Avanto Festival's 2004 programme announced

Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival is Finland's annual event of non-conformist audiovisual art. The fifth Avanto will take place on 18-21 November 2004. The festival venues are Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finnish Film Archive's cinema theatre The Orion, Gloria Club, UMO Jazz House, Mocambo Club, MUU Gallery and Gallery Huuto.

This year’s Avanto focuses on such eternal questions as "Is the tradition of counter-cultural avantgarde art alive?", "What are its forms now?" and "What is the relationship between radical formal language and radical political content?"

Avanto's programme features artists of different generations and persuasions. Headliners of the music programme include Alec Empire (Germany), Astro Twin (Japan), Ohne (Switzerland/Germany/USA), Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine (France), Goodiepal (Denmark), COH (Sweden/Russia), Mattin (Basque country), Belgradeyard Sound System (Serbia), Läjä Äijälä (Finland) and Kemialliset ystävät (Finland).

The main guests of the film programme are the pioneering structuralist filmmaker and theoretician Malcolm Le Grice from the UK and the master of surrealist collage film Cécile Fontaine from France. Austrian structuralist, actionist and destructionist film is represented by the works of Kurt Kren and Ernst Schmidt jr. from the 1960's and the 1970's and by younger filmmakers featured in the festival's international Avantoscope screenings. Other highlights include a rare screening of Andy Warhol's Sleep (1963) and an exclusive international selection of cinema without image in the Film Without Film screening.

Live performances

The opening event of Avanto will host the international neo-Aktionist noise/performance art group Ohne. The group's sound is a rich tapestry of dramatic laptop noise and the voices of three vocalists who are being treated digitally to varying degrees. Tom Smith's crooning, which has been compared to both Leonard Cohen and Iggy Pop, as well as the non-verbal, primordial and psycho-pathological sounds (grunts, gurgles, maniacal muttering, laughter) of Dave Phillips and Daniel Löwenbruck set them far apart from the usual ambitions of digital music.

Often dubbed an "all star line up" of contemporary actionist musicians and even a "super group",  Ohne was started in 2001 by two cult figures deep from the international noise underground: the Swiss noise artist Dave Phillips, perhaps best known for his work with Schimpfluch-Gruppe, and the American vocalist and musician Tom Smith, who has played in such groups as Pussy Galore and To Live And Shave in LA. They asked the Berlin musician Daniel Löwenbrück (aka Tochnit Aleph Empire, Sudden Infant, and more) and the Swiss laptop instrumentalist Reto Mäeder to join the project and recorded an album co-released by the Austrian Mego label and themselves, which was followed by an extensive European tour. After a silence of two years, Ohne is now revived for their show at Avanto.

A short selection of films from 1964-1968 by Kurt Kren and Ernst Schmidt jr. documenting the performances of the original Viennese actionists like Otto Mühl and Günter Brus will be screened before Ohne's show. The films are not merely documentation, though they made the actionists' chaotic provocations notorious around the world, but also extremely strong and original works in themselves.

Like Ohne, Japanese duo Astro Twin explores the outer limits of human voice. Vocalist Ami Yoshida doesn't sing in any conventional sense of the word but breathes heavily, blurts and wheezes mesmerisingly, while instrumentalist Utah Kawasaki squeezes similar-sounding noises from his computer and synthesizer. Any symbolic meaning in the proceedings is strongly denied by the musicians, as is often the case with contemporary Japanese improvisers. Nevertheless Astro Twin's concept is clearly defined: "As materials, we take these garbagelike sounds that have hardly ever been used before, and each of us tries to make them resonate them more and more. I don't just use my voice – I also do things like scrape the floor with the mike. Our respective sounds are totally unrelated to each other. Since Kawasaki's sounds and actions have no connection to mine, it ends up being this sort of garbagelike ensemble with a completely non-functioning collaboration style." Last year Ami Yoshida was granted the prestigious Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica festival in Austria for the double live album of Astro Twin and Cosmos, her duo with Sachiko M, whose solo performance was among the most memorable of Avanto 2001.

COH aka Ivan Pavlov is a Russian post-techno composer, who has been living in Sweden since the early 1990's. His early work was influenced by the premier Finnish electronic group Pan sonic, and a demo sent to them eventually led to his first record being released in 1998. Pavlov has recorded for a host of labels including Mego and the venerable Staalplaat, but most notably for Berlin's ultra-minimalist Raster-Noton. What sets his music apart from the beautiful, fragile abstractions of other top names of the field like Carsten Nicolai or Ryoji Ikeda, is his taste for Russian-style surreal humour and recklessly absurd concepts, like on the album Iron, which is supposedly inspired by 80's heavy metal. Pavlov's music is also featured in two video works, which will be shown in the Avantoscope screenings.

