Ratkiller: Dreamhammer (Rotifer Cassettes 2017)

Ratkiller: Meta Music for the 21st Century

Review

The Estonian musician Ratkiller is a master of intertextuality. His recent album Dreamhammer (Rotifer Cassettes 2017) is full of samples from different sources: from Death Metal to 1980s Funk or porn movies. A review comment.

There are always other words in a word, other texts in a text, but also other melodies in a melody, and other music in music. Ratkiller is a master of this musical intertextuality. His new release Dreamhammer weaves a fluid intertextual, intersonic web, deftly sourcing and splicing his samples, that hazily pass through your consciousness. Liquid signifiers are stripped of their spatiotemporal origin and time dissolves.

The tracks are the product of an informal music fan whose idiosyncratic work is in dialogue with other music styles. The transposing is done so seamlessly that there's no mistaking it as just the sum of its parts. His techniques are crude – for instance, uses a media player as a sampler and creates rhythms with play/pause/back/forward controllers.

Dreamhammer by Ratkiller

Dreamhammer unravels with the cacophonic «Nasty Travesty» driven on the backdrop of Limbus 3's album New Atlantis. «Soiled Sheets» culminates after three minutes in a piano-driven apex (Frederic Rzewski sample) with echoing voices taken from a tape of Estonian pornographic stories. Therion, a Swedish death metal band, provide a buoyant start to side B, while «Art of Awaking» dabbles in 1970s spiritual jazz.

Genres and styles are allusive on this latest release by the Tallinn-based black metal fan Mihkel Kleis. It could be an 1980s synth/funk album, or21^st century deconstructed club music. «Music, rhythm, rigadoon, without end, for no reason», wrote Julia Kristeva, the originator of the term «intertextuality», in Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.

Biography

Lucia Udvardyová is a music journalist, curator, and organizer. In 2010, she co-founded Easterndaze, a project that aims to document and interconnect the emerging underground scenes in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked with Czech Radio, Resonance FM, Cashmere Radio, The Listening Biennial, The Quietus, and The Wire, Central European University (CEU), and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), among others. Between 2016 and 2021, she curated and co-organized the Easterndaze x Berlin series that aims to bring together collectives from Berlin and the CEE region. She also gives lectures and talks and leads sound-related workshops. Udvardyová currently works for the SHAPE platform, a pan-European festival initiative that promotes innovative music and audiovisual art, CTM Festival’s discourse program and magazine, and she’s the film curator at WOMEX. Follow her on Instagram, and on her Website.

Published on October 04, 2017

Last updated on May 06, 2024

Topic

Sampling

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Snap

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Guy in a White Cube

Quotation

by Lucia Udvardyová

What is most important to you when curating?

Curating to me is something very subjective; presumably it should be a constant struggle between your subjective preferences and objectives factors, but of course, it’s not so straight forward. I’ve curated events at galleries and clubs, festival and living rooms. It’s important to have a certain level of diversity in mind – in terms of who you are inviting, what you’re presenting, how you’re presenting it.

What are the biggest conflicts / pleasures you encounter when curating?

Since I’ve been doing it not for large institutions, but more for independent initiatives and my own projects – the biggest conflict is how to remain objective if this is a small scene and you more or less know everyone personally. I guess the challenge is to constantly search for «new» (not in terms of a novelty fetish, but more staying curious and having your eyes and ears open) artist and ideas. And of course, it’s probably better not to try to present your own work while you’re at it.

What does curating mean to you?

It’s a glorified word to describe what is an integral part of any (not only) art scene. Selecting and presenting and putting together heterogeneous objects and artist (I mostly work in the music scene, so it’s gigs and musicians mostly) to an audience that will hopefully have some sort of reaction to at least some of what you have curated. An organizer is a curator, a promoter is a curator, the magazine editor is a curator, the lady arranging her flower shop window display is a curator. It’s not just the smartly stressed guy in a white cube. I wonder how curating will change in the future – will there be an AI curator, with its ultra objective, clinically impartial methods of curation based on algorithms? I hope not.

These quotations have been published in the Norient book Politics of Curatorship: Collective and Affective Interventions, edited by Philipp Rhensius and Monia Acciari (Norient Books 2023).

Biography

Lucia Udvardyová is a music journalist, curator, and organizer. In 2010, she co-founded Easterndaze, a project that aims to document and interconnect the emerging underground scenes in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked with Czech Radio, Resonance FM, Cashmere Radio, The Listening Biennial, The Quietus, and The Wire, Central European University (CEU), and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), among others. Between 2016 and 2021, she curated and co-organized the Easterndaze x Berlin series that aims to bring together collectives from Berlin and the CEE region. She also gives lectures and talks and leads sound-related workshops. Udvardyová currently works for the SHAPE platform, a pan-European festival initiative that promotes innovative music and audiovisual art, CTM Festival’s discourse program and magazine, and she’s the film curator at WOMEX. Follow her on Instagram, and on her Website.

Published on January 06, 2022

Last updated on May 28, 2024

Topic

Curation

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Special

Politics of Curatorship

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Cover of Diatribes – Sistere. Artwork, Design and Handwork by Katarína Škamlová, Jakub Juhás and Zoltán Czakó. Released 2017 by Mappa Records MAP06

Diatribes: Floating on a Sonic Carpet

Review

by Lucia Udvardyová

The music of Diatribes, a duo by the Geneva-based musicians D’incise and Cyril Bondi, induces hypnotic states. Lucia Udvardyova reflects about the inclusive communal effects of the duo’s radical sonic abstraction in their latest EP Sistere.

Lucid signifiers devoid of obvious meaning or reference to external circumstances point to a primordial and abstract sonic state where music floats in and out of consciousness over and over again. Layers of sound are intricately and gradually woven into a magic carpet that dissolves at the end and drops you back into the reality of the everyday. Aural cartographies and the mediation of recording processes in various spatiotemporal contexts (resonance, vibration, reverberation) are the main elements in Sistere, the latest release of Diatribes, a duo by the Geneva-based musicians D’incise and Cyril Bondi who run the renowned imprint & (meta) orchestra Insub.

Sistere by Diatribes

Both pieces are more than twenty minutes long and are bona fide repetitive electroacoustic recordings that usher the listener into a hypnotic state of timelessness, an inclusive communal ritual, a Zen-like mantra, a wall of sound for perception projections. There’s an inherent subtlety and gentleness to the record, the music evolves over time horizontally and vertically, with added and deducted instrumental layers. Sistere is a very open record – it welcomes the active listener, without excluding the «passive», comfortably drowsy one.

Sistere by Diatribes

Biography

Lucia Udvardyová is a music journalist, curator, and organizer. In 2010, she co-founded Easterndaze, a project that aims to document and interconnect the emerging underground scenes in Central and Eastern Europe. She has worked with Czech Radio, Resonance FM, Cashmere Radio, The Listening Biennial, The Quietus, and The Wire, Central European University (CEU), and the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), among others. Between 2016 and 2021, she curated and co-organized the Easterndaze x Berlin series that aims to bring together collectives from Berlin and the CEE region. She also gives lectures and talks and leads sound-related workshops. Udvardyová currently works for the SHAPE platform, a pan-European festival initiative that promotes innovative music and audiovisual art, CTM Festival’s discourse program and magazine, and she’s the film curator at WOMEX. Follow her on Instagram, and on her Website.

Published on June 09, 2017

Last updated on April 09, 2024

Topics

Sound

Perception

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