The best way to understand the idea and direction of the “Look Into The Future” festival, which is now taking place in Burghausen for the fifth time, is to look at the organizers. The brothers Johannes Tonio and Cornelius Claudio Kreusch are not only internationally successful musicians themselves, but complement each other to a certain extent. One is a more introverted classical guitarist, the other an extroverted, charismatic jazz pianist. Both of them have gained a lot of experience in all areas of the music business, both as concert organizers, festival directors and label operators, as producers, studio owners, Internet entrepreneurs and teachers. One has lived in New York for a long time, the other has a special relationship with Cuba and Italy.
And so the “KreuschBros”, as one of their registered companies is called, have built up a family of artists that is always open to expansion, which, in addition to jazz musicians and guitarists of all stripes, also includes flamenco stars, Caribbean dancers, pop avant-gardists, classical organists, filmmakers and visual artists – and also involves “the other side”, i.e. promoters, producers, journalists and above all the audience as closely as possible.
In no other project so far have the Kreuschs bundled all of this together like in “Look Into The Future”. It’s multi-stylistic and interdisciplinary. And if something is not only uplifting and entertaining, but also relevant to the current situation or sends out a message, you don’t mind. You want to be artistically sophisticated, but also accessible and of all ages, as was the case recently with the Papatef raves. Artist talks after each event make even stars human and approachable. With the Raitenhaslach Monastery as the festival headquarters and the Anchor Hall, a gem from the 1950s, special atmospheric venues have been found for it. A “holistic” festival construction that is quite unique and maybe groundbreaking.
What now too fifth edition underlines. Already with the literary-musical exhibition “Radio Free Modulations”, which can be experienced throughout the festival. Text fragments from Walter Benjamin and Heiner Müller to William S. Burroughs and John Cage, collected by media archaeologist Siegfried Zielinski and set to music by sound artist FM Unit, immerse the old walls of Raitenhaslach Monastery in a new light. FM unit aka Frank-Martin Strauss, as a member of Collapsing new buildings became well-known, is then also personally involved (and accompanied by the Kreusch brothers in an improvised manner) in a special program item that has already become a tradition of the “Look Into The Future” festival: the live setting of silent film classics .
Real world musician: the Vietnamese-French guitarist Nguyên Lê.
(Photo: Masha Mosconi)
This time it’s the turn of “The Man with the Camera”, shot by the Ukrainian director Dziga Vertov in 1929 and once voted “the best documentary of all time” by the British film magazine “Sight and Sound”. This Soviet counterpart to Walter Ruttmann’s experimental film “Berlin: Sinfonie der Großstadt” (Berlin: Symphony of the Big City), which was released two years earlier, is not only a contemporary document of everyday urban life and is groundbreaking in film history due to the use of various techniques such as multiple exposure, slow motion and time lapse, freeze frame or stop motion animation, some of them for the first time. Due to his shooting locations in Kiev, Kharkov and Odessa, he also has a depressing current connection: with these pictures it is hard to imagine that the Ukrainians and Russians united in the USSR hardly 100 years later are irreconcilably facing each other in a cruel war.
With the recently deceased Mary Bauermeister, a Fluxus co-founder, as the leitmotif, film, art and music intertwine: in Carmen Belaschk’s feature film “Mary Bauermeister – Eins plus eins ist drei”, Gregor Zootzky’s short film “Potpourri Mary Bauermeister (2006 – 2009)” and the experimental sound lesson “Transformed Reality” by her son Simon Stockhausen. Which brings us to the concert program, which for the first time has a Scandinavian focus. After all, the opening act features saxophonist Trygve Seim and accordionist Frode Haltli, two of the most creative minds on the Norwegian world music scene. Followed by the duo of Jan Bang and Eivind Aarset, two pioneers of electronic music who, of course, have already used it in a wide variety of collaborations with, for example, Ray Charles, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ute Lemper, Cher or Django Bates. Among others with Nils Petter Molvaer, the grand master of the electronically enhanced, ethereal trumpet sound, who performs solo in the Stadtsaal.
With the French-Vietnamese star guitarist Nguyên Lê and his Jimi Hendrix program, a pioneer of world music fusion jazz will be presented on the last day and thus an ideal look-into-the-future guest. Before it goes into the grooving party finale with the Austrian Hammond organist Raphael Wressnig.
Look Into The Future V, Thursday to Sunday, May 25 to 28, Raitenhaslach Monastery, Stadtsaal and Ankerkino Burghausen, www.burghausen.de