- A lot happened at Sonic Acts on Saturday night—arguably too much. I came away from Paradiso feeling overwhelmed, and I barely made it through half of the program. The evening was part of the wider Sonic Acts Academy, a multidisciplinary festival taking place all weekend in Amsterdam. Similar to CTM in Berlin, Sonic Acts has sought to expose and examine the relationships between art, music and technology alongside contemporary scientific thinking. Over the last decade, they've entertained themes like "The Dark Universe" and "The Poetics Of Space." This year's edition focused on dark matter and projects with a strong Anthropocene—"relating to or denoting the current geological age," says the OED—dialogue.
If that sounds way too intellectual, in practice it was a bit easier to digest. For one, Paradiso was the perfect space for it. The main room housed the programme's big AV and live acts, while the neat, 250-capacity backroom space was turned into a club. I arrived in time to steal a glimpse of the excellently named Drill Folly, before rushing to the viewing platform for Paul Jebanasam and Tarik Barri's show.
The Subtext chief and software virtuoso were presenting Jebanasam's second Subtext album, Continuum, in its entirety, a performance that premiered at Berlin Atonal last summer. I walked into this blind and came out speechless—Barri's visual mapping of Jebanasam's sonic timeline of the universe from primordial goo to fiery obliterated nothingness was more wonderful than I dare try and put into words.
J.G. Biberkopf had the difficult task of following, but the modern-day musique concrète artist didn't disappoint. His visuals—largely fictitious digital landscapes—were some of the most impressive of the night, in keeping with the themes of nature and social media diaspora that ran through last year's debut EP for Knives. M.E.S.H. and Visionist played after. Similar to Biberkopf, they're both artists who have used grime's malleability to destroy the language of the club and rebuild it in spiky, individualistic tones. I'm a huge fan of both on record, but by this point it was all starting to sound the same.
Upstairs, Stockholm's Straycore had the floor—imagine a Swedish version of Fade To Mind. Alx9696 went first, followed by label mate TOXE. Their sets were a confusion of R&B, pop and darker club beats. If you'd tuned into fellow crew member Mobilegirl on Boiler Room Berlin recently, or heard TOXE's own guest mix for East London's NTS, you'd know all about the remix of Britney Spears' "Toxic" that's flying about. It was one of those shocking-not-shocking moves that we've come to numbly accept as the norm, now that seemingly nothing is off limits. It wasn't doing it for me, but everyone else was having it.
Instead, I waited for SØS Gunver Ryberg to bring some pummelling techno to the fore, which she did in remarkably serene yet zealous fashion. Sounds of her recent Contort EP permeated through dense layers of field recordings, and then "1170 Siva (Bare Bones)" broke through and the night hit its second peak. Ryberg's dynamism and energy was a much needed shot in the arm for the program, which by that point was starting to feel like an evening spent browsing SoundCloud. (Even if that was the intention, the format was starting to drag.)
Overall, Sonic Acts felt a bit too ambitious. All the artists had just 45 minutes to perform, which gave the whole thing a choppy, frantic, impatient feel. Whole performances disappeared in the space of a toilet, cigarette or bar break. I would like to have seen less names and longer set times. It was a whole weekender crammed into a single night.
Photo credit: Pieter Kers