Preview
Prague Post
March 5, 2008
Coming from Berlin — a nexus of electronic music and minimal, streamlined techno — Modeselektor might be expected to sound cerebral and sleek. But the music made by the production duo of Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, among the headliners of this year’s Sperm Festival, is raucous and unhinged. A bubbling, spicy concoction of prickly analog licks, jackhammer bass and sleazy melodies, there’s nothing minimal about it.
Now in its third outing, Prague’s Sperm Festival is demonstrating a similarly unfiltered and all-encompassing attitude. Expanding to three nights of music and multimedia, the event has managed to pull in a wider variety of artists this year without losing its curatorial-like focus on new trends in electronic music.
This year’s lineup includes a live set by the eclectic Frenchman Joakim and His Ectoplasmic Band, dub-heavy bass by Deadbeat, a night of frantic mash-up music organized by Jason Forrest, programs dedicated to the intersection of visuals and sound and an 8-Bit Festival of music created with lo-fi electronics and repurposed video game consoles. Kicking off Thursday and Friday evening at La Fabrika and ending with a four-stage blowout Saturday night at Abaton, it’s a bold mix of music, design and audiovisual exploration.
“We’re always trying to bring something new to the Czech scene,” says Michel Brenner, the festival art director and one of the organizers.
Hatched in 2006, the festival was conceived as an attempt to provide a new incubator for the city’s music scene. Brenner, one of the founders, started booking concerts in Prague in 2003 and has since gone on to organize a plethora of shows, like the Bohemian Like You Club nights. But the Sperm Festival has become a highlight.
Set up as a nonprofit and arranged with the help of numerous guest curators, the event receives funding from a variety of foundations and organizations within the Czech Republic and internationally, which in turn helps bring in an eclectic array of artists. Forrest, an American now living in Berlin, helped pioneer the energetic, sample-based genre called breakcore, which fuses disparate music sources at breakneck speed. The track “My 36 Favorite Punk Songs,” from his album Shamelessly Exciting, is exactly what the name implies, a collage of joyous three-chord riffs. He’s bringing a crew of like-minded artists to perform Saturday night.
Another prime example of the festival’s diversity is the Blip showcase of eight-bit music, sometimes called chiptunes, also playing Saturday night. Organized by American Mike Rosenthal, who co-founded a similarly named New York festival, it’s a celebration of the musical possibilities of rewired retro electronics, especially the crude but memorable bleeps of first-generation video games. Music by artists like Nullsleep and Bit Shifter will be complemented by the blocky and colorful work of VJs (video jockeys), combining contemporary interpretations with a fair dose of nostalgia.
Visuals will also be highlighted during the more intimate and experimental sets Thursday and Friday evenings, which go well beyond the stereotype of mousey artists manipulating electronic rhythms behind a laptop. Thursday will feature the Prague debut of Berlin’s Frank Bretschneider, an audio-visual artist renowned for blending music and visual technology, who will perform his minimal 2007 album Rhythm in its entirety. Friday night will feature the dramatic and theatrical stage shows of Burbuja and Ghostmother, which have included dancers and a magician.
“This is a platform to explore how to perceive music and visuals,” Brenner says. Thankfully, he and his colleagues are keeping the definition of both very open-ended.