Manafonistas

This year’s PUNKT FESTIVAL has been a beautiful affair. After being curated by Eno and Sylvian in the last two years, it was a kind of going back to the roots of PUNKT. The best thing is the Punkt aesthetic which is, beyond the art of live-sampling, a lesson in stripping down nearly every „big thing“ to chamber music size and a sensual „being-lost-in-the-laboratory“-agenda. David Sylvian’s trio, The Kilowatt Hour,  shows the silent triumph of an artist rigorously following his own visions and thereby sacrificing old fans‘ nostalgic expectations. In case you’re looking for the best visual choreographies of modern music history, you can start, maybe, with early Pink Floyd, and you’ll end up at The Kilowatt Hour. The duo of Jan Bang with jazz pianist Tigran Hamasyan (and special guest Eivind Aarset) was one of the most shining hours of the Punkt history, telling that jazz’s future might be well-grounded in playing with fractured dejavues and nearly lost echoes. By the way, Tigran’s musical life changed when he (once upon a time) listened to „Dis“ from Jan Garbarek and Ralph Towner. The sound of the wind harp ist still alive, folks! Another breathtaking event was the duo of a singer and a guitarist: Eteniesh Wassie’s  and Mathieu Sourisseau’s performance was bleak, really bleak, another stripped-down intensity in its purest form. In parts rooted in the East of Africa, their music covered the range from trance patterns to joyous noise. No wonder that especially these three performances in  Foenix Cinema and  Kick Scene were followed by live-remixes (with Erik Honore, Ivar Grydeland, Jan Bang, Audun Kleive, Arve Henriksen, Sidsel Endresen a.o.) that transferred the original sounds to a totally different landscape without losing the emotional impact. In spite of the election in Norway that went utterly wrong (bad news) we will have PUNKT No. 10 next year (good news).

In the past, a long time ago, really, a lot of people who were going to David Sylvian concerts thought they were supposed to dress in black and wear deadly serious faces. In fact this was a way in which they expressed, at least for some hours, a world view full of soft existenzial darkness incl. some silver linings ranging from spiritual relief to healthy escapism. Going to The Kilowatt Hour, the fabulous trio with David Sylvian, Stephan Mathieu and Christian Fennesz, should encourage to delete all these fashion rituals. „Cool“ and „uncool“ are no longer categories that count, you can even wear flowers in your head. Go there with your favourite clothes, from Hawai, Rio, Milano, the suburbs of Trenchtown,  or Woolworth, leave all attitudes and signs behind that suggest you are extremely melancolic, a constant visitor of dark zones, or at some other bottom ground of  a shadowy half-life. The words set to music and the stripped-down music of the trio don’t deserve any posh and high brow games of beautiful losers. The music opens up wide spaces, a vastness with a breathtaking visual choreography. The  stories told are dealing with death, dying and last exits (in a very unromantic way). The purity of the performance  deserves an open mind. No charades, please!