The Skull Defekts are headlining a special Unsound Festival show at Littlefield on April 6
Goethe-Institut, Wyoming Building (and other venues)
5 East Third St. between Bowery & Second Ave.
April 1-10, free – $30
www.unsound.pl/en
www.goethe.de
After a successful debut last year, the Unsound Festival is back with an amazing lineup of concerts, lectures, discussions, and film presentations that explore the past, present, and future of electronic music. Focusing primarily on European performers, the festival begins tonight at 8:00 with “Collaborations 1” ($12) at the Issue Project Room, with HATI + Z’ev, Anna Zaradny, MERCE, Dawid Szcsesny, and Aki Onda. Tomorrow at 5:00 at the Goethe-Institut, the BFI DVD project MisinforMation will screen for free, consisting of clips of public-information shorts rescored by Mordant Music. On April 3, sound artist Stephen Vitiello will give a free talk at 1:00 at the festival’s home base, the Goethe-Institut, about his High Line installation, “A Bell for Every Minute,” in addition to other of his public projects. On April 5 at the Walter Reade Theater, Clay Gold, Demdike Stare, Felix Kubin, Peter Kutin, Raime, and Rob Eggers collaborate on the five-channel horror-sound program Cinema for the Ear ($12). Among the many other participants in the festival are Deaf Center, Henryk Gorecki, Alan Howarth, Harald Grosskopf, Emeralds, Carlos Giffoni, C. Spencer Yeh, Robert Piotrowicz, Marcus Schmickler, COH, Instant Coffee, Lustmord, and Void ov Voices. There are plenty of other special events; below are some of our favorites.
Gospel of the Skull: On Sunday night at 8:00 at Littlefield ($10), the Skull Defekts will premiere songs from its latest disc, Peer Amid (Thrill Jockey). If you’re going to call yourself the Skull Defekts, you better play loud, crazy-ass music. Fortunately, this Swedish experimental rock group does just that on such songs as “No More Always,” “In Majestic Drag,” and “Fragrant Nimbus,” with Henrik Rylander, Joachim Nordwall, Jean-Louis Huhta, and Daniel Fagerstroem joined by Lungfish vocalist Daniel Higgs, who brings a whole new dimension to the group. Also on the bill is Thrill Jockey labelmate Zomes, the solo project of Lungfish guitarist Asa Osborne, who are touring behind their 2011 record Earth Grid, which was made on a cassette tape, and Polish-born German electronic percussion specialist Paul Wirkus.
Legendary electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick will make two heavily anticipated appearances at the Unsound Festival
Unsound Labs: Nosferatu, Symphony of Fear: On April 4 at 7:30 ($15), BAMcinématek will screen F. W. Murnau’s classic 1922 horror film, Nosferatu, accompanied by a live score performed by acoustic doom creator Svarte Greiner and Wirkus.
Music for Solaris: On April 6 at 8:00 at Alice Tully Hall ($20-$25), the Unsound Festival New York Opening, held in conjunction with the Krakow festival Sacrum Profanum, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel, Solaris — famously turned into films in 1971 by Andrei Tarkovsky and 2002 by Steven Soderbergh — with a specially commissioned score by Ben Frost and Daniel Bjarnason performed by Sinfonietta Cracovia and with film manipulations by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson. Sinfonietta Cracovia will also play works by Steve Reich and Krzysztof Penderecki.
Morton Subotnick: American electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick will take part in a pair of very cool events at the Unsound Festival. On April 7 at 7:30 (free), he will present “Modular Dreams” at the David Rubenstein Atrium, revisiting his 1967 debut record, the seminal Silver Apples of the Moon, with video supplied by Lillevan. (Atom™ is also on the bill.) On April 8 at 6:00 ($15), Subotnick will give the lecture and demonstration “The Transistor, the Tape Recorder, and the Credit Card: The Technological Big Bang” at the Greenwich House Music School, focusing on his groundbreaking work with the Buchla voltage-controlled modular synthesizer.