The French group Cellule d'Intervention Metamkine, formed in 1989, consists of two filmmakers, Christophe Auger and Xavier Quérel, and one musician, Jérôme Noetinger. Auger and Quérel use eight 16 mm film projectors, some of them modified electrically and loaded with loops that are further processed with chemicals during the group's entirely improvised performances. Noetinger also sticks to antiquated low tech like reel-to-reel tape recorders and analogue synthesizers. The results are reminiscent of 1970's expanded cinema combined with musique concrète, but updated with a knowledge of everything that has come since, such as noise music and on the other hand, the saccharine excesses of many electronic music/digital visuals combinations of past years. When the boom of the latter started in the late 1990's, Noetinger said in an interview: "In multimedia events, you've got images and sound alongside one another, but there's no real relationship between them. Our work, on the other hand, is an interactive process: the music and images are created simultaneously, and if you were to listen to the music on its own, there would be something missing."

The Finnish artist Mikko Hynninen's work Kiasma Theatre, to be performed in the venue of the same name, as well as Basque noise musician Mattin's concert the same evening, deconstruct performing conventions in other ways. Hynninen's concert features neither performers nor instruments –  instead the mechanical sounds of the venue (automated lighting, stage machinery, ventilation systems) will be amplified and manipulated by him. Mattin is a laptop musician, who has quickly gained a reputation as an excellent improviser. He works with both electronic musicians and veteran players of acoustic instruments like Radu Malfatti and Eddie Prévost, with whom his elegantly simple and powerful feedback sound contrasts beautifully. Mattin's playing style often resembles the approach of the more radical acoustic improvisers, as when he scrapes and saws the case of his laptop with a small metal file, or as he put in an e-mail exchange: "I still sometimes physically attack this old computer. And sometimes do not turn it on and other times play just the hard drive noise, or the cd writer. Or sometimes do not open the screen or sometimes play just the earth hum. Endless possibilities with such a great machine." Mattin is also an experimental filmmaker, and his new short film Bilbo Bukatua, which deals with the gentrification of Bilbao, will be screened before his concert.

Alec Empire rose into true international rock stardom in the late 1990's with his explicitly political digital hardcore, which betrays his roots in hardcore punk and early underground techno and jungle of his native Berlin. Crossover success with both his band Atari Teenage Riot and as a solo artist in the USA, Europe and on MTV hasn't affected the apocalypticism of his "riot music", with tracks like Destroy 2000 Years of Culture, Death of A President D.I.Y., Deutschland Has Gotta Die!, or slogans like the one found in the booklet of his latest cd, Intelligence & Sacrifice: "'You must adjust' - This is the legend imprinted on every cd, the invisible message on MTV. Record labels have become vast factories for the manufacture of robots". 

Another side of Alec Empire's output is his mostly sombre, existentially-tinged experimental electronica found on such 1990's solo albums as Hypermodern Jazz 2000.5 or Les Étoiles des Filles Mortes, and more recently on the second half of Intelligence & Sacrifice. Yet another side is his interest in noise; his latest release is a live duo album with Merzbow, the star of the first Avanto in 2000. In Avanto Empire is set to play his electronic material, while the festival's film programme shows his hardcore side in the music video screening Revolution Action.

The Danish musician Goodiepal aka Kristian Vester is probably best known for his series of "inverted brand" 7-inch picture discs he composed and self-released a few years ago. Vester was then working as a sound designer for various mega corporations such as Nokia, Hitachi and Carlsberg, and used sounds designed by him for their ads in his "dub" versions, complete with the corporations' logos printed on the picture discs. The results on this series of mega corporation records sounded nevertheless very much like his other output: a dizzying, perplexing mixture of Faroe Islands folk tunes, childlike melodies, subtle digital treatments, and more. "Was this a critique? Was this sabotage? Was this a way to take back something that he did not want to get away? Was it just a theatrical gesture?" asked the jury of the prestigious Ars Electronica award when granting him an honorary mention in 2002. Goodiepal told in an interview published in The Wire magazine later the same year, as if answering to these questions: "I am MTV, quiz shows, Queen and Microsoft on the inside, or at least I am a product of that. My music represents the rise of New Europe, and I hope it speaks a language of origin, big companies, expanding, computing, banishment, and fatal numbness."

