- Non Standard Productions' tenth anniversary started at 6 PM sharp on Saturday, November 5th, by which time total darkness had already fallen on Berlin. As sheets of rain plastered dead leaves to the sidewalks, people shook out their umbrellas in the foyer of Hebbel Am Ufer, or HAU1, a wood-paneled theater built in 1908 by the Art Nouveau architect Oskar Kaufmann. Over by the merch table, a woman gasped as her companion admitted she'd been at Panorama Bar that morning. "Only for two hours," she assured her, "because I had to see a friend." The people pulling off their scarves and finding their seats all fit roughly into the same subsection of Berlin's scene: mostly 35 and up, by now primarily into experimental music but with one foot still in the clubs. The same could be said of Tobias Freund, founder of Non Standard Productions and the night's de facto host.
As a label, NSP documents the most recent stage in Freund's singular career, which has seen him making electronic pop (Sieg Über Die Sonne, with Dandy Jack) lean club weapons (Tobias.) and various kinds of avant-garde music, for Ostgut Ton as well as NSP. Though he lives in Berlin, he's long had roots in Chile, which has been something of a second home for him since his first gig there in 1989. That night at HAU1, he performed with his wife, the Chilean visual artist Valentina Berthelon, as Recent Arts, and with her friend Javiera Gonzáles, with whom he released an EP last year.
Those were by far the night's best performances. Recent Arts pairs Freund's vivid sound design with Berthelon's lush and mysterious video art. As the music rippled and sighed, her images showed stop-action footage of red and black ink blotting out old German texts, then moved into a meditation on the satellite LAGEOS, and finished with a kind of surreal portrait of Freund himself. With González, Freund deployed lilting synth pop grooves while she cooed lyrics like "seduce me, seduce me" and controlled effects on her voice with a small console attached to her mic stand—a dazzling contrast to the night's more stoic and stationary performers.
Earlier in the evening, Max Loderbauer delivered a wandering modular set that, while not without its moments, didn't approach the richness of his records. The night had begun with Uwe Schmidt, who these days spends a lot of time playing improvised techno with Freund. This time he delivered something more subtle: a rolling, slow cascade of drones and raw frequencies, at times tense, at others soothing, and increasingly cinematic as it unfurled. I found it interesting that someone who's previously done merengue covers of Kraftwerk (as Señor Coconut) could also express himself with something so austere. By providing a home and a platform for such adventurous music, Freund and NSP do a real service to Berlin's music scene.