Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny
Phantom Seance Ballett
Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny's ethereal Phantom Kino Ballett project, released on Utter: 'Phantom Seance Ballett'.
A vital component in the Ballett’s mix of performance, installation, and video, the Amsterdam-Cologne duo’s overlapping mosaic of film and TV dialogue samples original productions and cherry picked records makes for a compelling standalone release, smartly blurring the lines between soundtrack and mixtape in a way recalling the best Demdike mixes, but taken to a more purposeful level of arrangement.
It would spoil the surprise to give away too much of the tracklist, but suffice it to say this is properly inimitable gear, incorporating dialogue from Amanda Leer, Silvia Plath and Liz Taylor among many strong female presences telling a “story of domestic dissociation, public scrutiny and suffering” on teh A sideA, while the second piece deploys at a more abstract level, an extendedsoundscape created by Willikens & Szczesny inspired by their time in Kyoto, Japan during autumn 2017.
"The first of these pieces - 'Identikit Arkaden Seance' - took place on the 2nd of October 2019 at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein and is a live recording. This performance was part of their exhibition "Chambers of Phantom Kino Ballett", where they showed new video works and displayed the now infamous costumes and slippers worn by Lena, Sarah and a rotating cast of guest phantoms. At this performance, the seven performers carried boomboxes playing individual audio tracks inside and outside the Kunstverein, while Viktoria Wehrmeister and Detlef Weinrich improvised music alongside the phantoms' moving soundtracks of sonic snippets, poetry, field recordings and soundscapes.
The second piece - 'Studio Chamber Seance' - contains diverse audio tracks of performances that were held by Willikens and Szczesny in collaboration with Wehrmeister and Weinrich. It has been deconstructed and rearranged with additional sound material from the Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny archive, then edited and mixed by Lena and Sarah in Amsterdam and Cologne last year. Additional music by Detlef Weinrich and Viktoria Wehrmeister features throughout, recorded live in Aachen 2019 and Frankfurt 2020."
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Hand-stamped LP, 36 page riso-printed book, Riso-printed fold-out poster, Stickers. LP also includes 20 hidden locked grooves cut into the run-out on each side.
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Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny's ethereal Phantom Kino Ballett project, released on Utter: 'Phantom Seance Ballett'.
A vital component in the Ballett’s mix of performance, installation, and video, the Amsterdam-Cologne duo’s overlapping mosaic of film and TV dialogue samples original productions and cherry picked records makes for a compelling standalone release, smartly blurring the lines between soundtrack and mixtape in a way recalling the best Demdike mixes, but taken to a more purposeful level of arrangement.
It would spoil the surprise to give away too much of the tracklist, but suffice it to say this is properly inimitable gear, incorporating dialogue from Amanda Leer, Silvia Plath and Liz Taylor among many strong female presences telling a “story of domestic dissociation, public scrutiny and suffering” on teh A sideA, while the second piece deploys at a more abstract level, an extendedsoundscape created by Willikens & Szczesny inspired by their time in Kyoto, Japan during autumn 2017.
"The first of these pieces - 'Identikit Arkaden Seance' - took place on the 2nd of October 2019 at NAK Neuer Aachener Kunstverein and is a live recording. This performance was part of their exhibition "Chambers of Phantom Kino Ballett", where they showed new video works and displayed the now infamous costumes and slippers worn by Lena, Sarah and a rotating cast of guest phantoms. At this performance, the seven performers carried boomboxes playing individual audio tracks inside and outside the Kunstverein, while Viktoria Wehrmeister and Detlef Weinrich improvised music alongside the phantoms' moving soundtracks of sonic snippets, poetry, field recordings and soundscapes.
The second piece - 'Studio Chamber Seance' - contains diverse audio tracks of performances that were held by Willikens and Szczesny in collaboration with Wehrmeister and Weinrich. It has been deconstructed and rearranged with additional sound material from the Lena Willikens & Sarah Szczesny archive, then edited and mixed by Lena and Sarah in Amsterdam and Cologne last year. Additional music by Detlef Weinrich and Viktoria Wehrmeister features throughout, recorded live in Aachen 2019 and Frankfurt 2020."