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thirsty Finally weekend, and the Kulturfabrik is taking over the festival from here on, but when I arrived shortly after 8pm, it was a sorry state of things I found myself in. Not even 50 people were there yet, and the Artaban brothers played their laptop’n’bass sound to a tiny audience that enjoyed their melancholic Eighties tinged instrumentals. A bit like Visage without vocals and more bass guitar. In the meantime, Sermeq was playing a set with Cyclorama in the Kinosch. Ambient instrumental wave pop with floating guitar, nice enough to listen to, but you couldn’t bring your drinks. Understandable though, as the Kinosch is normally a regular movie theatre, and the Kufa people didn’t want to get it all messy. The main hall continued with a long laptop set by Loose Body Parts that didn’t manage to keep my attention. First of all this kind of music rarely works for me in a live setting, and when you stand hidden in a corner like this, the audience is forced to stare at an empty stage, and that made me walk over to the Kinosch again where Lisa Berg was delivering her cello loops. She doesn’t have the power and effervescence yet of an André Mergenthaler, but she is sexier. Much sexier! In the background, a movie of Lisa playing her electric cello did more to stimulate every man’s imagination, with blue dyed snails crawling over her bare legs. Who wouldn’t want to be a snail there?
The KNK DJ’s continued meanwhile in the concert hall, providing a growing and even rather attentive audience with two hours of music from hiphop over top forty from the Eighties to some acid techno house. At times it was really bad, and I was expecting “Vamos a la playa” any minute, and only the more uptempo parts towards the end of the set were consoling me a bit, but this wasn’t really an interesting warm-up. At 11pm, the elite of Luxembourg’s art scene started a performance about the final days of the culture year 2007, with lots of blue colour, weird sounds, deer noises, cello loops, again, modern dance, and X-rated texts. Serge Tonnar, Sascha Ley, Yuko Kominami and Lisa Berg put an interesting counterpoint to the more hedonistic action in the concert hall, which also explained why tonight there was a clash of cultures, of more artistically inclined people having to share the location with the local hiphop crowd, and all of this without any apparent friction.
Unlike the first two days, where time tables informed the audience what was happening when, today there was no such documentation available, which is why I missed the sets at the Ratelach, which is a shame, as I really wanted to see Yikez!
But then it was midnight, and Mix Master Mike started his set. Resident DJ of the Beastie Boys and three times consecutive turntablism world champion, we were in for something special. This was more than just run of the mill hiphop. Mix Master Mike added his crazy scratches with two turntables on a set that contained surprisingly many rock moments, from Nirvana to Franz Ferdinand, from Queen to Led Zeppelin, thus violating rock classics into a deconstructed yet organised chaos that was fascinating, vibrating and downright exceptional. I have never been one for that kind of music, but Mix Master Mike must have felt the origins of this place and transmuted a genre commonly associated with hiphop into a rock environment. More than 300 people must have been mesmerised towards the end by this loud irreverent performance.
This experimental evening needed some time to shift into the higher gears, but the final contribution of Mix Master Mike made this a worthwhile crossover evening that was original and innovative at the same time. Now it only remains to be hoped that my liver will make it through the fourth and last day of the Sonic Visions festival.