Now Vester's heady days of working for the branding and advertising industry are over. He has moved to Faroe Islands, where he works as a nurse in an old people's home, while continuing to tour actively. "A genuine eccentric" are the words most often heard describing his live appearances, where he plays vinyl records and Faro folk instruments and puts on display various small, inexplicable objects built by himself, such as mechanical birds and miniature models of planets.

Kemialliset Ystävät from Finland share some of Goodiepal's fresh surrealism in their take on folk music. The band started in 1995, which makes them the earliest proponents of the new Finnish psych-folk of which The Wire magazine wrote in September 2004: "alongside Tokyo, Leeds and Brattleboro, Finland now reigns supreme as a centre of unparalleled psychedelic activity... Led by Jan Anderzén, Kemialliset Ystävät are the most visible of Finland's suboperatives and the most consistently rewarding. They work in short, spooling instrumentals, building layers of simple repetitive riffs into laminal mud cakes and weaving ghosts of folk song into huge tunnels of drone. The latest [Kemialliset ystävät label] Fonal release 'Alkuhärkä' sees their sound slightly rewired in a bid to further bolster the electronic element, with several tracks evoking the cracked neon skies of David Bowie's Berlin trilogy as well as the early synth experiments of Asmus Tietchens." Other comparisons evoked by their Alkuhärkä cd include Harry Partch, Sun Ra and the theatre music of 1950s Japanese outsider composer Teiji Ito. In Avanto 2002 Kemialliset ystävät performed as a trio accompanying Bruce Baillie's film Holy Scrolls. This year Jan Anderzén will play a solo set.

Belgradeyard Sound System from Serbia is a new promising name on the digital music scene. So far their trajectory has been quite exceptional. First there was a similarly named reggae and dub show on the legendary oppositional B92 radio station in Belgrade. Gradually live effects were added to the vinyl spinning, and soon the duo of dj Relja Bobic and B92's sound technician Goran Simonoski became a live sound system performing for live audiences. Over the years they incorporated various styles of electronic music into their sets, then learned to play laptops themselves. This led to their current style  –  an idiosyncratic version of digital free jazz, loud, dissonant but all the while very accessible. Their screeching saxes, laptop glitcholodics, driving electronic beats and rambling sampled drums are augmented live by Ivan Antic's electric double bass. Belgrade Sound System's debut album will be released early next year by the London-based jazz label Cosmic Sounds.

New Finnish talent is represented by Verhaverbeke Krzyzosiak, a Frenchman settled in Helsinki, and the young electronica eccentric Aprox. (aka Human Chocolate). Both performances are accompanied by live videos. Verhaverbeke Krzyzosiak will collaborate with the renowned Norwegian video artist H.C. Gilje and Käenpoika will take care of the visuals for Aprox.

The main Finnish attraction in Avanto 2004 is Veli-Matti "Läjä" Äijälä whose three performances continue the festival's tradition of showcasing pioneers of Finnish experimental music. While previous "unsung heroes", Erkki Kurenniemi and Pekka Airaksinen, were of the 60's generation, Äijälä is best known both internationally and in Finland for his punk rock past. His hardcore punk band Terveet Kädet, formed in 1980, was a part of the first wave of hardcore punk and it had a lasting cult following around the world over the 1980's. But already before this, in 1979 and 1980, Äijälä had self-released the first Finnish noise/industrial records with his group Aavikon kone ja moottori. Their two 7" singles were inspired by Throbbing Gristle and the Finnish 60's Underground electronics group Sähkökvartetti that played on instruments invented by Erkki Kurenniemi (and that staged a one-off reunion concert with Kurenniemi's participation in Avanto 2002).

Aavikon kone ja moottori performed only a handful of times during the 80's and early 90's. While hardcore punk remained Äijälä's main occupation, he continued pursuing various avantgarde interests as well. Musically they share a carefully cultivated monotony, restraint and tension without release, all the while hinting at a possible eruption of chaos. A common theme or even a state of mind is the angst-ridden mentality of Northern Finland. An extremely conservative sectarian Lutheranism is prevalent in the region's countryside and the urban areas are notorious for their ideals of  middle class normality. The flipside of these is known as "arctic hysteria": excessive drinking, aggression and outsider art bordering on madness. Äijälä adds another twist to the latter with his inborn predilection for experimentation and avantgardism.

At Avanto Festival Äijälä will perform in three different groups. Sultans is a duo playing minimalist instrumental blues. Äijälä’s pioneering noise group Aavikon kone ja moottori will be revived, as well as a later project in which he handles the vocals – the Dadaist "boogie" outfit The Leo Bugariloves, who have just released their first album after a seven year hiatus. The longest-running Finnish underground rock label Bad Vugum will also release in co-operation with Avanto a compilation CD spanning 25 years of Äijälä's recording career.

