DACM — Showroomdummies

DACM is a French dance / theatre collective consisting of many different people and already received critical acclaim from the audience in various dance theatres across France. To provide a soundtrack for their performances, Peter Rehberg also known as Pita was asked to create an electronic work fitting for DACM. Stated by was "to achieve a deliberately hybrid choreography, hence the use of different artistic disciplines such as contemporary dance, the fine arts, theatre, puppets and electronic music, all brought together over a project which opposes body movement and dummies". Some of the themes covered are "repulsion and erotism relative to appearance and stillness" and "how one could possibly slide from submission into passive resistance". Given these facts, it remains pretty unclear to me what this project is about, so it's hard to judge if the music is indeed fitting. So in this review, I'll concentrate on the music alone, if you don’t mind.

The music on Showroomdummies obviously falls in the clicks & cuts / techno directory. Cut-up and manipulated samples are reformed into static pulses with subtle twists, without losing the 4/4 beat dynamics. Sometimes very minimal, at other times quite attention attracting. Still I don't find it very pleasuring to listen to, and at times it is even irritating if you try to follow the totally unstructured noises. The minimal parts are pretty good, but nothing surprising nor refreshing, while this is absolutely needed to keep the listener interested. Clicks & cuts isn't as new and intriguing as it used to be, so I feel that artists really have to come with something unique. Regular followers of the genre might find this a nice addition to their collection though.

As I'm not familiar with Pita either, I have no clue if this work is representative for Peter Rehberg's other releases, but Showroomdummies is rather disappointing and boring. There's no doubt that there are better things to find in the click & cuts-genre, check out Mikael Stavöstrand instead. The concept behind this is fascinating though, and makes we wonder how this could've worked out together with the dance & theatre performance. Unfortunately, separately this isn't really worth picking up.