A L'ARME! Festival Vol VI at Radialsystem / 1-4.08.2018

A L’ARME! festival returns this year with another great lineup including many D/B favourites such as Ellen Arkbro, Andrea Belfi, Laurie Anderson, Bill Laswell, Mark Fell, Radian and many many more. Disruption on principle. Noise as an asset. Sound as the basis for experience and perception. This is what lies at the heart of the A L’ARME! Festival’s programme and ambitions.

Material. That was the name of Bill Laswell’s first musical group, which he founded in the era of No Wave and New York Noise. Since then, the namesake of the aforementioned communications professor has devoted himself to the same fundamental principle in ever-changing constellations: the basic conditions of sound and rhythm.

On the opening night of the sixth edition of the A L’ARME! Festival, the sounds of Laswell’s Method of Defiance will come together with the powerful imagination of Laurie Anderson in a very special collaboration. “It’s not about power structures, not about guilt, not about the Last Judgement, nothing like that. It’s about consciousness and allowing yourself to be open to things, to love them.” That’s what Anderson said in an interview with the magazine Spex the last time she performed in Berlin. She was talking about Buddhism.

But, over the course of the Festival – especially on the second and third days, with performances by Gordoa, Malfon, Edwards Narvesen, Large Unit Rio, Léandre, Rolfsson, Harnik and many more – it will become clear: you could say the exact same thing about improvisation, about jazz and new forms of collaboration – and, generally speaking, about all relevant forms of musical communication