Fri 08 | 10pm

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Dim Locator (AUS/UK) is a new group formed from the ashes of legendary Berlin-based band Fatal Shore. The group comprises Phil Shoenfelt (guitar/vocals), Chris Hughes (drums/percussion) and Dave Allen (bass guitar). Special guest: Gez Donnelly (guitar)

Englishman Phil Shoenfelt has lived in Prague for many years, and is known for his work with Southern Cross (Prague), Fatal Shore (Berlin) and Khmer Rouge (New York), as well as for his autobiographical novel “Junkie Love”, recipient of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in New York. To date, Shoenfelt has released 15 full length CDs of his music – solo, with Khmer Rouge, with Southern Cross, with Fatal Shore and with Nikki Sudden. In the past, he has toured as support artist with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Fall, Crime & The City Solution, Nico, The Clash and Tom Verlaine. He also played lead guitar in The Nikki Sudden Band on two European tours in 1997 and 1998.

Chris Hughes (AUS) is based in Berlin and has played and recorded with Fatal Shore, Hugo Race & The True Spirit, The Act, Methylated Spirits, Nina Hagen and Rowland S. Howard. His most recent collaboration was with Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubaten in Hacke’s new project Hitman’s Heel. He was part of the same Melbourne scene that spawned the likes of The Birthday Party and Crime & The City Solution, and is known for his explosive style of syncopated drumming. Several of his compositions appeared on the True Spirit CDs “Wet Dream” and “Ambuscado”, and he has recently been composing film soundtrack music for Ralf Goldkind’s label.

Dave Allen (AUS) is also based in Berlin, and has played bass with Hugo Race & The True Spirit, Lunar Lounge, Methylated Spirits, The Act, and Kinch Blade & The Black Lilies. Originally from Sydney, Allen moved to Berlin in the early 1990s, and his rock steady bass playing style complements and anchors Chris Hughes’s wild, improvisatory excursions.

MUSICAL STYLE: The music of Dim Locator is stripped down industrial psych-rock music with influences from The Stooges, Beasts of Bourbon, Can, The Birthday Party, Pink Fairies and Hawkwind. This deliberate mixing of radically different styles and genres intentionally avoids the identikit, music-by-numbers style of so many contemporary bands, who simply adopt the image and sound of their idols, and whose originality suffers accordingly. The music itself uses randomly sampled and re-sampled loops, a pulsating, electric sound that creates a kind of hypnotic “Ur-Drone”, stimulating what Iggy Pop once referred to as the “O Mind”.

RECORDING NEWS: In late 2011 a three song tribute EP of Rowland S. Howard songs was released, for online sales only. The EP is called “Immortalised” and is available through Bremen-based label Fuego. Two of these songs, “I Ate The Knife” and “Undone”, will be released as a 7 inch single by Vienna based label Cover Recordings.

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dimlocatormusic/dim-locator

Flyer design: Christin Grothe

THE 9th BERLIN INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORS LOUNGE [DL9]

08.02.13 / Friday / Day 2

GROOVY > MOVIE > DO ME!

Crashing in from New York via time machine and landing in Berlin is “The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisted,” a photo show of rare vision by photog supremo Robert Carrithers, who was there when it was happening and was smart enough to capture it in pix… Basquiat, Haring, Club 57, the whole beautiful, crazy mess. Prague’s DJ Ida T spins us through it, and tonight Carrithers will himself be present (show from 18:00/6:00pm, daily)… then comes “Autoluminescent” (by Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn, Berlin Premiere),a motion picture trip Way Down Under capturing the enigmatic Stoker-esque guitarist Rowland S. Howard in all his gothic glory (19:30/7:30pm). After that, Dim Locator hits with live tones – remnants of the legendary band Fatal Shore with new blood crank “industrial psych-rock” out at 22:00 (10:00pm), and DJ/producer Steve Morell, yes, the “Pale Music Int.” and “Berlin Insane” underground festival founder, spins more to make it all move even more starting at 22:30 (11:30pm). You know you gotta be there!

Fri 08 the program

the complete program

Phil Shoenfelt and Dim Locator live at Directors Lounge Berlin. Photo: André Werner
Phil Shoenfelt and Dim Locator live at Directors Lounge Berlin.

 

Phil Schoenfelt and Southern Cross will smash your screen!

Phil Schoenfelt, who rocked our 9th edition of DL, and Southern Cross will play live from Praque, on Friday 26th 7pm (CET), to all the world. That is, the gig will be streamed live onto your screen.

A show (of about 60 minutes) not to be missed.

Grab the live link here on fb, put the hi-fis high and the light down low.

 

The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisted, photo exhibition by Robert Carrithers at DL9, photo: JM/DL

Dim Locator, photo: JM/DL

Dim Locator, photo: KT/DL

Photographer and filmmaker Robert Carrithers, photo: Klaus W. Eisenlohr

Prague DJane Ida Taušlová, photo: Robert Carrithers

The Groovy Dada Lounge Revisited, photo exhibition by Robert Carrithers at DL9, photo: JM/DL

DJ Steve Morell, photo: Klaus W. Eisenlohr

photo: KT/DL

More impressions from The 9th Berlin International Directors Lounge [DL9] here

Fri 08 | 6pm

imageFlyer design: Christin Grothe

imagephoto: Robert Carrithers

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Photographs by Robert Carrithers: Basquiat, Haring, the New York scene in the 1980s and the infamous Club 57.

AT THE 9th BERLIN INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORS LOUNGE

Naherholung Sternchen, behind the Kino International, U-Schillingstraße | Berolinastr. 7, 10178 Berlin-Mitte

Opening attended by the artist:

February 8th, 18:00–20:00

Robert Carrithers will be available to take questions from the media from 5 p.m. onwards

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The exhibition will be from February 8th to the 17th daily from 18:00.

