Anja Kreysing
ORTrmx
GERMANY ATTENUATION CIRCUIT ACU 1063 CD (2024)
This one works well as a short set of alienating electronic brain-slices, but in fact it’s the by-product or carton achievement relating to an art installation done by Kreysing, along with Thomas Gerhards and Werner Rückemann.
Well, Anja is a sound artist and the other two are visual artists, but together they worked in and with the Oxfordquartier in Münster, a military site from the second world war. The Nazis used it as barracks, but the English army continued to occupy it after the war – indicating something, perhaps, of the way that wartime extended into peacetime; there’s one school of thought that proposes that wartime conditions continued to prevail in the UK for about ten years after 1945, with sweet rationing and no material available for new dresses, until eventually Cliff Richard arrived to solve everything. Kreysing and her crew are bereft of hope – they’re 100% convinced the Oxfordquartier is an evil building, and suggest that “the evil ideology of the builders is…encoded in the buildings”. The project follows the familiar line about “taking a warning from history” which has been put forth by many historians who have studied the Nazi regime, and Anja Kreysing tries to walk an intellectual tightrope by preserving history without glorifying it in any way. “An open wound that we must never allow to close”, is her general take on fascism, and it’s reflected in the title of the installation which translates as “a place without nostalgia”.
All of this is a way of indicating the intended subtext to these field recordings, captured directly from the site but now subjected to much distortion and electronic remurgeonating, in the hopes of creating alien and disturbing mood-phases for the alert ear-to-brain facilities. The music does indeed express a certain tension and uncertainty within its unsettling tones and strange, insectoid clickerments, not expressing outright terror as such, but successfully conveying a constant mental unease. Even so, I think the creators might be overstressing the “evil ideology” aspect of this zone; while I’ve never visited it, there’s a short YouTube video by Andy Mcloone which offers a more general overview and history of the area, and you can read comments there from people who grew up there after the war and have pleasant memories of the experience: “Sad, that they left Münster. I loved it to have the British here. It was not because of the military itself…, but it was a bit more international you can say and after they left…it was different.” (18/03/2024)