s well before even Buffalo Springfield, and while it wasn’t too sophisticated, hearing the line “we found things to do in stormy weather” that he later reused in “Long May You Run” was cute. “Earth Girl”, a new song from the new album, was somewhat bland and by-the-numbers.

After some greatest hits, we were treated to a fantastic, rare, full-band version of “After the Gold Rush”, with Neil playing the solo on harmonica. Then he finally picked up his electric guitar (Old Black) and tore into “Powderfinger”. It rocked. Neil played lengthy solos for an extended, roaring rendition. “Roll Another Number” was a delight, with the crowd singing along about as much as they had for “Heart of Gold”. The encore opened with the brooding but still relevant “Living with War”, but Neil lifted the mood by closing on “Rockin’ in the Free World”, this time without multiple fakeout endings.

This was a great show. “Old Man” was just a bit sloppy, and Neil’s voice on “Living with War” was rough, although that kind of fit. Otherwise, they were in strong form. I was worried they’d be out of practice, but they sounded fresh. We also got a longer set than the prior show, and both bands had shorter sets at Farm Aid a couple days later. Willie might be a little worn down, but I appreciated his easygoing charm. And Neil isn’t slowing down at all!

[Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts. Not the best picture, I know.]

Willie Nelson & Family’s setlist:
01. Whiskey River [Johnny Bush cover]
02. Stay a Little Longer [Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys cover]
03. Still Is Still Moving to Me
04. Bloody Mary Morning
05. I Never Cared for You
06. Die When I’m High (Halfway to Heaven) [cowritten and lead vocals by Micah]
07. Workin’ Man Blues [Merle Haggard cover, lead vocals by Waylon Payne]
08. Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys [Ed Bruce cover]
09. Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground
10. On the Road Again
11. You Were Always on My Mind [Gwen McCrae cover]
12. Good Hearted Woman [Waylon Jennings cover]
13. Georgia on My Mind [Hoagy Carmichael and His Orchestra cover]
14. Help Me Make It Through the Night [Kris Kristofferson cover, lead vocals by Waylon Payne]
15. Everything Is Bullshit [Particle Kid cover, lead vocals by Micah]
16. Last Leaf [Tom Waits cover]
17. Are There Any More Real Cowboys? [Neil Young cover, with Neil Young]
18. I Thought About You, Lord [lead vocals by Micah]
19. Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die
20. Will the Circle Be Unbroken? [Ada R. Habershon/Charles H. Gabriel cover] → I’ll Fly Away [Albert E. Brumley cover, with Kurt Vile and Ty Myers]
21. I Saw the Light [instrumental outro; Hank Williams with His Drifting Cowboys cover]

Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts’ setlist:
01. Long May You Run
02. Human Highway
03. Comes a Time
04. Casting Me Away from You
05. Earth Girl
06. Old Man
07. Heart of Gold
08. Daddy Went Walkin’
09. Harvest Moon
10. After the Gold Rush
11. Powderfinger
12. Roll Another Number (For the Road)

Encore:
13. Living with War
14. Rockin’ in the Free World

Scores:
Willie Nelson & Family: B
Neil Young & the Chrome Hearts: A

P.S. This was the first time I’ve ever seen the line to the men’s bathroom far outstretching the one for the women.

P.P.S. Thanks to the Hammons-Murphy family!

Buzz Kull / Kontravoid / Normal Bias - Live 2026.09.20 Saint Vitus, Brooklyn, New York

A friend recommended this show while I was in town and it sounded like a good time. The beloved metal bar has recently reopened in a new space, although this was more of a darkwave night. I failed to pack black and felt conspicuous in a pink top.

Normal Bias opened. I liked their synth-goth atmosphere even if it leaned a little too hard on Depeche Mode. The singer was good and even had Gahan’s powerful baritone. The one other member, less stylish, handled the electronics in the back. I wished there was a little more complexity in their music, but I could move to it.

[Normal Bias.]

After a lengthy DJ break came Kontravoid, a solo synth performer. In a haze of fog machines and delirious strobe lights, he barely touched his desk and mostly just harshly shouted into his mic. The intensity only picked up as he went along. A few songs had hints of pop that were consistently crushed by the aggression. Friends told me this was not what they expected given his studio recordings. I found his industrial jungle too abrasive, although I still could dance to it. What else was there to do? I couldn’t understand the words.

The headliner was Buzz Kull, the solo act of Marc Dwyer. He had a little more personality and balanced the beats better with texture. I heard a bit of Skinny Puppy. Dwyer was more involved in his synth rig and used thick effects on his vocals. I wished I could’ve understood him better, too, but he played the best set of the night. The venue has clearly invested in a good sound (and light) setup, but the perennial problem of unclear vocals was still an issue. Or is that just the genre?

[Buzz Kull.]

Scores:
Normal Bias: B-
Kontravoid: D
Buzz Kull: B

P.S. Thanks to Keagan and Chris!

