XX Y X: Michaela Schwentner: Le Banquet / Martin Brandlmayr: Vive les fantômes

Vive Les Fantômes is a radio piece
Martin Brandlmayr created for German station SWR in 2018. It awarded the renowned Karl Sczuka Prize the same year and was released on Chicago based record label Thrill Jockey 2019. Now he has created a live version of it using drums and vibraphone and computer.

Vive les fantômes is based on snippets of interviews, rehearsals and performances by people like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Jacques Derrida, Chris Marker and many more, resulting in a network of sound-objects that appear repeatedly and changing their shape throughout the piece. Communication is constructed across different rooms and times, beyond the borders of language and music. Vive Les Fantômes is not only a piece of music, it’s rather acoustic cinema with a non-linear narrative layer organized by scenes.

French philosopher Jacques Derrida answers the phone repeating the same words in various scenes. Sometimes we hear the philosopher simply listening. We imagine him listening. We are listening as well and try to get a hint of who is on the other side of the line. Sometimes there is just silence or static noise. Spoken word transforms to sound, the borders between language and music become blurred.

Protagonists talk to each other from and to different rooms. They are connected but separated as well. The other side of the line is the unknown. The unknown again is up to our imagination. Silence, the absence of images, the incomplete and the cutup. It is all just a framework, a playground, an invitation for us to complete, connect, to create and construct our very own piece.
Vive Les Fantômes is a celebration of the musical moment, pointing to the past and to the future. Repetition is never only repetition- it is always creation.

Michaela Schwentner
Le Banquet

Installation + performance