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