Emotional Alcemy: An Interview with Laurentius the Profit

I saw Laurentius the Profit perform on a rooftop bar in Tempelhof in May and was immediately stunned by her dexterous, luminous voice. She spoke of an album recorded while living in a cave church in Turkey, and she also had written a book. Both are titled FUCK LIFE — When On High and are available on Bandcamp here. I listened to the album first, and the sound of the cave pulled me in. The beautiful, long reverb rings out her bitter, wandering, entrancing melodies. Listening closer and then reading the book, I could feel pain seeping from her words. I heard a need to escape, to feel real freedom, to find new meanings and a new place in life after a long stretch of darkness. Her work is metaphysical and mysterious, like being caught in a labyrinth you don’t understand any of the rules to, but it searches for patterns and past wisdom to make sense of the world after emerging from a dungeon. I had so many questions, so I reached out for an interview. You can read some of our conversation on Bandcamp Daily here.

International Music / Gregor - Live 2026.08.22 Festsaal Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany

When International Music announced a new show in Berlin without a larger tour announcement, I wondered if this was going to be something special, perhaps a way to introduce new material to gear up for a tour. The former wasn’t the case, and the latter doesn’t appear to be; but it was Peter’s birthday, which received significant musical attention from Pedro and the crowd.

I saw the band last year at Immergut when their 2024 album Endless Rüttenscheid was a little fresher, and they unsurprisingly played quite a bit of the album then. To my surprise, at this show it was just a few songs, about as much as from Ententraum (2021). The real focus was on the debut, Die besten Jahre (2018), from which they played almost the entire album. I suppose that is still the crowd favorite, but I missed the psychedelia of Rüttenscheid.

By and large, the songs they chose were great, so it’s hard to complain. The only real dud was “Tür”, a harder and more aggressive song, although it was apparently specifically requested by email. A few others like “Du Hund” and “Mama warum” didn’t speak to me much and felt a bit indulgent, but “Farbiges Licht”, “Metallmädchen”, and the Rüttenscheid songs were all bangers. I enjoyed the harmonies, particularly on “Country Girl” and “Immer mehr”. The latter also had a great open, jammy feeling that let the musicians explore the space, as did “Lass es ziehen”. I was (naturally) entranced by Pedro’s bass, particularly the great tone he got with just fuzz and chorus pedals.

I could tell the band hadn’t played much lately; they were just a bit loose. That said, it kind of worked. They were clearly having fun and were in an upbeat, playful mood. Even when they missed a line or had to restart “Lass es ziehen”, it didn’t feel like a problem, but rather just part of the spontaneity that kept it lively and engaging. They also acknowledged that a certain Ludwig was adding a tape delay effect to the vocals and guitar from the mixing board. It was really well done and never overpowered the mix or went awry. That was a small thing but it added a little extra spice to the songs.

There was an opener, Gregor, but I didn’t like his simple muzak backing tracks or his half-baked melodies. I struggled to keep my focus. He certainly provided a contrast to International Music’s spark!

[International Music.]

Approximate setlist:
01. Pfeffer
02. Fehler
03. Country Girl
04. Mont St. Michel
05. Cool bleiben
06. Nebel
07. Raus ausm Zoo
08. Du Hund
09. Misery
10. Tür
11. Immer mehr
12. Farbiges Licht
13. Daddy Is Rich
14. Lass es ziehen

Encore 1:
15. Kneipe
16. Liebesformular
17. Metallmädchen

Encore 2:
18. Mama warum
19. Für alles

Scores:
Gregor: D
International Music: A-

P.S. Thanks to Tim!

John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt - 17th Klangwechsel 2026.08.05

In Halberstadt, a sleepy but pretty town in eastern Germany, an organ is playing a 639-year-long rendition of a John Cage composition. It’s not in the big cathedral in the center of town, nor in the other big churches nearby, almost all of which have mighty organs. It’s a little walk further, past the splendid half-timbered houses, in a former Cistercian cloister that was secularized in Napoleon’s wake in 1810. On August 5th, among election campaign posters that spoke of deportation in openly racist terms, most of the sparse pedestrian population appeared to be tourists. Some were there to admire the parts of the city that weren’t bombed to bits in 1945 when the surrounded Nazis wouldn’t surrender, but most came for the same reason I was there: a Klangwechsel, a chord change. The last one was in February 2024. They don’t happen often. The name of the piece is ORGAN²/ASLSP, where “ASLSP” stands for “as slow as possible”, and that instruction is taken quite literally.

[The Burchardi-Kirche.]

I came early with a couple friends who were there for the last one. The night before, we caught the free concert put on by the John Cage Organ Foundation Halberstadt, the volunteer-led organization that keeps the organ running. The last time around, they did a similar event in the cathedral featuring a shorter version of ORGAN²/ASLSP. This time they assembled a myriad cast of musicians and dancers to “set the mood”, as the flyer announced.

