On two long weekends in late spring (28.04.-30.04. and 05.-07.05.2023) the donaufestival once again put the small town of Krems an der Donau in a state of emergency. Around 20 events per day present adventurous aesthetics and vibrations between music, performance, fine arts, film and discourse under the title “Beyond human”.
Sound, Art, Performance, Discourse. The locations of the music and performance festival, which presents around 20 program items per day, are the Klangraum Krems Minoritenkircheseveral halls at the exhibition center, the Cinema in the boiler house, Forum Frohner and the Kunsthalle Krems. If one follows the suggestion of theorist Frédéric Neyrat (on May 6 for the video lecture with subsequent Q&A online), then we are no longer in the Anthropocene, but in the Alienocene. The journal run by Neyrat Alienocene celebrates unfamiliarity with the environment. It is dedicated to encounters between the human and the inhuman and sympathizes with aliens from space and exiles on our planet. We live in a world where organic and synthetic converge, where military-trained eagles hunt drones and steaks come from the lab.
Do we have to radically redesign ourselves to have a future? Certainly not only the climate crisis under capitalist conditions needs to be discussed, but also those ominous parallels between colonial and ecological divisions of the world into higher and lower. The supposedly legitimized conditions of exploitation correspond to the contrast between nature that is worthy of protection (national parks or domestic animals) and nature without rights (fracking soil or cattle for slaughter). Perhaps we not only need a decolonial ecology, but also a hitherto unimagined vision of a world full of intelligence that lives not only in human brains and digital machines, but also in “thinking forests” or the “internet of animals”. Read the foreword by Thomas Edlinger here.
Beyond human
Some artistic intelligences will make suggestions at the donaufestival 2023. Guitarist Daniel Bachman fuses folk improvisations with field recordings of winter storms and bushfires, punctuated by recordings from a local weather radio station, in his latest album, Almanac Behind, which will be presented as a film at the festival. Kim Noble slips into a father role for a maggot in his comical outsider performance. Eglė Budvytytė video installation Songs from the Compost deals with mutated body images in forest and dune landscapes. The collective DISNOVATION.ORG creates a hybrid “Bestiary of the Anthropocene” and develops tools for a society that has said goodbye to the fetish of growth. In a video installation, the artist Oliver Ressler deals with the sound of melting glaciers in the Arctic. The religious founders of the Toxic Temple celebrate plastic-digesting bacteria and worship nuclear waste. At the same time, their mission, which infiltrates the festival, suggests that speculation about transhumanism and the end of humanity must not replace the question of concrete forms of the inhuman in the here and now. The musically driving performance Aphasia by Jelena Jureša asks: Why does a popular Serbian DJ step on the head of a Muslim woman during the war? What does the full use of the body by the performer Harald Beharie tell about in his piece, which is accompanied by booming prog rock Batty Bwoy? And need people, as illustrated in workpiece by Anna-Marija Adomaityte, working in warehouses today based on the model of robots?
If you say no to this, you can also mobilize your body. Musically, the name of the techno-spiritual duo sets Animistic Beliefs a sign: music as magic, freed from the compulsion to be reasonable, made by sentient machines. New albums will be released by the singer and rapper Debby Friday, the witty provocateur Zebra Katz or James Holden, who sees his current work as rave music for a parallel universe. Possibly the most exciting live hip hop band on the planet right now Petronn Sphene ensures mutant disco berserkerism, the noise specialist Puce Mary now also has demonic ballads in her luggage, Hüma Utku merges oriental influences with contemporary electronics. Vocal extravagances are found in the jagged “survival anthems” of Unknown languagethe sophisticated arrangements of workers’ songs by Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker or in the music of Phew, Marina Herlop or Félicia Atkinson and the celebrated Grammy Award winner Arooj Aftab (together with Vijay Iyer & Shahzad Ismaily). Intense encounters of sound and visuals are revealed in the live versions of the formation’s post-industrial sounds Clara Lewis & Nik Colk Void + Pedro Maiain the dated donaufestival Co-produced commissioned work by Slikback x Weirdcorein the advanced psychedelic of Heith live AV ft. DECLINOin the digital aesthetics of sensory excess Amnesia Scanner & Freeka Tet as well as in stage performances by electronic composer Maya Shenfeld & Pedro Maia.
In 2023, some bands will also visit Krems: noise rock caliber like Godflesh or BIG|BRAVE as well as new discoveries like the furious live band focused on percussion Nihiloxica from the environment of the Nyege Nyege collective. This is joined by afrofuturistic voodoo magic by Nwando Bizijeand of course also aggravated club sound, for example from DJ Lag, Omar Souleyman or RP BOO. And last but not least, am donaufestival 2023 several Austrian acts will also be represented: Radian presents the world premiere of their new album, which will be released in autumn, Lukas König presents an international, rap-heavy project, Rojin Sharafi & Épong present a dated donaufestival co-produced audiovisual performance (World Premiere), Steel Vulture (band) perform rickety, gloomy machine music.
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