The year is 1943. Dalmatia has been occupied by the German armed forces and the population is afraid of punitive action. Around 30,000 civilians are therefore fleeing to the island of Vis, at that time the headquarters of the partisans and the allied British army, but where there is no room for so many people. The escape, it continues by ship to southern Italy. But Italy is also considered unsafe, and so the refugees set off for Egypt, which is under British administration. You land in El Shatt. A complex of refugee camps is being built there and will be her new home from February 2, 1944 to March 20, 1946. People are setting up schools and workshops there, but adapting to the desert is not easy. Numerous bombing raids also ensure that many no longer leave the camp alive.
The refugee camps of El Shatt, which are now a cemetery, are only a small episode in the long history of war, flight and displacement. But like many other episodes, this one is universal and stays current. And if Josip Pavlov and Gene Aicher alias Ippio Payo & Genelabo she contributed on her on August 20th Echo chamber and Geenger Records’ mini-album “NAQ” (short for “Nobody Answers Questions”), they are telling a very contemporary story. But you do it without words, only with images and sound. Four instrumental pieces are included on “NAQ”, which Pavlov created with guitar, percussion, loops and samples and which the video and light artist Aicher extends to an audiovisual performance on stage.
The musicians are interested in the atmospheric aura
It is not about historical facts, but about the “atmospheric aura” of the event. “For me it was exciting that I put myself in the role of a traveler, a refugee”. This is how the Dalmatian-born Josip Pavlov himself describes the project to which he was inspired by Alida Bremer’s novel “Oliva’s Garden”, which he read on tour in southern Italy. And indeed: when the bass growls deeply on the first track “El Shatt”, the drums play a mechanical rhythm and the guitar grinds chords, then you feel like you’re in the engine room of a ship.
“Sky Is Covered With Stars” goes on deck. You can hear plucked, atmospheric chords, a carillon that suggests the vastness of the sky. “Under deck!!!” begins with “folkloric” pipe sounds. A female choir sings, steel strings clink, percussion rattles, a cutting guitar heralds danger. At the closing “End Of The Road Doesn’t Mean End Of The Journey” the guitar chords sway leisurely back and forth. And back and forth. And on and on? For Ippio Payo & Genelabo, Grünspitz and Art in the square the next stages. The two will perform there on August 13th and 15th.
Ippio Payo & Genelabo: NAQ (Echokammer & Geenger Records); live on August 13th at 7 p.m. at Grünspitz, Tegernseer Landstr. 104, and on August 15 at 6 p.m. at Kunst im Quadrat, Theresienwiese