The Cabinet

In the fourth book of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Pantagruel is suddenly startled by strange noises in a frozen sea. These sounds do not originate in the moment itself, nor do they reverberate events that are taking place further away: what Pantagruel hears are sounds of a battle that took place the winter before. All those frozen sounds have begun to thaw in the warmth of spring and become audible again.

Rabelais’s tale reflects a deep-seated desire to make bygone times reappear and re-sound in the present, allowing past experiences to be ‘foreverized’ (to borrow Grafton Tanner’s term). This longing manifests itself in various forms of musical cryogenics: sound recording itself, but also tribute bands, early music, vintage instruments,...

The Cabinet interrogates these phenomena by transforming a live electronics performance into a dialogue with the (un)dead, negotiating multiple memories and identities. Drawing inspiration from the art cabinets of Rabelais’s era and the long Baroque, The Cabinet opens musical drawers to reterritorialize auditory memories in an eerie, steampunk landscape where past, present, and future collapse into one another.

Events

Concerts on Border Buda

The Cabinet transforms a live electronics performance into a dialogue with the (un)dead. Drawing inspiration from the art and curiosity cabinets of Rabelais's era and the long Baroque, The Cabinet is an eerie, steampunk auditive landscape where past, present and future collapse into one another

Friday 20 June 2025, 22-23h (Club version)

Saturday 21 June 2025, 14h-15h30
Live Radio Fantôme @Fobrux Radio studio + live on Radio Fantôme The Radio Show, Nick Aikens

The woman who thought she was a planet

Keynote on ODC 2025

10 April 2025 - 11 April 2025

10:15 - 11:00 Keynote Bruno Forment Collapsing Presentism Through Music: The Cabinet as a Historical Experience Generator

Lecture at EPARM, Tallinn

3-5 April 2025

Research presentation - Transforming Early Music’s Sound Library into Live Electronics

Related recording:

Wiedergutmachungsdrang derives from two German concepts: the Wiedergutmachungspolitik, the postwar policy through which the German government sought to repair the damage caused by the Third Reich; and Wiederholungszwang, the Freudian mechanism by which trauma patients tend to repeat certain acts and discourses in order to suppress painful memories. By conflating Wiedergutmachung with Wiederholungszwang, and by turning a “compulsion” (Zwang) into an “urge” (Drang), I refer to present-day tendencies to reconcile with the maladies of the past: post-colonialism, woke, revisionism. These attempts to settle accounts with history are, of course, doomed to fail—for the past knows no forgiveness; it is not even courteous enough to return our calls. By constantly striking the same aching nail, moreover, we may end up suppressing and silencing problems that could otherwise by resolved.

Wiedergutmachungsdrang is brutally wiederholend across multiple temporal dimensions and media. Musically, it is an assemblage of material from my personal sound library, called The Cabinet—after the curiosity cabinets in which people in the Baroque era stored their valuables and souvenirs, but also after the dark cabinets or closets Locke, Leibniz, and others used as metaphors for memory and the intellect. My cabinet is filled with musical souvenirs recorded on drum machines and synths, as well as other instruments; some sounds date back to my live kits of the mid-1990s, while others are lifted from songs, ads, and news reports from my childhood. These sounds are juxtaposed with video footage from my city of birth, Kortrijk: its annual cycles of fairs and festivities, its Catholic heritage, its lieux de mémoire… A central place is occupied by the neighborhood around the Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ter-Engelen Lyceum (usually called ’t Fort)—where my grandmother once went to school, which two of my children are still attending, and where my wife is teaching. For years, I passed by this school daily, witnessing its tragic collapse in 1984. This is the neighborhood where I once visited the fairground (which is no longer there) and where I said goodbye to my father at the morgue (neither there any longer).

The resulting montage is full of unresolved memories from my childhood during those Years of Lead, the 1980s. You catch glimpses of my idol, Simple Minds keyboardist Mick MacNeil; the ugly car my parents owned, and the one I wished we had; the radio station where my father worked after office hours; the political circus which my parents (both municipal employees) constantly complained about; the terror of the Brabant killers (Bende van Nijvel); the E3 (now E17) motorway cutting through the countryside; etc.