In the Lower Austrian provincial capital of St. Pölten, the architect Ernst Hoffmann has erected a 77-meter-high building of iron, steel, and glass – »as a portal to a tempestuosly spreading medial world«: the St. Pölten Klangturm (Sound-Tower). Opened in 1996 under the artistic directorship of the musician Mia Zabelka, its program is now being continued by the culture journalist Roland Schöny. Since April of this year, he has been working on the esthetic representation and presentation of digital sound files. Installations and specifically commissioned compositions are to be changed on a yearly basis, while the basic principle remains the same: the move towards electronics.

On a hot Sunday in August, the administrative district of St. Pöltner is deserted. The ghetto of the civil servants has turned quiet. This bizarre ghost-town atmosphere certainly offers no incentive to »chill out.« The only thing left to do is to allow the electronic sound temple to tear you out of this alarming quietness. What do visitors want? They want to »lose their senses« upon entering the exhibition rooms – in the best possible way, of course. Into the panorama lift, which catapults you with »heavy-digital« elevator music to any of the seven exhibition levels of the sound tower. Little games like this suggest entertainment, sound as an event.

So you also hear with your eyes! Blue, crimson, yellow ... each story is immersed in a different light using transparent colored films, a concept created by the designer team d+, and which is meant to intensify the listening experience. So-called »sound-gates« are distributed on three levels. In each sound-gate, a walk-in globe opens, equipped with several loudspeakers and providing a fixed inner architecture for inter/national sound commissions. Patrick Pulsinger, electronic musician, DJ, and owner of the label Cheap, is the first to have composed for the three »sound gates«: with his piece »Klangwurst« (Sound Sausage).

»It has no effect on my approach whether it's a club, a museum, or a men's toilet. I try to fill the space with sound and convey a story to the audience,« says Pulsinger about his work in the St. Pölten sound tower. Unfortunately, Pulsinger's lovely »beat story« is continually interrupted because of the architectural conditions. For, before you can continue listening to »Klangwurst« in the next sound-gate, you have to go through the mezzanine floors that have been put in. It's easy to miss the fact that the »sausage« has two ends: past the impressive »Heavy Rotation Reviser,« a machine from the multimedia group »Meso\involving systems« that can be used to remix currently playing radio programs. A stop-over at the Nintendo Game Boys, turned into musical instruments by Christoph Kummerer, Rober Stepanek and Christoph Weber. This year's programm by the artistic director, Roland Schöny, is rather reserved and reductive, with much ambition and little spectacle. With one exception: »Pension MIDI,« an installation by the post-dadaist artists' and handcraft collective »Monochrom.«

On Level +5, Monochrom invites visitors to a refreshing and completely undidactic display of works and equipment from electronic music history. Here, folklore and techno are closely juxtaposed. On the rustic record shelf, vinyl from Bruce Gilbert to Wu-Tang-Chan is piled up loosely. Dusty trophies are stored here near a glass cabinet with the title »The Pride of Creation.« It is full of, amony other things, Karlheinz Stockhausen's signatures, downloaded from the internet and enlarged; or with references to German kraut-rock of the seventies. Next to this, a dirndl hangs ostentatiously on a clothes stand, and a gingerbread heart bears the iced headline »Daft Punk.« Right next door, you can fiddle about with Atari's pioneer game »Pac Man,« or maltreat a Roland TR 505. »Musikantenstadl« chief Karl Moik, standing in front of a skyline on a postcard, proclaims: »Anyone can make electronic music,« and two framed garden gnomes hanging next to a huge oil painting with a rural subject (on loan from the Lower Austrian Landesmuseum) announce; »Yes, I'm looking forward to K & D.«

Kruder & Dorfmeister are the model Austrian duo on the international down-tempo scene. Does the luxury brand K & D stand for the global players of an innovative technology cult? Are they catalogued in the »Pension MIDI« as the well-established proof of a pop-technical belief in progress, or as a mythos that nurtures national pride and has therefore to be surrounded as a phenomenon by a lot of national costumes and the calculatedly claustrophobic atmosphere of a museum of local history?

In the »Pension MIDI,« Monochrom have put on a clever, open-ended dance around the attributions of electronic music – an installation in the guise of an excellently presented parody of regionalism.

In rural reality, the location in St. Pölten could at least have produced a home advantage for the »electronic« club scene based there. In this region, in which DJ locations are sparse enough already, the »DJ Nights« that used to take place in the Klangturm were moved to the neighbouring shed for a test run. The Klangturm, the artists' collective »la musique et sun (lames),« and »proton,« the local association for the promotion of urban culture, cooperate to organize these events. At present, the local dancefloor practice has been shut down. The shed will undergo alterations and be handed over ceremoniously to »high culture« in the form of the Lower Austrian Landesmuseum in November, 2002. And soon, web forum postings such as the following will disappear without a trace: »hi, i'm rokker007, this club /Shedclub/ is a place where you can come hang out, you don't need to talk about mountain biking ...«

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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