First up was Loré Lixenberg, a mezzo-soprano who performed excerpts from Cage’s Song Books along with a backing track. It was highly unpredictable, ranging from dissonant noise to Lixenberg gurgling water and opening a bag of chips on mic to waving a black flag and chanting “the best form of government is no government at all”. She also did a piece of her own, Bird, which started as her explaining birdsong. She gradually sped up her speech and interspersed it with wild flights of whoops and trills, and a backing track of actual birdsong gradually similarly built up to an ecstatic cacophony.

[Sarah Maria Sun and Clara Hyerim Byun.]

The other highlight was soprano Sarah Maria Sun and pianist Clara Hyerim Byun. First, they used found objects, harmonica, synth, and voice to perform selections from Benjamin Scheuer’s Fragwürdige Fragmente, which was arrhythmic, almost atonal, and very silly. They came back later for a straight piano and voice version of “Meine Stadt”, written by local composer Hans Auenmüller, but then veered back hard left into György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre. The text was described as “half-nonsense”, but that could be said about almost everything I saw on stage. This piece was more physical and theatrical, including Byun ranting while Sun held her hand over Byun’s mouth, and Byun ripping up her sheet music.

Tanz Harz, a local dance company, performed Moving Silence accompanied by a soundtrack of prepared piano pieces by Cage. They danced with a digital timer on stage, which they frequently stared at in fascination or glanced at in curiosity, although the majority of the choreography was constant fluid motion. They seemed to be expressing tension and anxiety about the passage of time.

Otherwise, Gunnar Brandt-Sigurdsson performed parts 3 and 4 of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate in an expressive display of human vocal sounds. Moderator Christoph Ogiermann broke the avant-garde flow to sing a set of traditional political songs (Franz Josef Degenhardt, Wolf Biermann, Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht), accompanying himself on piano. The night closed with PSON (Dietmar Gubin), performing a blend of live electronics and pre-recorded material.

[Tanz Harz.]

When I came back the next day for the Klangwechsel, there was excitement in the air. Hours before it opened, there were already people lined up by the entrance to the church, and plenty lounging around the courtyard of the cloister, trying to escape the heat. I could feel the anticipation. Inside the church, video teams set up their rigs, photographers angled for good spots, and I could see I wasn’t the only one recording audio. I could sense something stirring within me, but I was distracted by all the people and activity. The foundation had a little ceremony and thankfully asked everyone to be quiet and just listen for a few moments. I could finally focus and started to feel at peace. Eventually, an elderly organist inserted the new pipe, an A4 (a’). There were already seven pipes in use, including the adjacent A♯4, so the tone was richly complex and mildly dissonant.

[The organ with the pipe to be added.]

After a few more moments, the crowd cheered. I saw lightness, giddiness, and a buzz among the people. Something mystical and strange had happened, and we had witnessed it. Gradually, people filtered out. I stuck around for a while, but there was still too much commotion to fully relax and enjoy it. I sat outside with my friends for a couple hours, listening to the amplified chord projected into the courtyard while we talked to volunteers and other attendees. I heard multiple comparisons to witnessing a total eclipse. Some described it as a religious or spiritual experience.

Eventually, I went back in the church. It was thankfully much quieter. I was immediately transfixed. I was mesmerized. The sound wasn’t particularly loud, but omnipresent and warmly inviting. I stayed inside for about an hour, meditating on the flow of time and the relative insignificance of my existence. For once, I was in no hurry. I didn’t want to leave.

[An installation inside the Cage-Haus.]

I was struck by the playfulness of the entire experience: Cage’s approach to composition, the performances the night before, and the hubris of performing an organ piece for as long as the modern 12-tone keyboard organ has existed. At face value, it’s all comical and absurd. Simultaneously, I found it profound. How slow is “as slow as possible”? Why do we take the passage of time so seriously? What does the future hold? Will humanity even exist in 2640 to see the performance to the end? Isn’t climate catastrophe basically inevitable at this point? Can anarchism (or socialism, or any other ideology) defeat the stranglehold capitalism has on the distribution of wealth and welfare? Why aren’t more disused churches used for fun art projects? What is the meaning of property? What happens if the extremists win the state election?

Okay, you can see how the mind can wander. But one’s environment influences thought. And when I was enveloped by an unceasing, discordant pipe organ drone, I felt on one hand relaxed and deeply connected to the world around me, and on the other starkly at odds and ready to fight. I want to live in a world full of strange and idiosyncratic art. It’s part of human experience, and everyone should have the opportunity to create and witness it. I’m not sure I understood all the music I heard the night before the Klangwechsel, but I don’t care. I think most of the performances would’ve benefited from being about 30% shorter, but can I really complain? It was fun. I laughed. It felt like a set of instructions on how to take things less seriously, while still fighting for what you know is right. Will they still be holding pre-celebratory concerts in a couple hundred years? I hope so. I hope the world isn’t on fire, or underwater, or a nuclear wasteland by then. What other ridiculous things can we get up to in the meantime?

Further Reading and Listening:
My friend Gabe’s piece for The World on PRX
A longer piece by Gabe from the last Klangwechsel
Homepage of the John Cage Organ Project Halberstadt