For your listening pleasure; Special guest: Fellow photographer and Prague DJ Ida Taušlová will play a mix of new music that has been strongly influenced by the ‘80s, linking the period of ‘80s to the present time of 2013.

After the opening: The Berlin premiere of the Richard Lowenstein film Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard. (Robert did the European interviews for the film)

The film is followed by the live performance of the band Dim Locator that consist of musicians that knew and played with Rowland S. Howard.

The night will continue with the music of talented Berlin DJ Steve Morell who appears in the film “Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard”.

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“One staircase led to heaven the other to hell” says Robert Carrithers of a building in New York’s St. Mark’s Place Street, number 57. The building whose basement housed, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Club 57 – a creative laboratory for all non-conformists and free-thinkers from the East Village – actually belonged to the central offices of the Polish Catholic Church.

At that time New York was a city on the verge of bankruptcy and today’s luxurious East Village resembled a war zone. Refined citizens had long ago left the area as part of a progressive suburbanisation. The area with burnt up brick buildings – a last ditch attempt by desperate property owners to earn some money was more than often insurance fraud – was left in the hands of drug dealers, immigrants and also artists working in all disciplines. The police didn’t even bother to patrol there, which was good for anyone annoyed by having the authorities riding their back, artists and criminals alike. “It was often a matter of life and death. You had to have eyes in the back of your head and constantly watch what was happening in the street. It was so intense that sometimes you would find a corpse lying on the sidewalk,” recalls Carrithers, who moved to New York from Chicago. He wanted to study photography, film and acting there. The apartment that he could afford to rent was less than a 10-minute walk from Club 57.

The punk and disco scenes concentrated around the CBGB and Studio 54 clubs were losing their sense of novelty and originality, when out of nowhere a performer like Klaus Nomi appeared. This was a man, who sang opera in the costume of a Dutch Pierrot.

Club 57 was in fact founded by two friends, who loved vaudeville – Susan Hannaford and Tom Scully – and was run by director and performer, Ann Magnuson, who hosted its first performance.

“This place was fascinating in that, while artists had earlier met in bars or at concerts, they chatted and they drank, but in Club 57 they created something together. Here concerts mixed with exhibitions and performances,” stresses Carrithers, when speaking of the community that first made him feel at home.

Ann Magnuson thought up theme parties for every other night of the week. She found the decor and the furniture in the streets. Keith Haring had his first installation there and created his signature work, as did Kenny Scharf and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Club 57 exorcised America’s evil spirit. It went wild from “camp” aesthetic. With a Dadaistic fascination and vigour, it seized on the suburban supermarket culture; stores that had become museums of the contemporary lifestyle and its plastic kitsch. During one evening a country-western evening might take place on piles of hay, the next a burlesque event and an Elvis memorial, then a performance showing John Sex performing with his python snake Delilah or a concert by singer, Wendy Wild, and her group, The Mad Violets, which took the public on a joint trip, when hallucinogenic mushrooms were thrown into the crowd. The group, Pulsallama, was also born here. This was a group of twelve or thirteen girls, who sang in the style of Greek chorales, and when doing so banged on beer bottles, pans, cowbells and shot off kids‘ toy machine-guns. Pulsallama made it so far that in 1982 they were the opening act at several concerts by The Clash.

Even almost thirty years after its closing in 1983, Club 57 is still a legend that defined a period of pop culture and still inspires it. Many of the artists tied to the institution were unable to face up to their own wildness, drugs or the incontrollable rise of AIDs. They died. Others died only to become immortal (Haring, Basquiat). Others survived to become famous later (Ann Magnuson, Marc Shaiman, Scott Whitman).

Robert Carrithers was one of them. He spontaneously documented everything that happened in the club. The performances, the birth of success, the first exhibitions and the backstage area. In his moment shots and portraits, which will be shown for the first time in Berlin, barmen meet with writers, film-makers and future celebrities. Thus a unique testimony was created; one that is as unbridled image-wise as the Club 57 program.

Curator: Pavel Turek

Robert Carrithers is an American photographer and film-maker, who lives in Prague. Besides the Club 57 scene he documented the post-November cultural scene in the Czech Republic. He is preparing a documentary on the Prague-Berlin-Australian, post-punk band, Fatal Shore. Its members include Phil Shoenfelt, Bruno Adams (died in 2009) and Chris Hughes. Besides their common devotion to music, each member of the band also married a Czech woman.

He also took part in the making of the documentary Autoluminescent about the Australian musician Rowland S. Howard (dir. Richard Lowenstein), for which he shot all European interviews and concert footage. Rowland S. Howard (died 2009), an icon of alternative rock, was a member of bands like The Birthday Party, Crime and the City Solution or These Immortal Souls.

Robert Carrithers has begun a new photo project to show fairytales and special infamous tales in a new light. He will have a solo exhibit of these photos in April 2013 at the Prague galleryViniční Altán.

From there, Robert plans to take the photos to Berlin in June 2013 to include in a group show called “Your Daily Darkness” with German photographers Miron Zownir and Tina Winkhaus, Costa Rican painter Luis Cerdas Jaubert working with Cypress visual artist Raissa Angeli. All of the artists explore the theme of darkness each in their own unique way. This exhibition will be held at the Neurotitan Gallery situated in Mitte in the middle of Berlin.

Robert then plans to take the group exhibition ”Your Daily Darkness” full circle back to where he was originally inspired that one day long ago by Club 57.” The exhibit will happen at Salomon Arts Gallery in New York City in November 2013.