Film programme

During the past twenty years the Parisian filmmaker Cécile Fontaine has created an impressive array of surrealistic collage films, which combine the authoritarian rhetoric of educational films with the expressionist tradition of hand-painted films and aesthetics of destruction. A selection of her films will be screened under the title Histoires Parallèles - Alternative Histories. These films constitute a unique chronicle of the fantasies and obsessions of the bourgeoisie at the turn of the millennium. Fontaine's approach is mercilessly satirical but also warm. Her characters are sympathetic half-wits who always reach for the excessive.
Fontaine uses methods familiar from collage art and graffiti: rough physical manipulation and concrete carving of the film emulsion. Frames of found footage are given new forms and meanings with bleach and ammonium treatments. The editing rhythm of Fontaine's films is so rapid and they are filled with such a massive amount of information that they make one wish to see them again immediately. Fontaine will introduce the films personally, and will also take questions from the audience.

Placing media art and avant-garde audiovisual productions into a historical context has always been on the agenda at the Avanto Festival. This year the festival programme will focus on structuralist cinema. The roots of the movement, which was born during the 1960s, are in the visual arts, and subsequently structuralist films are usually more painterly than literary. The British filmmaker and writer Malcolm Le Grice and other pioneers of structuralist cinema used their abstract films to attack and question the institution of narrative Hollywood-influenced cinema during the 1970s, and attempted to develop a form of cinema which did not manipulate the viewer. As the Austrian filmmaker and theorist Ernst Schmidt jr. wrote, they wanted to tear down the "illusionist delusion of cinema." The subjects of their films included the material properties of film, the chemical grain of the film image, kinetic motion, repetition, or the process of watching itself.

Malcolm Le Grice has been an active filmmaker since mid-1960s and, together with Peter Gidal, remains one of the most important theorists of British structuralist cinema. During the 1960s and 70s Le Grice created several multi-projection works that are now regarded as early milestones of expanded cinema. They challenged the conventions of film watching and questioned the traditional, "oppressive" model of single screen projection, and sought to take film out of the cinema space and into the streets, rock clubs and galleries. This year's festival programme includes both an extensive retrospective of Le Grice's earlier works and a selection of his latest films, including the brand new psychedelic three-screen fantasy Cyclops' Cycle. Malcolm Le Grice will introduce the screenings personally, and will give a lecture, whose theme is Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age.

Austrian structuralist cinema is represented by a selection of films by two already passed masters: Kurt Kren (1929-1998) and Ernst Schmidt jr. (1938-1988). Contemporaries of Le Grice, their films also eschewed the mainstream of experimental cinema of the time, which was either "wild" underground or symbolic impressionism. Nevertheless, or exactly because of this, their films are very charged emotionally. Kurt Kren's first eight films form a stunning whole, in which he creates his own cinematic language and universe from almost nothing. His mathematically edited, "systematic films" portray what are seemingly everyday and commonplace situations and observations. The films, however, have many layers of meaning; they open a window to a world previously unseen. The impressions they create have often been compared to those produced by the paintings of Kandinsky and Mondrian. Some of Kren's most interesting works were created between the years 1964-1968, when his films were based on the sexually shocking and often violent happenings or "material actions" performed by the Viennese actionists Otto Mühl and Günter Brus.

Ernst Schmidt jr. (1938-1988) was the enfant terrible of the Vienna school of structuralist cinema. Kurt Kren's contemporary and in many ways also a brother in spirit, his physical style of filmmaking was, if possible, even more unpolished and brutal than Kren's. Schmidt's films reflect the peculiar inner world of the artist in the spirit of actionism, employing methods of a truly "direct cinema." The aptly named selection of his films Destruktionsfilme brings together his oeuvre. Kren's and Schmidt's films will be introduced by Gerald Weber from the Viennese distribution company sixpackfilms.

The domestic surprise of the structuralist cinema programme is the premiere of Sami van Ingen's lyrical new film Fokus, which will be finished right in time for the festival. According to advance information, the film is as painterly as cinema can possibly strive to be.

The structuralist theme is complemented by Andy Warhol's five-hour debut film Sleep (1963). It is often remembered as one of the most sensational provocations of modern art, "the film with somebody sleeping for five hours." Later interpretations have, however, re-evaluated it as one of the starting points for structuralist cinema, and also a delicate and sensitive homoerotic masterpiece. Sleep belongs to those famous historical works that most film buffs have heard of, but very few have actually seen it with their own eyes.

