M LORE Unpopular Music, (2024)

The series »Sonic Experiments« is dedicated to current developments within the various varieties of experimental electronic music. The program presents upcoming musicians and sound artists who either have a special sense for new, forward-looking impulses, or pursue particularly innovative compositional approaches. The aim of the series is to invite the audience to expect the unexpected. 

M Lore:

My work is inspired by aspects of pop, club and experimental electronic music. For example, I write sardonic, personal lyrics with sticky melodies and driving rhythms. I also play with unusual song structures, compositional surprises and loud timbres. Until recently I called my music “experimental pop”, but that was a misnomer because it's not popular. Now I claim unpopular music as an ethos. That allows me to do what I want.

One of my favorite spatial sound experiences is listening to rain. The opportunity to compose for the Klangdom gave me the idea of arranging “Raindrops” in pointillist rhythms. At the beginning of the piece, I put the audience in a metal bucket, a decision inspired by Maggi Payne's Ping/Pong: Beyond The Pail. Sounds fall like raindrops or hailstones, hurling into the space and forming themselves into speaking, even argumentative rhythms.

Each channel in the spatialized environment has a specific sound and each sound has a light. In my audiovisual combinations I strive for a captivating, confusing sensory overload. To this end, I also craft migraine auras to accompany a ruinous polyphonic club cut, and melt down more than 50 years of pop songs featuring “bad boy” and “bad girl”, which I then forge into weapons for the gender deviants among us. That's the metaphor that comes to mind as I write from a former munitions factory. It's also good to have liberating tools.

Credits:

Dominik Kautz (Curator & project manager)
Götz Dipper (Guest artist mentor)
Laura Benetschik (Project management assistant)
Ben Miller (Sound director)
Manuel Urrutia (Stage manager)
Bernd Lintermann (LiDAR motion detection technology)
Hans Gass & Alexander Hauk (Light- & stage technician)

This year, »Culture Moves Europe« awarded five grant receivers with scholarships. Funded by the EU's »Creative Europe«-program, »Culture Moves Europe« is implemented by the Goethe-Institute.

Ben Fawke's scholarship is fully funded by ZKM | Karlsruhe with no additional funding from the European Union and is not part of »Culture Moves Europe«.

Maximilian Pellizzari’s project is co-funded by Autonome Provinz Bozen - Südtirol, Deutsche Kultur.