A cassette in a porphyry robe
Museum of Natural History: Presentation, concert and lectures on 30 March, 7.30 pm
On Thursday 30 March at 7.30 pm, interested parties are invited to a special evening at the Museum für Naturkunde Chemnitz. A cassette with Phoenician funerary inscriptions will be presented, recorded and sung by the Spanish octet ZA! & TransMegaCobla. The cassette has also been wrapped in a new coat of linen and Zeisigwald tuff.
Admission is free of charge.
The presentation of the cassette will be accompanied by remixes of the original musical material by the Munich duo Sewicide and the French musician Laure Boer. Lectures on the Phoenician language and culture and on the material porphyry tuff round off the evening in the middle of the Petrified Forest. Linguistic history becomes a game, becomes a medium, becomes music.
Under the title "Reading Phoenician letters - what it has to do with us and :inside", ancient Hebrew specialist Daniel J. Naumann will share interesting facts about the texts of the ancient Phoenicians and the origins of our modern alphabet. Professor Heiner Siedel from TU Dresden will introduce the secrets of the 291-million-year-old Zeisigwald tuff, which Chemnitz stonemason and product designer Till Apfel has used to create the cover for the cassette.
The evening will be framed by musical performances by Laure Boer and Sewicide, who will attempt to merge all of this into an aesthetic whole - in feedback with the musical source material, the album ZA! & TransMegaCobla, which was released on 10 February 2023 in collaboration with six other labels from around the world.
The initiator and organiser is the Chemnitz label IN:EX, which has been in existence since 2018 and is linked to the EX:IN event series for experimental music. It sees itself as a platform for exchange and communication for the local scene as well as part of an international cassette culture that, unimpressed by global trends, ekes out a niche existence.
IN:EX publishes bulky content in a sophisticated form and has specialised from the outset in developing handmade packaging designs and using existing materials, if possible without producing new waste. Recycled cassettes are usually used as sound carriers.
Till Apfel, a stonemason and sculptor from Kaiserslautern, discovered Chemnitz porphyry tuff through his interest in architecture. The warm red colour and good workability of the volcanic rock, which is widespread in the city, make it a popular building and decorative material. So it was only natural that he created a cover made of this stone for texts set to music from gravestones.
The people behind Sewicide are Klaus Erika Dietl and Stephanie Müller from Munich. They appreciate the splinters in the fabric of sound, creaky pop chirps between bytes and beats. Sometimes sewing machine rhythms meet deep bass lines, then delicate vocals rub against dissonant language barriers. Live, the stage becomes an open workshop.
French multi-instrumentalist Laure Boer lives and works in Berlin. Her music is influenced by contemporary noise as well as traditional folklore. Boer's live performances are hypnotic improvisations: classical instruments, strange percussion and her voice, which sings or recites in French. A pulsating universe of sound, fragile and brutal at the same time.