renkelbender7ftkonka

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This forty minute DVD, recorded live in Berlin, pairs Sonja Bender’s video sampling with Michael Renkel’s guitar and electronics. Despite decades of rock videos, the pairing of improvised music with images is still in its infancy, particularly if the images are improvised along with the music. Unlike most rock, improvised music does not lend itself to literal or narrative video, so the visuals put alongside it are often completely abstract.
Here, Bender adopts a rather different approach: as well as abstract images (interference/white noise, "Venetian blind” cut ups…) she uses images and sequences (often human images; there is very little time when there isn’t something human on screen) that could have a narrative meaning, but she does not use them to construct a narrative.
The end result is a detached view of humanity, most starkly seen in her use of X-ray images—one of a child’s skull—and a series of images from a head-to-toe body scan, the latter looking like a selection of cuts of meat. Consequently, there is an emotionally cool feeling throughout, coupled with a looming sense of foreboding—most pronounced in a nightmarish sequence set in a bathroom, reminiscent of Buñuel’s early films.
Renkel’s approach to music and Bender’s approach to images are sufficiently similar to complement each other well; together, their effect is greater than the sum of the parts. Renkel’s music is episodic, making for frequent changes of mood, and hence of visual style, so that there is enough variety here to keep the viewer attentive.
For those familiar with Renkel’s recent work, the most surprising section will be the prolonged (over four minutes) bout of fuzz-toned sub-Hendrix rock guitar mid-way through, which is accompanied by a procession of diffuse, brightly-coloured patches that could be straight out of a 60’s light show. As a section it feels rather out of keeping musically and visually with the rest of the DVD. Elsewhere, we are in more familiar Renkel territory, with extensive use of electronics to create repeated patterns that complement the guitar.
I came to this DVD after several weeks of immersion in Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings software, and the contrasts couldn’t have been starker. Whereas Eno’s images fade and merge imperceptibly slowly, accompanied by similarly mesmeric slowly- evolving music, Renkel & Bender have produced sound and vision that frequently verge on the hyperactive, although there are passages of calmer beauty.
The opening ninety seconds of the DVD are the most extreme musically and visually, a barrage of multi-layered, rapid-fire guitar accompanied by very rapidly changing images, some overlaid, some held for a second or so—which in context seems like forever. This opening is likely to challenge viewers, a test to see if they have what it takes to stay the course. My advice to anyone daunted by the prologue is to stick with it: there is much here that is intriguing, challenging and rewarding. Renkel and Bender are to be congratulated on a happy marriage of sound and vision.
Personnel: Michael Renkel: electronics, guitar; Sonja Bender: video sampling

Production Notes: 40 minutes. Recorded 2006 at Georg von Rauch haus Berlin

A new released from Berlin-based improviser Michael Renkel, this time a region-free pal DVD (recorded live in 2006) where he plays guitar and electronics, while Sonja Bender is in charge of video sampling. The DVD wisely focuses on the end result rather than showing how it was created in the live set, so I have no clue of how this was made, but let's say it's a great release: Bender's frantic, Schwitters-like cut-up of images, colours and shapes perfectly merges with Renkel's abrasive set of sounds, including some invigorating fragments of extreme electronics. The interaction between the two is remarkable, so the unpleasant "artsy videoclip with boring music [or the other way around]"-feel is luckily avoided. Though I have only seen a promo version, the packaging should be stylish as well, in the Absinth tradition. In its field, this is a keeper.
Review by: Eugenio Maggi

Electronic textures, frequencies, fuzzy sounds, improvised moments which always come back to cyclic sequences, iterations that mimic the images, which are well programmed and selected in homogeneous loop groups. Proceeding with an extreme coherence of audio-video correspondences, Michael Renkel and Sonia Bender effectively integrate even the most demanding musical sections, the ones that, in the free forms of a guitar noise, stand out from the melodic and repetitive patterns. The varied visual inspiration that mixes abstract cuts and sometimes figures in crystallized movements is counterbalanced by the refined sobriety of images that, without too many language crossovers, in a pop dimension, connect several stylistic influences. Fluctuating images, multiform digressions, often stressed by numbers that specify 'inches' and 'feet' of a film reel. The overall impact is of a very accurate and enthralling work, perfectly in line with the quality of Absinth, a label that testifies the vitality of the Berlin underground.
Aurelio Cianciotta

...There’s a certain amount of structural similarity between that project and "7ft_KONKA” by Renkel and Bender but the results are strikingly different. Obviously, the music itself is something else entirely, Renkel’s guitar and electronics work dealing more with quasi-melodic repetitive patterns that almost always retain an underlying tonal quality. And Bender’s concerns lie largely with concrete imagery albeit layered within abstract motifs in a manner that recalls Rauschenberg’s print collages. The central difference is that whatever the particular connections between Renkel’s activity and their role in instigating the video images, it’s not as overt as in the AVVA disc. There are times when it’s clear that a shift in the sound input is altering, in some fashion, what’s flashing before your eyes but more often, there’s not a clear correspondence, even if you get the slight impression that it’s there, somewhere. This makes for a much more subtle and cohesive experience, independent of how one feels about the music and video as such. Your consciousness is free to flit back and forth between that part of the music acting on the video and those parts washing over the images on their own if indeed you’re able to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I found both the music and the videos quite absorbing when experienced in tandem. I have a feeling that Renkel’s music, by itself, wouldn’t have struck me as positively as has much of his recent work, such as last years fine "Errorkoerper III”. Indeed, there’s a sequence midway through on this disc where he lays out an acid rock, full fuzz assault, the inclusion of which is as baffling as it is annoying, even if paired with appropriately psychedelic video. Bender’s work, on the other hand, held my attention throughout. She strikes a fine balance between rapid fire images and sustained shots. The x-ray "movie” of what appears to be a child’s skull, held for several minutes, is hauntingly beautiful. She uses a great deal of staggered repetition, a back and forth approach that I could understand some viewers finding grating although I thought it generally worked quite well. A later montage that includes a black and white TV image of a young guy writing, overlaid with shots of a man repeatedly turning in his sleep and another gently caressing his penis, is as oneirically moving as a subsequent bathroom sequence is nightmarish.