Possibly the most extraordinary screening in this year's festival programme is Film Without Film, which is a selection of cinematic works that have been realised entirely without moving image, be it film or video. What is essential is a darkened cinema theatre, the screen, the projector and the act of watching and spectatorship itself. The programme features the German pioneer of avant-garde cinema Walther Ruttman, who not only directed the arguably first abstract film of all time in 1921, but also created Wochenende, a sound art work from 1930 intended to be performed in cinemas. In addition to Wochenende, the programme includes later interpretations of the idea of cinema without images from the 1960s to the present time. Among the works featured are meticulous reconstructions of the historically significant expanded cinema performances by the Austrian artists Peter Weibel and Hans Scheugl, a British classic of happening cinema Line Describing a Cone (directed by Anthony McCall) and a selection of brand new commissioned works from some of our favourite international artists.

Avanto's traditional programme of new experimental cinema, Avantoscope, includes several works that are linked directly to the tradition of structuralist cinema. An organising principle that applies to many (but by no means all) of the films selected is a relationship to sound or music. The programme includes works by the following directors: Sami Sänpäkkilä (Finland), Stefan Macheiner (Austria), Robin Dupuis (Canada), Anouk de Clercq, Joris Cool & Anton Aeki (Belgium), Pekka Sassi (Finland), Brigitta Bödenauer (Austria), Michela Grill/Billy Roisz (Austria), Galina Myznikova and Sergei Provorov (Russia), Nicolas Schevin (France/Finland), Ryoko Kuwajima (Japan), Börries Müller-Büsching (Germany), Myriam Bessette (Canada), Nosfe (Finland), Tuulanauhat (Finland), Mark Boswell (USA), reMI (Austria/The Netherlands), Panu Johansson (Finland), Lotte Schreiber (Austria), Michaela Schwentner (Austria), Ian Helliwell (United Kingdom), TJADER-KNIGHT inc (Finland/United Kingdom), Alli Savolainen (Finland), Pierre-Yves Cruaud (France), Didi Bruckmayr/Michael Strohmann (Austria), Kerry Laitala (USA), Karo Goldt (Austria/Germany), Peter Kubelka (Austria), Norbert Pfaffenbichler (Austria), Laura Mela & Janne Lappalainen (Finland) and Pure/Dekam (USA).

The new, magnificently restored version of John Coney's 1974 cult film Space Is the Place is American Afro-futurism at its finest. The leading role of the film –  the commander of a spaceship that uses music as its fuel –  is played by Sun Ra, the legendary free jazz saxophonist and band leader. The yearning for transcendence of cosmic free jazz, with all its fantasies of space travel and Egyptology, was born in the apartheid conditions of the early 1960s America. Sun Ra's "Black Space Program" collides with reality when the ship returns to earth, in the California of year 1972. Space Is the Place has been described as "part documentary, part sci-fi, part blaxploitation, part revisionist bible epic".

Revolution Action, a series of frenetic music videos produced by the Digital Hardcore label, represents German Zeitgeist at the turn of the millennium. The screening shows the political side of Alec Empire, the headliner of Avanto's live programme this year. Empire and his band, Atari Teenage Riot, are portrayed in these promo clips as futuristic superheroes fighting against evil. The contrast between their cartoon-like characteristics and their raw apocalyptic prophecies is what makes the videos something extraordinary.

Exhibitions and discussions

Both exhibitions in this year's programme are video installations on the theme of war. The clinical but visually rich dissection in Berliner Harun Farocki's video installation Eye/Machine III focuses on the mental relationship between new digital technology and the arms industry. Minna Långström's video installation Bubble examines war on a more personal level by bringing the imagery of war to a children's nursery staged in the MUU Gallery.

The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art is hosting a panel discussion organised in co-operation with The Academy of Fine Arts, and focusing on artists' relationship to society, and the relationship between radical aesthetic forms and radical politics. Among the featured artists are Alec Empire, Malcolm Le Grice, Minna Långström, Mattin and the master of American situationist political satire, Mark Boswell. 

In November Avanto releases its festival compilation CD featuring all the festival's live performers with rare or previously unreleased tracks plus excerpts from the film soundtracks.

Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival is organized by the registered non-profit association Avanto in collaboration with Kiasma Theatre and the Finnish Film Archive.

For more information, press photos, interview arrangements etc. please contact:

Milla Kontkanen
+358 (0)50 3393596
press@avantofestival.com