Sonic Assault: Ital and The Haxan Cloak at Abandon Normal Devices

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) cares little for your comfort zones. The multi-arts festival of new cinema, music and art, based alternately in Liverpool and Manchester (it's the turn of the former city this year), was founded in 2009 with an aim to ‘push the boundaries of audience experience’. The theme of this year’s AND is not overtly publicised, but a trawl through the schedule quickly reveals a preoccupation with both our concern and enthusiasm for technological progress – and two of the musical events in the programme, though distinct in their approach to these overarching concerns, both strive to subvert their audience’s expectations and experience of a traditional electronic music event.

Explaining the inspiration behind opening night event The Cloud – which will feature live sets from house/techno music producer Ital and techno artist Stellar OM Source, as well as a venue dressed by Andrew Grune of London fashion label Primitive – Jon Davies of Liverpool-based music event curators Deep Hedonia says it intends to explore issues around “how to remain [as] anonymous as possible in a society that has accepted suspended democracy and mass state surveillance.”

“Techno has always dealt with the futuristic,” says Ital, aka Daniel Martin-McCormick, offering an insight into how his music plays a part in this exploration of our relationship with advances in technology. “I think the genre generally encourages some kind of engagement with these issues. My two albums for Planet Mu definitely embraced a certain tech-revulsion.”

Matt Smith and Sam Wiehl of electronic music enthusiasts and event organisers HIVE Collective are also a little reluctant to unveil the finer details of their own event, DIN 19643, the name of which relates to a 1970s therapeutic technique that, using isolation and flotation tanks, relied on sensory deprivation to lead the way to spiritual enlightenment. Far from replicating sensory deprivation, though, DIN 19643 – featuring electronic noise assailant The Haxan Cloak and visual collaborator Adam Cooke – promises to deliver a ‘sensory assault’ and an ‘uncompromising experience’ to its attendees. “Broadly,” Smith and Wiehl say, “people should expect something in turns evocative, hallucinatory, abstract and extreme.”

There are few live electronic artists that can deliver on such a promise as effectively as The Haxan Cloak, a man who admits to being “knackered” by his own live shows. “When you’ve been pounded with that amount of sub-bass for that long, it’s tiring,” explains Bobby Krlic, when we meet him before a show in Leeds, sipping on a glass of red wine. “When I was seven or eight, [my brother] would bring home stuff like Slayer, stuff like that – really heavy music like Pantera, really extreme,” he says, discussing his fascination for the intense. “When it comes to making music, I don’t wanna go unheard. I wanna put a stamp down.” Krlic’s shows have become renowned for their unforgiving extremity: abrasively loud and suffocatingly bass-heavy, his recent appearances with Fuck Buttons have been stripped of visual accompaniment, reliant instead on the internal narrative of the music to guide the audience’s journey. The DIN 19643 show, however, suggests a multi-sensorial intensity, with the artistic visual input of HIVE conspirator Cooke.

What The Cloud and DIN 19643 share is an engagement with – to utilise a phrase of our technological age – the ‘user experience’. And in the case of the latter, it will most likely not be a comfortable one. The HIVE Collective stress the importance of creating an event outside of the standard ‘turn up, pay your money, dance, go home’ process. “This is absolutely critical to how we look at things,” they comment. “We want to offer something different than the usual passive audience gazing at a distant artist.” The uncertainty of what may happen once you’ve passed the paying-in desk, of course, is all a part of AND’s appeal.