Munich: Frameworks Festival at Blitzclub – Munich

50 spectators, distance requirements, no drinks: despite the restrictive corona requirements, pop music outside the mainstream can be heard live at the “Frameworks Festival”. An experience as intense as it is challenging.

“Nevertheless, it took me this whole life to stand here tonight in the lifelong light,” sings Hans Unstern with his own poetry. It is the first of two concert evenings of the “Framework Festival” in the Blitzclub. Since 2011, the festival has been showing the possibilities of pop music beyond the mainstream. And it’s the same as always: it is not uncommon for the type of pop music preferred by Frameworks to also exist as so-called contemporary serious music in a supposedly high culture. However, that seems to everyone involved to be just as unimportant as a commercial success on the pop market. Instead, they self-confidently serve a niche program that never fills the big concert halls even after Corona.

Due to the Corona requirements for non-soccer events, there are only fifty spectators in the Blitzclub this year with appropriate distances between them. They are not allowed to buy drinks in the club or take them with them into the club, because unlike in restaurants, where drinks are allowed despite Corona, they seem to pose an enormous risk of infection at concerts. Of course, such framework conditions are not particularly mood-enhancing. And the euphoria like in those concerts announcing a new beginning after the first lockdown in the pandemic no longer really wants to set in. As if one had grown tired of constantly hoping for improvements. Instead, one enjoys quietly and almost modestly that a pop concert is taking place again at all. And during the breaks, you can enjoy the social interaction in small, talkative groups, which is what cultural events are after all. Outside of the concert hall, of course, because of the refreshing air on a February night in Munich. And because of the drinks, which – as I said – are not allowed to be taken into the club. But they are then sold outside around the corner.

in the blitz club on the other hand, thanks to outstandingly good acoustics, first-class sound technology and the experienced Munich sound engineer Andreas Zeh, the audience is bathed in a rich sound that can be almost physically grasped. But even extreme, physically perceptible volumes don’t hurt your ears thanks to Zeh’s skills. Mind you, not even when the corresponding background noise dominates the music of the Berlin producer and DJ Ziúr on the second evening of the festival as pain that has become sound. Zeh carefully prepares even the most dangerous sound attacks of the performing artists in such a way that they attack the audience quite violently, at least physically but never seriously hurt them. Psychologically, however, Ziúr’s music, for example, is certainly a challenge. Just like the music of the Berlin composer Maya Shenfeld. With her sound sculpting she creates the free fall as the video artist Hito Steyerl once described it in her essay “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective”: If there is nothing to fall against, it seems as if you don’t fall anymore. Instead, you float weightlessly like in Shenfeld’s sound sculptures.

In this way, such an intensive concert experience as at the Frameworks Festival ultimately also sets impulses for a socio-cultural discussion that is worth continuing outside of the concert space. Just like Hans Unstern’s musical and textual examination of a sexual identity in a society that does not accept transgender people as a matter of course as cisident people whose gender identity corresponds to the gender assigned to them at birth. “Simply beautiful, C sharp sounds so beautiful,” sings Hans Unstern, as if he were describing a key. After a short pause, however, he adds the word “off” with his flair for wordplay. And what just “sounded” now sounds out. This may stand for an end, but it can also be the auditory counterpart to the visual “seeing out”.