Blog - Lärm & Gestalt

Avalanches Of The Soul: On Guy Maddin’s Twisted Heimatfilm Careful

Marion Schiwietz 7. July 2023

By Marion Schiwietz Released on screens in 1992, this film by Canadian director Guy Maddin opens up a fairy tale book for adults. Set against the idyllic backdrop of a snowy mountain village populated by a cast of peculiar inhabitants, it takes us down a rabbit hole of human abysses. Being both a homage and a parody of the kitschy genre of the Heimatfilm, Careful (Lawinen über Tolzbad) thus accommodates both the wondrous and the strangely familiar. As a result, it brought me to reminisce about my childhood days around the spa town of Bad Tölz in Upper Bavaria, whose

Nektar & Lethe: On Found Photography

Benedikt Eiden 31. January 2023

by Benedikt Eiden A worn cardboard box, grey and stained, on the back is written: Photographische Anstalt, Steinach. On the front is a class photo. On both sides are the teachers, dressed in strict uniform: three-piece suit, remarkably high stand-up collar and, as was still fashionable well into the 1920s, the chain piece of the pocket watch peeping out of the waistcoat. In addition, a protruding moustache and steel-framed glasses. In the middle we see the miserable-looking, strangely undisttinguishable faces of the children. In one of the lower rows, almost exactly in the golden section, stands a girl who apparently

Hinter Mauern Meere – Writing and memory beyond GDR cultural policy. Part I: Inge Müller

Benedikt Eiden 25. March 2022

The view leads over marble surfaces, past numbing violet straight into dazzling brightness. From somewhere in broken treetops comes the mad roar of a flock of crows, a few lilacs sway lazily in the midday light. It is a pleasantly hot June day here at the Berlin-Pankow municipal cemetery. My companion and I are walking along the gravel paths of the strongly scented, somehow Mediterranean-like grounds and are already on our way home when suddenly, after a more or less diligent search, we discover the memorial stele in an ivy-covered pine grove. It looks bare and unadorned, covered with a

De La Cohorte Mystique: Vox Populi!

Benedikt Eiden 29. November 2021

Inmitten dieser Sommer waren wir Schatten,die aus Schatten traten, Schritte setzend,die aus Schritten folgten,Schritte, die zu Schritten wurden,und zu Schritten wurden,und zu Schritten, Schritten…– Wolfgang Hilbig I’m only satisfied with my music when it can bring me to an inner space whichis rich and mostly egoless,recalling […] feelings of childhood.This is definitely what I can call home for me. – Axel Kyrou, Vox Populi! by Benedikt Eiden It seems to me the older you get, the more you perceive casual music listening as acoustic irradiation. Not that music necessarily has to be always something personal, cerebral

Terror and Transgression in No Man’s Land: The Films of Takahisa Zeze

Christian Lenz 22. October 2021

by Christian Lenz Takahisa Zeze is one of the most distinguished and prolific Japanese filmmakers of the present day. Since the late 1980s, the director has realized more than sixty films including blockbusters such as the two-part mystery thriller Roku yon (64, 2016) or the slick romantic drama 8-nengoshi no Hanayome: Kiseki no Jitsuwa (The 8-Year Engagement, 2017). But Zeze’s oeuvre also includes subversive erotic film miniatures and other projects that transgress popular cinema conventions in particular ways – for example the meandering Documentary Zunō keisatsu (2009), a five-hour film about the reunion efforts of the titular proto-punk band, which

Mondo Quieto: Lärm’s Favourite Quiet Records

Benedikt Eiden 19. December 2020

Aine O’Dwyer – Safely Adrift Its roughly 5-minute organ-opening—according to O’Dwyer recorded in an abandoned friary—is without a doubt one of the most beautiful, most immersive things in my recent memory. The quasi-sacred aura of the pipe organ instrument emanates from this festive piece of retreat while at the same time tying in with one’s own submerged memories of semi-voluntary church service attendance. From there on, things become increasingly quieter. The remaining thirteen minutes of this collage of four pieces call for further contemplation, culminating in the seemingly fleeting, feathery “Piano and vocal improvisation at St Mary Of The Walls

Die einzig wahre Volksmusik: On Christel Schönheit and Knusperkeks

Benedikt Eiden 22. July 2020

by Benedikt Eiden In 1983, the well-known underground label ZickZack, which had previously played a vital role in shaping the so-called ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’, but was almost history again by the time, released a little 12’’ EP that is now long forgotten, yet on a closer look turns out as a strangely fascinating side-note in the German music culture of the early 1980s. On the front of its cover, in rich-black Antiqua, ‘Knusperkeks’ is emblazoned over a blurry sepia photo of the Belvedere on Klausberg, part of a large palace complex near Potsdam, designed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV but never virtually completed. On the back, besides

Behind The Noise Of The Doom Generation

Valeria Calderoni 2. June 2020

by Valeria Calderoni Dear Generation Y, I am addressing you directly because I believe we share more than only the epithet of “millennials”, which sounds almost derogatory at this point due to the many times it has been used to illustrate some of our worst features. Maybe we share the same comfortable and privileged background, where all our fundamental needs are satisfied at all times. Despite this, you might also share with me a latent feeling of inadequacy, alienation, dissatisfaction, or guilt. These feelings could be sensed through a certain kind of music and movies already in the early 90ies,

Transdiegesis and the Other: Sound in the Films of David Lynch

Tim Nagel 9. April 2020

by Tim Nagel Diegesis:1. A narrative world. 2. (film theory) The spatio-temporal world depicted in the film. Anything within that world (such as dialogue or a shot of a roadsign used to establish a location) is termed diegetic whereas anything outside it (such as a voiceover or a superimposed caption) is extradiegetic. This distinction is especially associated with diegetic sound: for example, when a record- player is shown to be the source of onscreen music. A diegetic audience is an audience within the depicted world. [Sounds in David Lynch’s movies can not] be reduced to some primary function. They

A Quiet Farewell – On Cluster’s forgotten Record Curiosum

Benedikt Eiden 25. January 2020

by Benedikt Eiden In the press release issued by the record label Bureau B in 2009 on the reissue of the Cluster catalogue, it says that Curiosum, with its radically minimalist music, deliberately sought to counter the loud zeitgeist of the early 1980s. Moreover, it says the album was completed with the simplest of means somewhere in Austria, drawing on concepts from their early days such as ‘randomness’ and ‘spontaneity’. Now, by looking at the postmodern album cover with its references to constructivism, Curiosum could still well be located in the time’s zeitgeist, musically it is indeed a conscious rejection of that, and