Mariendom / New Cathedral, Linz. 9.10.26
This one made me cry.
Not loads. Just a warm up-swell of eye water at the end. It was lovely.
Context: bb15, a long standing, sound focused offspace in Linz have a long running series of concerts for sound artists called Wavering Worlds. These often take place in the offspace itself, which is behind the Mariendom / New Cathedral in Linz. For the last year or so they have been doing this thing where a subset of the Wavering Worlds concerts are held in the tower of the Dom itself.
We cluster outside around 1845, saying hello to people we know and gradually forming a larger mass, until we wend our way into the quiet cathedral and up a winding spiral staircase into the tower.
It’s a medium sized floorspace, the walls of which extend upwards into the darkness where the spire peaks. There are speakers around the walls up there, and ornate glass on the north and south sides that allow the last of the daylight to glint in high above. You can grasp the dimming sky.
The musicians, normally two single artists who will play one after the other, are set up at a table in the middle of the tower, electronic devices winking. Seats are arranged around. Several doors lead off into other corners of the church and up into the heights above.
We’re there for Sound Art, which is somehow Linz’s thing. I’m not a massive fan of all things sound art. I like detailed arrangements, good compositions and pop music, so sometimes I am left feeling unrewarded by these events. But other times the musicians share enough of my taste markers to give me an experience I can rave about.
Turning up to Sound Art events is worth it partly because you don’t know if you’re in for a surprise or a long boring sit. Though that’s less likely in the Dom. The space creates extra excitement.
It’s old, elaborate and solid, with gothic twirls to the stonework, medieval wooden doors with dramatic hinges and so on. That a large group of scruffy, mostly secular creative thinkers are allowed to sit on chairs in this space and listen to strange sound experiments feels like an immense privilege, and grants the evenings in the Dom a special kind of gravitas. It’s a meeting of old and new, where things feel simultaneously grounded and untethered.
Presumably not only God knows how this arrangement came into being – ancient keys must pass from hand to hand – but he’s in on it (even if he doesn’t exist 😉 ). The building’s history seeps into the proceedings, electrifies your trainers, gets under your skin.
That’s the context.
Steve Bates stepped up first, dressed in crumpled black. He used his laptop to feed the space with overlapping dirges. They were slow, swelling, semi rhythmic electronics. My mind drifted away from my body and as the sounds moved, sometimes shaking at the building, sometimes passing through the space more obliquely, my body settled into a sleepy state and my thoughts skimmed around their enclosure. It was nice. It reminded me of those black prisms in Superman II from 1980 that the evil Kryptonians are trapped in: the sounds seemed to be pressed into strange dimensions as they passed across my ear screens. A crescendo of flimmering high pitchedness near the end granted the whole large scale mountain movement a place to arrive and tumble away from. I woke up a bit then, my emotions stirred up and left to rest.
Maja Osojnik stepped up after. Warmly clapping Steve, relaxed.
Then she took of her jacket, rolled up her sleeves and set to it.
She started by carrying a black bluetooth speaker around the space, like she was lighting up its shapes with a black candle. The movement allowed us to feel the air and hear the space differently. She slowly circled the group then proceeded off down a corridor. The sound changed from a pleasant one to a high pitched horror signifier while she was out there. A shift.
She came back in, releasing a gentle tension as dread skittered on in the corridor, creating volume through separation, raking finger nails over a black board.
Back at the table she produced another device and started to use it like a P.K.E. meter from Ghostbusters, waving it over the different cables and devices of her set-up to draw our attention to the psychic energy of the space, or to show us where the electricity was emanating from. It crackled and glitched, thick with pitch.
There was a lot of this doubling in the performance. Is it this sound or that one? Is she showing me this or the other? Oscillations of sound and metaphor.
I can’t describe every part of the piece. It was already fading as it was absorbed. But there were a bunch of wonderful moments:
Early on, during this electro-static testing phase with the ‘P.K.E. Meter’, Osojnik kicked one really nice beat off and I was poised, waiting for the next one to solidify a groove, which never came.
There was tension built up with touch pads. You could see her sizzling these timpani-like beats out into the space, fingers a-blur. I couldn’t tell if they were electric samples, or sound recordings of something wooden being struck. I couldn’t tell what century it was as I prepped for the jump scare.
Then came the strings. Sending out feelers, building more tension, talking about rising horror without ever reaching full apocalypse. Building layer upon layer, scraping at our edges.
She took her time over this, first talking about what different stringed instruments could do without them doing anything musical. It was like someone was rehearsing, long ago, that she had dislodged back into our dimension using her ghost-o-meter. Then that someone was joined by another. Slowly they built up in layers, building and building up until the whole space was full to bursting with practicing ghosts.
The walls throbbed with the sound of it. Building dislodged. Church untethered. Horror was spoken about and induced, like an academic discussing the horror genre while screening a horror movie about a haunted academic in the safest of places.
I saw a flicker of light move up above. For a moment I imagined a whole host of white faces pressing up against the shadowed glass, hungry to get in. Then they were gone, dropping away at a few seconds After Eight, bleeding ghosts over the sweet sounds of bells pealing out into the city.
The peals were real. And they were waves reaching back in time.
She used her breath, drawing it in and out over the microphone. Hanging each one out between eroticism and dread.
Recorders joined in, their medieval sounds piping tunes that weren’t, out over the city, kindly touching the heads of every grown up child haunted by the recorder choirs of their primary school youths.
The strings and pipes joined and then somehow collapsed back into more electronic sounds around then, stitching us back together. The scruffy creatives in the medieval belfry, caught in a temporal loop.
I’m not really sure how she shifted things after that. This might have been the moment of silence where someone almost clapped before she set the next Spell Spinning, because then there were Violins and Bleeps that Became Birds and Insects in the Black Jungle Forest of Our Holy Church Clearing in the Sky.
The air was wet, all traces of horror banished.
A beautiful peace emerged in the middle of all of this sound. It was somehow golden. Across the forest floor. I guess by this time I was getting emotional. It went on long enough that the bottoms of our trousers would have gotten wet with dew.
Again it could have ended here. But now we knew to wait.
A voice emerged. Striking me as only another human can. As voices singing do. Harmonising. Strings off key. Dischordant. Rising. Looping. Repeat. Or did I dream that part?
Finally the heavens opened and we were deluged with rain.
Sounds.
The sounds of rain.
You could hear it running down the tiles outside.
Only it wasn’t.
And then it merged into the sounds of clapping.
Only it wasn’t.
And we were all dry.
And then it stopped.
And I had wet eyes.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Maja. Thanks, bb15.
It’s these kind of events that give me hope. That in our mad world, where ancient madness stalks the halls of power, wrecking things, a relatively large group of sensitive, civilised people (read: POTENTIALLY ALL PEOPLE) can come together in a building intended for one thing and use it to travel to somewhere else entirely, with open hearts and minds.
