Die lange Nacht der elektronischen Musik

King Midas Sound are singer/songwriter Roger Robinson and busy-bee musician/producer Kevin Martin aka The Bug. The latter played the opening concert of the penultimate Saint Ghetto music festival with Dylan Carlson from Earth in the Reitschule’s Dachstock loft venue. When King Midas Sound debuted ten years ago as a trio (with Kiki Hitomi) on Kode9’s Hyperdub label, they were most likely to be considered part of the rampant dubstep genre; but later, with a collaboration with Fennesz, they drifted into ambient realms. It is truly astonishing to hear how The Bug, who has exhausted the building structures of countless clubs and has always pushed volume and power to the limit, is now suddenly keeping his tendency to excess in check and yielding the floor to the voice of Roger Robinson. Musically, we move through a dream world of dry ice, or rather wafts of mist, and barely suggested rhythms. The new album “Solitude” is about separation; the online magazine Pitchfork had this to say about it: “Its atmosphere resembles that of a collapsed star – black, isolated, unfathomably dense. These 60 minutes pass like a dark night of the soul, stretched out to eternity.” (…) “Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.”

Nadine Byrne is a musician and visual artist from Stockholm. She runs the band Ectoplasm Girls with her sister. She has expanded her latest solo album “Dreaming Remembering” into an audio-visual live project, which she will be putting on exclusively in Switzerland during Die lange Nacht der elektronischen Musik. Byrne’s sound world is in many ways unmistakably reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s avant-garde electronic parallel universe, which also always has one foot in pop music.

Belia Winnewisser from Lucerne has already made a name for herself with her music projects A=f/m and Silver Firs. During her undergraduate studies in “Music and Media Art”, she worked with musical sound syntheses and provided fine-motor, technical skills for sound installations, film, and live electronics. Her debut album “Radikale Akzeptanz” was released in autumn and when performing live she skilfully positions herself between synth pop and sound art.

The music of Kristian Jabs, aka Pessimist, is living proof that there is lots more to come in terms of drum and bass, breakbeats and bass-heavy music. Pessimist’s 2017 album of the same name, released on «Blackest Ever Black» (Raime, Carla Dal Forno, Ossia), proved that the innovative potential of these genres is there to be maximised. So it’s not surprising then that Kristian comes from Bristol, the powerhouse of British electronica, where the most obscure creations are still being brought to life to this day.