Unsafe+Sounds was founded by Vienna composer Matthias Kranebitter in 2014 and has been under the artistic direction of Shilla Strelka since 2015. The festival, in its own words, focuses on challenging music from a variety of different genre, combining underground aesthetics and avant-garde strategies in a subversive, idiosyncratic program. Vienna may not lack for cultural offerings – including in the subversive, idiosyncratic category – but Unsafe+Sounds, in its first ten years, has become known for its high-quality, varied, and challenging program. We recently visited the opening night of the festival’s tenth-anniversary edition.
The tenth anniversary of the Unsafe+Sounds festival is subtitled “Of Many Worlds”. The first world to be introduced is that of sound artist Marija Jociūtė and dancer Yoh Morishita. A dull rhythmic banging heralds the beginning – industrial in the sense of machinery rather than music. Morishita lies on her belly, begins moving her fingers as if playing piano, then gradually raises her forearms perpendicular to the floor. Her hands turn to one another and appear to strike up a conversation. The music develops in fits and starts; the thumping augmented by oscillating keyboards and arpeggios. At some point, the dancer is standing, and she launches into an astonishing display of flexibility. At some moments, one has the impression that parts of her body are attached backwards. As a whole, the performance is beauty and grotesquerie in one, challenging but enthralling.
Miriam Adefris
After the intermission, Miriam Adefris walks to her instrument and begins, without prelude, to bow strings in the middle register of the harp. Electronically looping each string before moving on, she adds an octave, then a fifth, the harmony thickening as she goes – until, at some point, a lush minor chord is hanging in the room. The tone color varies; overtones flicker and disappear again, like a cello playing sul ponte; there is scratching, scraping, imperfection. When she finally sits and begins plucking melodies, they initially struggle to free themselves of the droning chord, coming into focus as it dies away. A seamless 30-minute performance follows, improvisation interspersed with brief set pieces. She’s told me she’s an Alice Coltrane fan, but her playing tends more toward the contemplative than the ecstatic. The music is strongly minimalist, wistful, hewing close to a few simple modes. It wouldn’t be out of place in a highbrow film.
This goes on for perhaps a half an hour, then she suddenly lifts her fingers from the strings and begins to knock, tap, scratch the wooden body of the instrument. The change is jarring but not unwelcome, reintroducing an element of imperfection into music that, for a while, was almost preternaturally clean. The interlude leads swiftly into a more impromptu series of rubato melodies supported by a delaying effect: the sound of rain on a rooftop, meticulously rendered in equal temperament. This passage is comparatively short, though; soon, she drifts back into a final, elegiac song, which gradually slows and comes to a stop. She damps the strings with as little ceremony as she began and stands. The applause is thunderous. The whole affair has lasted perhaps three quarters of an hour, and none of us has noticed the passing of time.
It’s hard to say anything critical about a performance so fluidly executed: one feels as if one were turning up one’s nose at a gift (which, in a sense, one is). Still, the opening held a promise of glitchiness, noise, humanity, that never fully blossomed. One might argue that our age demands the acknowledgement of noise, error, decay (but then again, one might just as well argue for the opposite – for an aspirational, Bachian striving for transcendence). There is a point beyond which technique alone cannot take you, where a musician must begin to test the bounds of her instrument – to find out what’s out there, and what she can do with it: the exploration of all those things that the classicists call “extended technique”, or that a jazz or soul musician might refer to as grit, or shouting, or preaching. But one has the sense that Miriam Adefris is already on the trail of that revelation: the flickering overtones, the scratching and knocking, are her trying the door to a world even larger than the one she already inhabits fully.
Dorian Concept
After a break, the “headliner”, Dorian Concept, takes the stage, dressed in utilitarian black, a baseball cap giving him a boyish look. He’s known for his organic, completely improvised sets, a hybrid of electronic dance and art music, and on this evening he’s true to form. He begins – as did Jociūtė – with a single statement, an arpeggiated melody, that he builds piece by piece into an architecture, looping as he goes. The material is diatonic, sticking close to a simple major scale, but as the music progresses and gains in complexity, he begins modulating elements, bending, detuning, distorting. He is constantly in motion: tweaking a knob here, activating an effect there, dancing a little in bare feet, his left foot stretching to tap a loop on or off. His joy in what he is doing is infectious; he seems as continually surprised and pleased with what happens as we are.
In this age of splintered audiences and precarious funding, ten years is a venerable age for a festival to have reached – especially an affair as stubbornly grassroots and iconoclastic as Unsafe+Sounds. Even better, it’s clear that age has not robbed the event of its ambition to offer Vienna a varied, challenging program of art and discourse. Happy anniversary – and here’s to ten more years of the same. – Philip Yaeger