After an intense light and sound experience during the opening of Sonic Acts on January 12, THE DARK UNIVERSE will really take off on February 21 (until February 23)
Correspondent CILIA ERENS:
Scanning the Festival on field recordings I encounter two artists far away in the dark: LUSTMORD and JUSTIN BENNETT
about ‘Spectral Analysis WG’ made by JUSTIN BENNETT:
It was a concert, a soundscape, a soundwalk, an audiotour in one, with a perfect balance between the visible surrounding walls in the neighbourhood and the variety of distant hums in my ears.
Festival information:
Opening
Thursday 21 Feb – 19:00–22:00 – Stedelijk Museum
‘The Dark Universe festival takes off with a very special evening as part of Stedelijk | special events, during which unknown properties of seeing and hearing are revealed. The evening features a sound installation composed for a specific space in the Stedelijk Museum: freq_out 9. This work consists of twelve separate sound pieces composed by twelve artists. Made on site, the pieces are amplified to act as a single, generative sound-space. Matthijs Munnik will premiere a new monumental instalment of his flickering light work Lightscape: Common Structures. Anil Ananthaswamy will begin the evening with a lecture about the edge of physics and how the most remote places on the planet might help us solve the mystery of the dark universe”.
Saterday 23 Februari, 21:00 – 22:00 performance in Paradiso, Amsterdam of:
Biosphere, Lustmord & MFO: “TRINITY”
“TRINITY” is a collaboration of Biosphere, Lustmord and MFO. Using sound and image, they explore the first nuclear weapons tests in the New Mexico desert. For this, Lustmord and Biosphere travelled to the Whiten Sands Missile Range and Los Alamos in the US to research and make field recordings.
about LUSTMORD
Brian Williams (UK) is an electronic musician often credited for creating the dark ambient genre with albums recorded under the name Lustmord. Lustmord’s music combined field recordings made in crypts, caves, and slaughterhouses with occasional ritualistic incantations and Tibetan horns”.
SPECTRAL ANALYSIS WG
Soundwalk by Justin Bennett
In 1635 a plague-house was built on what is now the WG Terrain in Amsterdam. There was a hospital on this site until 1983. Dr Ernst Hartmann (1915–92) observed that some areas in a
hospital were more conducive to healing than others. He determined that a grid of radiation covers the earth’s surface. At some points, these lines form a ‘Hartmann Knot’ of negative energy. Hartmann’s work has been related to the study of ley lines and feng shui, as well as to Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy. Justin Bennett’s soundwalk Spectral Analysis WG (2013) attempts to reveal this and other energy phenomena in and around the WG Terrain while investigating the healing properties of sound and electricity. We listen back through time – perhaps back to the days of the plague-house, the curing sessions of Anton Mesmer, or the Second World War – to the electromagnetic traces in the spaces around us.
Headphones and a map of the walk are distributed at the NASA reception desk upon presentation of a photo ID.
The exhibition runs from 13 January to 24 February and is open daily between 12:00 and 22:00.
about JUSTIN BENNETT
Justin Bennett (UK/NL) works with sound and visual media. His work painstakingly examines the sounds of our everyday urban environments in the minutest detail.