This year's »club transmediale« (CTM), an independent project organised as an accompaniment to the transmediale festival, showed even more clearly than in the past how electronic music and its discourses have infiltrated the domain of media art, traditionally dominated by visual aspects. This time round, the »CTM.03« team (Oliver Baurhenn, Jan Rohlf, Remco Schuurbiers, Marc Weiser) successfully enlarged the nine-day-long, lively »festival for electronic music and related visual arts« in exponential fashion: whereas last year’s venue was the already voluminous »E-Werk«, the location this time was the »Maria am Ufer«, whose two floors provided an ample space that, however, also offered the necessary intimacy. There was room here not only for several dozen laptop and VJ sets, but also for a programme that for the first time included discussion panels in addition to screenings, presentations, and installations. In addition, the CTM.03 compilation CD, a supplement to the English music magazine »THE WIRE«, with ›club‹ musicians such as Radboud Mens, Jan Jelinek, Otto von Schirach and others, came out in time. But the Slovenian label rx:tx also compiled a CD (»PROGRESS | the trieste-vladivostok ctm.03 line«) for the section of the CTM dedicated to eastern Europe - rather small-scale but with the striking title »[GO EAST]« -, to which labels such as the Polish Mik.Musik and the Serbian Belgradeyard Soundsystem were invited.

This section was discursively supplemented by the presentation of the book »Im Osten - Neue Musik Territorien in Europa« (In the East - New Music Territories in Europe) by Susanna Niedermayr and Christian Scheib. As part of this, Niedermayr interviewed three musicians/producers from Poland, Croatia, and Serbia (Wojt3k Kucharczyk, Bojan Mandic, Relja Bobic) about the conditions under which they work. In particular, the description of the internationalistic cooperation between Mandic and Bobic met with much applause from the audience. Did this discussion already contain hints of the political agenda (through sound) that was also suggested as a subtext in the slogan used by the »club«: »play global!«?

The panel »home electronics«, organised jointly by the transmediale and CTM in the House of the Cultures of the World, with Susanne Binas (HU Berlin) as moderator, and David Toop, Susanna Niedermayr, Alain Mongeau (director of the Canadian MUTEK festival), the Swiss journalist Thomas Burkhalter, and the Mexican artist Fran Ilich as guests, seemed at first to be turning into a routine talk show. But at the latest when Burkhalter, with critical mien, read out the names of the mainly central European sponsors and supporting institutions from the club/transmediale programme, the table, with its large »play global!« banner, where six Western panel members were talking about the music business and globalisation, began to have problems justifying its representation - problems of its own making, but which were also put down to financial constraints. The prestigious presence of Mongeau also made one suspect that the club transmediale wanted to use this invitation to enter the ranks of the large, global festivals of electronic music like sónar or MUTEK.

The panel »Strategies«, with Mercedes Bunz, Diedrich Diedrichsen, Ted Gaier, Peter Kraut (Taktlos) and Don’t Rhine (Ultra-red) was co-organised by the »taz« newspaper and chaired, somewhat too irresolutely, by »taz« journalist Sebastian Handke. This discussion was impaired by the much too typical confrontation between the communicability of political ›content‹ (rock) and the efficiency of ›politically‹ grounded structures (techno-economy). In particular, the panel's somewhat superficial analysis of the term »tactical sound«, a concept which Ultra-red - currently a ubiquitous guest at exhibitions - had put into play, could have served to shed a more concrete light on some of the aspects implied by the »play global!« motto.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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