Music of a world without us.
withoutusness is a filmatic music performance combining the sounds of post-apocalyptic landscapes with old norse folk tones, contemporary black metal and gritty electronica. The 45 minute long performance takes place in blackboxes, abandonded buildings, old theatres, clubs and cellars, and creates an eerie and powerful experience for the audience. Abandonment is a strong and peculiar force.
Performed by Gisle Martens Meyer, playing and building live post-apocalyptic sounds both individually and in huge realtime swarms, together with live processing and manipulation of a quirky, cheap and broken violin. Images of desolate cityscapes and empty ruins are haunted by eternally stoic, static mobile devices. Are they waiting for a signal, or are they tombstones?
The performance is created from thousands of recordings of abandoned items, places, and technology, together with footage from the same spaces. The work has been created over several years of patient field-recordings and stealth shoots in rural edgelands and forgotten non-places in Portugal, Japan, Germany, Iceland and Norway.
References and inspiration
Edgelands, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts
The Last Of Us, by Naughty Dog / Sony Computer Entertainment
The Lonely City, by Olivia Laing
Stalker, by Andrei Tarkovsky
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
Stills from live performances and live visuals
