Annesley Black: Digital Blood

In a strange environment, developed and designed by artist Katrin Plavčak, three rock musicians with dadaist tendencies collide with four musicians of contemporary music. The lumberjacks are equipped with both analog and digital instruments.

 

In this bizarre landscape, the group encounters figures from Plavčak’s fantastic world: humorous cyborg-like Wolpertingers—half human, half animal, half machine—such as the military-developed robot dog, or Jack the Dog from Adventure Time, or Roger, the semi-acoustic guitar. They are also confronted by hitchhiking clouds, severed tree stumps, »prosthetic beings,« bearded mushrooms, and the chorus of Jolly Dentists who disrupt the action with their commentary. Naturally, Alexa as a substitute partner or an AI discovering its creative side also appears.

 

This electroperette (electro-opera), a scenic music piece, creates a digitalized, post- or transhuman world with fantastic prototypes that cannot, and do not wish to, simply discard their human legacy.

 

The music itself is also a hybrid—half-improvised, half-composed, challenging the boundaries between rock songs and contemporary music. The narrative is not linear; instead, the music mirrors the sometimes abrupt encounters between various species. It includes everything from completely instrumental sections to tutti a cappella passages, and every possible variation in between. The genre boundaries in music blur.

 

To create this strange musical being, the artists chose an interdisciplinary, collaborative, and mutually inspiring process that allows for spontaneity and individuality within fixed elements. Annesley Black recorded motifs from the band, reshaped them, complemented them, fragmented them, and added her own compositions. For instance, the songs of Kinky Muppet take on wandering movements. Text fragments from the songs reappear in the quartet’s arrangements, becoming disembodied and sounding like a false feed from an interplanetary chat, a hymn summoning the last »bearded mushroom,« who enjoys an entirely analog beer.

(Annesley Black, Katrin Plavčak, Matthia Löbke)