The Amsterdam dance organization Dekmantel has built something beautiful in less than ten years. The five-day festival Dekmantel, the club’s flagship, is a jewel in the Amsterdam summer agenda, because it combines progressive and avant-garde electronic music with simply very festive DJ sets, although these are also usually of a high musical level.
A fixed opening ritual for three days of outdoor party in the Amsterdamse Bos, from Friday to Sunday, is a two-day introduction to the Muziekgebouw. It is as if Dekmantel wants to reveal the vast backgrounds of electronic music culture precisely there, in that stately concert hall. And show and show that dance has an incomprehensibly broad history, and still touches on jazz, music from far corners and especially classical.
Harp phenomenon
On Wednesday evening, a harp phenomenon plays in the full great hall that makes all of Dekmantel’s programmatic dreams come true. The American Mary Lattimore uses her harp as a multifunctional musical device, with which she actually forms an electronic one-man band. She sends her sparkling chords through a loop station, with which they can be repeated ad infinitum. She then plays patterns through her own recorded work, from threatening bass tones, which may also be repeated, to tinkling angel notes in the highest registers.
It makes her music pieces, which skim past classical, folk and even minimal dance, increasingly complex but above all more compelling. When you see the compositions arise before your eyes, you are transported into a surrealistic sound world, in which you suddenly also perceive the inspirations of Lattimore: from astronauts floating around the earth to whales washed up on a beach.
Lattimore, who impressed in particular with her cross-border ambient record Silver Ladders from 2020, also has the gift of the word. She introduces her compositions with fascinating stories about their creation and tells, for example, how she once broke her jaw, was unable to speak for months and had to relearn how to do social small talk. She wrote a visual piece about it, in which you can feel how her faltering harp hesitantly wants to start a conversation.
cult hero
Dekmantel has also brought a cult hero to the Muziekgebouw, whose work has been rediscovered many times, so that it has barely escaped the black hole of oblivion. In the mid-eighties, the Italian pianist and composer Gigi Masin made music that was far ahead of its time. He played piano over slow, rhythmically pulsating chords on the synthesizer, letting trumpets and saxes whirl through them. His album Wind from 1986 was a marvel of musical chemistry: jazz and easy listening, but due to the dubbing undertones also quite trippy house, which hadn’t even been invented at the time.
The in-house pressed edition of Wind was lost due to water damage, but Masin’s work was picked up in the 1990s by singer Björk, among others. Masin was more or less forced to release his old work by a growing group of fans, and the Italian became a hero for foodies and dance snobs.
Beautiful sound carpets
In 2014 Masin formed the trio Gaussian Curve with the Amsterdam DJ and producer Young Marco and the Scottish guitarist Jonny Nash. The band started with some non-committal jam work, but released the sensational ambient record a year later clouds from.
In the Muziekgebouw, the trio performs for a rare live show, which also proves to be unparalleled in terms of soothing musical power. Masin’s unctuous piano playing is flattered by Young Marco on beautiful sound carpets, from beeping computer game notes to sighing female voices from an analog synth. Guitarist Nash plays dry and undecorated chords from the oeuvre of the legendary Robin Guthrie of the band Cocteau Twins. Or he lets long, howling guitar lines full of overtones steam up next to the dubbing chords from Masin’s style book.
This music also breaks through walls, sometimes sounding like an electronic soundtrack to Italian films from the eighties, and sometimes also like fathomlessly deep, intoxicated house that transports you to another universe. A breathtaking performance, and a perfect starting signal for a dance festival that wants to break open the narrow spaces of dance clubs and festivals.
Mary Lattimore
Ambient
★★★★ ren
Gaussian Curve
Ambient
★★★★