The Echo Park Rooftop Melancholy Scene- Trauermusik Fest

July 29th, 2009

TRAUERMUSIK is a three-part concert series curated by Los Angeles neo-nonprofits eighteen-thirty and HumanEar. It is an extended meditation on the purpose, function and power of sorrow in music. The curators selected three historical texts to convey three profound notions of melancholy, attempting to createa kaleidoscopic experience of sadness that is far from the dreary monochrome that might come to mind.

The project sets aim for an understanding of sadness as colorful and paradoxically complex as rain on a sunny day. By challenging their artists to create original works outside their comfort range and by pairing artists from genres as diverse as experimental classical, ambient electronica and avant-pop, it would seem
they are attempting to break the uniform gray into a dizzying spectrum of subtleties. Its title – borrowed from German romantic composers’ favorite term for “Mourning Music” – is a clue to the overarching plan. Three concerts, devoted to the melancholy of longing, the melancholy of excess and the melancholy of contentment, respectively, are titled only by the historical quotations used as “instruction sheets” to the artists involved. Ultimately, it may be Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille and Claude Baudelaire, who with their inscrutable notions of pain and suffering guide the course of these starry nights.

DATES
1 August 2009
Soft-Boiled Eggies I Geneva Jacuzzi I Oscar “Sister Mantos” Santos

15 August 2009
Indian Jewelry I John Webster Johns I Julia Holter I Im Kino

29 August 2009
William Basinski I Jason Grier I Mark So I Sound Installation by Lucky Dragons

ADMISSION
$7 per night I $15 full pass
Doors open 8pm

www.trauermusikfestival.org
www.eighteen-thirty.com

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