Alec Empire, Craig Leon, Emptyset and Peder Mannerfelt are among the first names announced for the Berlin festival’s 16th edition.
Wandering around the hallways of the Brooklyn Museum back in 1973, Craig Leon’s eye was caught by a series of sculptures from the Dogon of the Republic of Mali, a tribe whose stargazing artistic culture focused on imagining what otherworldly life might look like. Humanity has always been curious about what other life exists in the Universe, but that sentiment was especially potent in the mid-70s. During this time, Leon provided production chops for a series of artists who distorted the concept of what pop music could encompass: a then-emaciated and often shirtless Richard Hell, Blondie, the Ramones, Suicide. They were all extraterrestrials in their own right, and hearing their feedback-laden tracks on the radio must’ve been as shocking to some as hearing the 1938 broadcast of War of the Worlds and thinking that aliens had actually landed.
The latest video from RVNG Intl. HQ riffs off the inspiration for Craig Leon’s Nommos in high definition style.
The forthcoming Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 collates the producer’s two seminal early ’80s synthesiser albums.