Beatnik Manifesto
Audio/video piece in 4 acts for 14 musicians and recordings. Beatnik Manifesto is a piece by Viennese musician, filmmaker and artistic recycling specialist dieb13 (a.k.a. Dieter Kovačič).
As a turntablist he has been playing in the first league of international experimental music since the late 1990s and has managed to turn existing sounds into new music and noise into euphony (or vice versa) in pretty much every one of his numerous projects and collaborations.
Beatnik Manifesto brings together dieb13's companions from the last years and decades. The 14 musicians on stage and Phil Minton, whose contribution comes from record, are all pronounced voices in the experimental music scene and do not simply play a piece as interpreters, but give it the color and depth it needs to come alive. The double instrumentation of the individual instruments provides ample opportunity for pairings and competitions of all kinds.
The title Beatnik Manifesto refers to the Beat Generation - the big bang of the artistic underground of the second half of the 20th century. The Beatniks brought together jazz, photography and literature; dieb13's piece combines experimental music with texts and film footage. At the same time, beat stands for the moments in a story that drive the plot forward. Building on the text Wir Beatniks, which dieb13 wrote for a film project in 2020, fragments of text meander through the sound, creating their own layer of meaning. The beatniks of this manifesto are drivers and driven, cause and effect, wave and particle at the same time.
No one knows why, but there's never been a beatnik manifesto before, so we're making up for it now!
Musicians:
drums: Camille Emaille (fr) + Erik Carlsson (se)
double bass: Elsa Bergman (se) + Matija Schellander (at)
e-guitar: Sandy Ewen (us) + Flo Stoffner (ch)
bass clarinette Hans Koch (ch) + Susanna Gartmayer (at)
electronics: eRikm (fr) + Billy Roisz (at)
saxophone: Antoine Chessex (ch) + Anna Högberg (se)
voice: Karolina Preuschl (at)
turntables: dieb13 (at)
sound director: Arnold Haberl(at)
[as playback: Phil Minton (uk)]
