TIME LOSS

SCHALLFRONT is an event series that gives a platform to artists that are shaping the contemporary experimental electronic music scene.

The theme TIME LOSS tackles musical, political, and philosophical discourses. Electronic music lies between two poles in terms of its temporality: on the one hand, it offers the possibility of non-human, inorganic and unsynchronous durational relations. Endless sound surfaces and random noise take the place of beat, tempo and pulse. On the other hand, as "machine music" it creates a completely linear-mechanical advancing time that can be divided into distinct grids, bpms and beats. In recent years, this question has increasingly become the conceptual focus of attention in experimental music. Polytemporal approaches extend the polyrhythmic and polymetric aspects of 20th century music from minimal music and non-European musical traditions to Cornelius Cardew and Fluxus.

However, time loss also refers to social phenomena such as cultural infinite loops, media monothematics, and the global coexistence of time zones in virtual space.

Thus, artistic and theoretical discourses emerge that think of time as a political category, referring to the notions of utopia, apocalypse, deceleration, and acceleration that have been explored by various philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bernard Stiegler, and Paul Virilio.

While our social climate is increasingly determined by threatening future scenarios (global warming, pandemics, wars), the capitalization of the future is also increasing with speculation and financialization. Time loss describes the crisis of the linear time understanding of past, present and future. But it can also mean that in musical experience we forget time and everything that was, is and will be.