Aether - a transcendental waveform market

Timetable

Outside 18:00 – 23:00 (In case of bad weather in the foyer)
Iceboy Violet, live
Remo Helfenstein, live
Chewlie, live
Haya33, DJ Set

Inside 23:00 – 05:00
John Glacier, live
SKY H1 & Mika Oki, live
Low Jack, DJ Set
Noria Lilt, DJ Set

Aether – a transcendental waveform market is a collaborative exploration of club music and electronica. A microfestival inside and outside Dampfzentrale, including food, bar and much more.

Food by Buffet Nord.

There is a lot of coolness in John Glacier’s voice or mood: Both the beats and the raps of the British artist are based on a sophisticated monotony, from which she rarely breaks out, but instead achieves an extraordinary pull. It is gloomy music, which at the same time radiates departure. It is contemporary poetry in a lo-fi guise, which is less in the tradition of Beats & Rhymes, but more deserves a place in the electronic playlists – and there it can be found more often recently:

She earned international attention with the album Shiloh in 2021 and ventured into collaborations with Dean Blunt or Shygirl, among others.

Belgian producer SKY H1’s songs blur the lines between contemporary club sounds of drum and bass, grime, dubstep and techno. The idiosyncratic mix of club music with ambient-oriented sound design as well as schematic bursts of pop-oriented songwriting are further indicative of her compositional signature. In collaboration with visual artist and DJ Mika Oki, SKY H1 presents an A/V show at Aether. This takes the meditative content of the compositions on SKY H1’s 2021 debut album “Azure” and translates it into a subtle scenography of light, projections, smoke and shadows, combining the physical thrill of the club with intoxicating excitement.

Iceboy Violet’s work is located in the creative spheres in and around the White Hotel in Salford City, Manchester. On the mixtape “The Vanity Project” released earlier this year, Iceboy Violet combine elements of metal, rap, grime with noise, which can feel like an emotional punch in the gut. Their signature is also evident in stringing together seemingly disparate beats without getting lost in the process.

Anyone who gets to hear a set from Low Jack knows that there is no stopping them when it comes to genres. Here it is important not to get entangled – and in this Low Jack is master of his class. Trap, Grime, Dancehall, no problem. Breaks, techno, gqom, no problem. No wonder, because Low Jack is also tirelessly diverse as a producer. He has clearly earned his spurs on the dancefloor, but also creates music far from it. For example, he forms the duo Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement with Vatican Shadow: a lighthouse in the otherwise often so uniform world of ambient music.

“Melancholic confidence” is the name of one of the playlists on Spotify in which Remo Helfenstein’s releases appear. And that sums it up quite well. His tracks are poems of synth fragments, cassette deep noise and his subtle voice. What does it sound like? Sometimes like soft industrial music, sometimes like experimental gospel. No matter what the result sounds like: It makes you all misty-eyed about the way the Lucerne native handles tapes to reproduce his idiosyncratic sound creations on stage.

Not much has happened around the artist Chewlie yet, and already the Bernese is on everyone’s lips. At least among those who witnessed this one performance of her at the cassette christening of the collective CRTTR. On this tape, she contributed Broken Fairy, a track that explores the rough edges of club music with razor-sharp precision. The longplayer “Creature”, released shortly after, blows the same horn: cranky rhythms, warped synthesis, bent basses.

Whoever follows the situation of the dancefloor in Switzerland at the moment regularly stumbles across this name: Noria Lilt. In her DJ sets, the Fribourg native maps out where the fire is in club music right now. She opens up the axis of these hotspots for us on an intense ride at high speed through the most important stations of contemporary club music – if not those of the future.

It’s entirely possible that a DJ set by Haya33 will begin with a classical record. Or with trap. Or with a record by Jean-Michel Jarre. Or gamelan music. Or a poem. Maybe with harsh noise? With futuristic elevator music, sound experiments from the late 60s or hard-horizontal drones? We’ll find out on the spot.