Location: Izbruhov bazen, Kranj
Concert date: 11.09.2009
Attendance: 100
Ticket price: €15
“Playing Bach is easy: all you have to do is open the right program on your computer and Bach will play itself.” Laibach
The gig, announced for around 10 p.m., kicked off almost two hours late. In the meantime we got our fill of Johann Sebastian Bach’s original music playing in the background, soaking up the atmosphere while waiting for the mighty sons of Trbovlje, and of course knocking back a refreshing drink or two. Izbruhov bazen in Kranj is a lovely little hideaway, and the best spot for the sound is on top of the wooden footbridge built across the width of the former swimming pool. Naturally, that was the first part to fill up.
I knew this time I was in for Laibach without their vocalist, and I’d even heard horror stories about how a concert devoted to Bach’s masterpieces can push you to the brink of despair and leave you mentally shattered. In fact, the crowd thinned out quite a bit during the show, since this is no dance or entertainment music, but a meditative journey through the more or less dark regions of the conscious and the unconscious. Laibach introduced themselves under the pseudonyms Eben, Salinger, Dachauer and Heller, and of course they billed the master Bach himself as a special guest. For me, watching Iztok Turk at work was an experience in itself, a real wizard on his Apple Mac.
In its original form, Bach’s Art of the Fugue wasn’t written for any particular instrument, so Laibach simply took on reworking it with computers. On Saturday we heard all kinds of musical styles, from experimental electronica, which took me back a bit to last year’s J.M. Jarre concert at Hala Tivoli in Ljubljana, to touches of jazz and classical music with a hint of strings, while the last piece was performed in an almost purely organ form (on keyboards, of course).
A chapter of its own in the concert’s atmosphere was the themed projections on two screens, showing a succession of abstract mechanical patterned images (a perpetuum mobile, the gears of some huge clockwork, the inside of a barrel organ, a two-stroke engine at work, red swirling smoke, a musical staff gradually replaced by enlarged ants, in short a very hallucinogenic and above all dark sequence of moving pictures). The last piece felt like a warm-up for Sunday Mass, since it sounded completely like an organ, and all the while gray and black crosses of one sort or another flickered on the screens behind the band (and even the odd swastika, if you looked closely).
This was the first time I experienced a concert more on the rational side than the emotional one. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that on Saturday Laibach were once again playing tracks from the album Kunst der Fuge, which collects reworkings of Bach’s counterpoints, working like a kind of mathematical language, a set of complex mathematical algorithms in sound. I didn’t feel any big emotions from the band members either: they walked on stage in impersonal black outfits, ran through their 60-minute set like pros, didn’t talk to the audience during the show, and barely even looked at each other. A few times the crowd was even unsure whether to clap between pieces or not. This lack of connection with the listeners can probably also be put down to the absence of vocalist Milan Fras, whom we’re impatiently waiting for at Kino Šiška.
photos: Robi Lipej
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