zweikommasieben
Magazin #18
** Get a copy via Präsens Editionen. **
In this issue, zweikommasieben once again collects numerous suggestions for how one can arrive at other perceptions of the world. The many artists, musicians and contributors in the magazine before you tell of other ways of seeing and hearing, other ways of experiencing.
Artists are experts at developing new perceptions. For example, when new contexts for performances or presentations are sought—like Gerben de Louw for the Dutch label Queeste, or Philip Müller in relation to his DJ Heroin project. Meanwhile, performer Sue Tompkins emphasizes how different contexts and locations can serve as catalysts for other occasions. For DJ Lycox, the move from his hometown of Lisbon to Paris was crucial for gaining a new perspective on music. And Melika Ngombe Kolongo, alias Nkisi, not only has another view of the world, but chose the very possibility of looking at other worlds as a pseudonym—since Nkisi are ritual sculptures from precolonial Congo that are capable of looking at our world while also giving us the possibility of looking into the underworld.
Bogomir Doringer has been able to develop another view in the modern sense of media technology: he hangs cameras from the ceilings of clubs and festival tents, in order to look at the dance floor from a bird’s-eye-view. He observes dancers as if through a microscope aimed at a petri dish—and suddenly the vocabulary of cell biologists is most relevant for describing what occurs. Here, a new way of seeing turns into language—just like a new way of hearing sounds can fuel new writing. Thanks to the mineral sounds of producer Lechuga Zafiro and composer Catherine Christer Hendrix, Alexander Iadorola succeeds in developing a linguistic-associative review of the work that seems poetic.
Poetry and language’s possibilities of becoming poetic are also of interest to New York musician Eartheater, as she notes in an interview for this issue. Similarly, Simian Keizer, who is continually looking for new connections between sound and word for us in his poetry column “Soundtexte,” guides us on this search. Dagmara Kraus, presented in this issue’s column, is a prime example of how language and its sound can occupy space and allow new approaches, new listening and understanding.
For us, all of these attempts and experiments are the inspiration for a magazine that now and then sets out to document this diversity. We hope that our astonishment at the artistic knowledge developed through these new efforts will be shared by our readers, and that someone or other will be inspired by the search, or maybe even join it.
Until next time,
The Editors