At the beginning there is only noise. A creaking bass that elicits a few random sounds. A synthetic plucking sound. A frequency noise like a broken radio. A few careful clicking contacts of drumsticks with a hi-hat. This goes on for almost two and a half minutes until all the small, fine individual parts are sent into the loop and a groove emerges, which finds its visual counterpart on a video screen in meandering red shapes against a blue background.
Bass, synths, two drum sets and a cello, all of this strives towards each other in a beguiling constant gyration, while on the screen a play of colors and shapes soon draws the senses, ranging from bright green clouds of mist to whimsical geometric shapes to the most delicate explosions of color transformation after transformation.
“Slalom” is the name of the song that Philipp Dittmar alias Red On recorded for a YouTube video in the Nuremberg concert club “Kantine” together with a three-piece band and the video artist Sabrina Zeltner alias Subrihanna. It represents a sound that the Nuremberg producer and DJ creates so flexibly and openly that you can hardly keep up with it using genre terms. What he always brings to the stage as an overall audiovisual experience can take on just as many forms as the screen behind him.
The focus of his new album “Phantom Easy” may be on an ethereal and ghostly sound somewhere between ambient and futuristic, clattered electronica. However, the way in which Dittmar sets out into the open, how he fills the gray area between these two worlds with life, and how he oscillates fluidly between relative pop accessibility and resolutions in the noisy with an autotuned voice – all of this has something of one An idea of what the pop music of a more distant future might sound like.
Red On & Subrihanna, Thursday, April 25th, 8 p.m., Milla, Holzstraße 28