The evenings organized by the artist Barbara Holzherr und the musician Kalle Laar are sheer festivals and have develloped their own culture of celebration. Taking place in Munich in the context of a museum they are at the same time a party and a transitional exposition. The object is the music where the melodies of the entire world become audible, ones that are no longer easily found since the appearance of the CD and disapperarane of the vinyl record. Since music cannot be put on show in a museum, the two collegues have named their project Temporary Soundmuseum, not a permanently installed “museum“ but rather brief and momentary like a memory – an occurrence for only one night.
The Nights of Lost Music are set up neither as a nostalgic revel nor as entertainment. Its about a quest that in a sense always asks about the function of music as a language and follows the question of the acoustic memory of the recipients: the starting point usually is a certain theme – ranging for example from the Exotica Night, Island Night, Sports and Music, Electronic Lounge and to Space is the Place – and panoramas of somehow ‘lost’ musical thoughts and memories come together. Kalle Laar´s record collection is the material, equipment, and well of ideas for various exhibitions and Laar´s record player the artistic tool of expression. The course of the evening follows a chosen theme and is at the same time immediate improvisation. Access to musical history may be transformed into a perception of subjective memory. Kalle Laar calls sounds to life and fuses bits and pieces, then letting them communicate with one another and reacts at the same time to the space and the audience. The sound becomes an idea;
it should not provide just the background or force the guests to come up with some collective (dance-) movements, but it discloses a polyphony of different emotions, associations, and vivid thoughts.
The application of this information is left up to each individual.
The Nights of Lost Music are therefore not as much planned compositions as they are surprising sonic journeys: time travels, genres, and sounds that are often strange bizarre and in every case somehow unusual. In sometimes strange combinations one hears, curiosities from familiar realms such as report records, advertisement recordings, daily sounds, test recordings, recordings of political speaches, animal sounds, instructional recordings, hypnosis instructions and other unexpected treasures from fleamarkets, junkstores, or pulled from a collectors dusty shelve, for the most part sounds of ‘other’ cultures and traditions from beyond the eurocentric horizon.
In this manner the DJ finds his way, much like writers or visual artists, through the sonic landscapes to new non-linear forms of story-telling. The flurr of sounds is visually complemented by projections of record covers or filmclips and on nights like Sound Garden or Ambient Garden installations and spacial textures make it possible to enter the sound. On one night with the appearance of Augusta Forster, a native lyricist of Munich whose texts are accessible on the internet, the ideas became apparent for the first time in the form of text and speech.
The Nights of Lost Music are an event, a reflexion, an encounter and more – in any case not just another party in town. Whether one experiences them as a party or as a museum visit, those are only two of many possible options.
Birgit Wiens