Impakt festival, Thursday March 29
Apr 1, 20:02 by Stefan KoopmanschapImpakt festival is a dutch festival presentating a lot of multimedia art. Art installations, films, music, and combinations of those. This weekend was the 18th edition of this festival. Let’s have a look at the first evening of music.
Location is Tivoli De Helling in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The first evening of music here is an evening of two parts. First, Carsten Nicolai, followed by dutch electronic mastermind Speedy J.
Carsten Nicolai is known for his use of glitches, bleeps and static noise in a very interesting way, and in this performance he shows his best. At times, the use of static and noises is very dry, edging on boring, but he makes this up time and again by building up walls of sound that overwhelm you. This intense experience is something very special, and this is what Carsten Nicolai is definitely good at.
The program is then split up by a short film by Telco systems. Interesting, but not my thing. After this, first an interview takes place with Telco systems. All kinds of “intellectual” questions are being asked, and the response by Telco systems came off to me as “we don’t give a fuck, we just create cool music and visuals”. Then, the same happens in an interview with Jochem Paap (Speedy J) as he introduces his new project, a combination of his music and visual works of Scott Pagano. As the interview progresses, more and more I have the idea that Paap will not be performing. And indeed, after the interview, they simply start the DVD of this new Umfeld project. Quote a disappointment, as Speedy J was the headliner of the evening. The new DVD was OK, but not that special. A big disappointment, that’s for sure, especially since nowhere upfront it was announced that Speedy J would not be doing a performance. I left about 20 minutes into the DVD.
Concluding: If Carsten Nicolai had not been as good as he is, I’d have felt I’d spent money on nothing. Now, even though I still feel I was being mugged of my money, I didn’t make the trip to Utrecht for nothing.
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