Punctum by Válek Merta Tarnovski

What does a venue sound like? One might approach this question by assessing the technicalities of how it handles sound: the room acoustics, the quality of the PA etc. Instead, this trio seek answers by enlivening those loose inanimates strewn silently around the venue’s edges – whatever the players could find throughout the backrooms and corners. Pots, pans, dud domestic appliances and old bicycles are hauled up from the groundfloor basement of Punctum in Prague, along with a few stones and tree branches gathered from the venue exterior, thereby inverting the usual pre-gig etiquette of decluttering the space before the band and audience arrive. Powered by Petr Válek’s electroacoustic machines, the music amasses into a tumbling, churning homage to those objects that quietly resist the notion of a venue as a neutral non-space or a blank canvas. It’s a cascade of corridor obstructions and rusted trinkets, resulting in a noise that couldn’t have originated anywhere but this one little space in Prague’s Žižkov district.

The second piece sees the trio joined by SunDog (Isabelle Duthoit and eRikm), whose presence here thickens the material downpour with lupine croons and squeals of marine sonar. Just as the emissions seem to be pressing into a solid mass, the players switch into a slow and methodical process of disentanglement: clangs and scrapes are swept away, bicycles are retired to their favoured nooks, pans are flung back into old cupboards. The trio’s business is brought to a state of palindromic completion, the objects pushed back into Punctum’s unassuming peripheries, the stage rendered empty again.

“Flaming Pines is itself a topography of hidden global sounds." The Wire.

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