Monheim Triennale: “Each event becomes a little art happening”
Ganavya Doraiswamy at The Prequel of Monheim Triennale 2024, Photo: Niclas Weber
Prequels have become quite the cultural phenomenon. So often they’re a chance to go back and pencil in more of the original story, a revisitation of characters and themes, a chance to rinse out some more value from characters we already know.
Here in Monheim am Rhein, with the sun’s heat pulsing (at least in theory) behind a thick veil of cloud, the word prequel means something more basic, honest and fundamental. The Monheim Triennale festival takes its process and chronology seriously. At this year’s ‘The Prequel’, sixteen talented musicians from all over the world of experimentalism, jazz and instrumental daring, are gathered. Their purpose, to get to know each other, to reveal their various modes of music making, to work out how to play with each other. Thrillingly we the audience get to watch this glorious workshop take shape for 4 days.
Music without records
At its heart Monheim Triennale is founded on a few key premises. That art is made in the moment. Music should be a shared and spontaneous thing. That you don’t know what you’re making… until it’s ricocheted off the walls. (The festival director, Reiner Michalke, admits during an artist talk with Shahzad Ismaily and Monheim Triennale Co-Curator Thomas Venker, that he loves live music so much, he doesn’t own or listen to any recorded music at all. An idea that both stuns the room and then has us all nodding in sage agreement.) In an era when much live music is the bangers-you-already-know with some live microphone mixed in on top, Monheim is committed to the original ‘organic’, fireside music making of our deepest past.
Every band, imaginary
The schedule of performances is in reality a sequence of experiments, round robins, and emerging collaborations. Less a menu, more a recipe. Each event becomes a little art happening, where everyone present eventually discovers its form and meaning. We the audience drift pleasantly between a boat, a church and a venue over the festival’s four days, meeting different elements and dimensions of each performer as we go. At times, it’s a little like being in a film, a Bergmanesque fantasy where a quiet and well kept German town finds itself playing host to the sounds and personalities of this particular travelling circus.
It’s a dizzying array of musical encounters and the ultimate goal is that the experience of the Prequel will shape what these artists bring to the festival next year, in the next phase of their contribution. The boat stage plays host to larger scale combinations, the seemingly static vessel a platform for music that’s always in motion, trying to establish its way back to dry land or to move as fast as possible from it.
Music in motion
To capture something of the surreal dance of The Prequel, here are a few random accessed memories…
The shifting streetscene samples somehow cut apart then jigsawed back into place by Muqata’a. Rojin Sharafi’s otherworldly textures, producing droplets and patterns, from instruments powered yet unfamiliar. A change of pace as multi-instrumentalist Shazad Ismaily and vocalist Ganavya Doraiswamy performing an improvised soundtrack to a projection of the Germany vs Spain match, a show that is half vocal–piano exploration, half stand-up comedy routine. Heiner Goebbels’ lyrical collaboration with Scottish piper Brighde Chaimbeul, in which the two conjure moving waves of sound punctured by Goebbels’ treated piano interventions and a sudden blast of Schumann (I think).
Friday’s brass ensemble on the boat featuring the estimable Darius Jones on saxophone, Shannon Barnett (trombone) and Peter Evans (trumpet), the trio’s excursion ranging from staccato pointillism to rich harmonic echoes of Gershwin’s Summertime. Then Saturday lunchtime’s trio of Peter Evans (trumpet), Chaimbeul and Georgian electronica exponent Anushka Chkheidze which starts quietly before evolving to form a bracing soundtrack, somehow imagining a folk dance for a new world. Oren Ambarchi, his face quite serene and focused as he elicits anything but a guitar sound from his six string companion.
The shows in Marienkapelle chapel are solo features, a chance for each performer to intensify what they make, taking advantage of the plaintive religious setting, finding both stillness and the freedom to go to town. Peter Evans’ set is gloriously ambitious, a real showcase of his wide range of techniques and his ability to take a complex idea and explore all its variations. Darius Jones’ set is a combination of angular beauty and savage harmonics, and he seems utterly at one with the room and the way it reflects his sax back into the space. Brighde Chaimbeul’s performance is oblique and serial, hypnotic and beguiling, with a triumphant flourish of traditional Scottish folk song to close.
Shahzad Ismaily is almost the father of Monheim Triennale performers, having been a key pillar of the festival concept and ever-presence at the first edition in 2022. Here again he plays many roles and wears many hats. As he describes later in an artist talk, his version of performing is listening, always intently, working out what a piece needs, where the spaces are, what should be done, what isn’t needed. His thoughtful and deft approach takes shape on bass guitar, piano, acoustic guitar, drums, sometimes providing a lift, other times some bottom end or darting percussive additions.
He also contributes to another key element of the festival, its work with local music students, under the inspiring direction of Achim Tang. In workshops at the local music school, Tang is a radiant encourager, getting the children to improvise, to free themselves from the usual demands of sheet music, and Shazad, and violinist yuniya edi kown join in the improvised orchestra. Achim will later bring together a choir of local students to perform Balkan folk songs, in The Living Song II – a session hosted by Julia Úlehla. These sessions, less frenetic than the headliners, with more than a few proud parents looking on from the auditorium, illustrate Monheim’s culture-as-integrator role. It’s all rather charming.
I lose count of the number of times surprise leads to a sense of liberation. This is niche music and art by any standards. But Monheim’s strength is to humanise experimentation and provide the audience with a beautiful way to pause, relax and rethink what it is we want from art. In a world where everything is so commercially loud, so keen to be understood, it’s truly giddying to watch some of the most technically gifted musicians gamely throwing out the rules for each other, hour after hour. Instead of getting what we want, or being reminded of what we already know, it’s a chance to rediscover a little wonder at all the things music can do, at all the other things music can be.
Full list of participants:
Oren Ambarchi
Shannon Barnett
Brighde Chaimbeul
Anushka Chkheidze
Ganavya Doraiswamy
Peter Evans
Heiner Goebbels
Shahzad Ismaily
Selendis S. A. Johnson
Darius Jones
yuniya edi kwon
Muqata’a
Rojin Sharafi
Terre Thaemlitz
Julia Úlehla
Ludwig Wandinger
