Review | By Aurelio Cianciotta / Neural
Befreit die Maschinen | Hannes Seidl
Already in the beginning of the eighties the Kraftwerk, maybe little aware of this huge anticipation, promised that, pushing a special button, a little electronic calculator might play a short melody. Actually, the theme of the music machines is a suggestion that totally precedes contemporary, since the first proofs of music automatons date back to Third Century B.C. We need to get to 1970 and to the warnings of Alvin Toffler to imagine times and a daily life that is closer to us. The American sociologist claimed that the future often “arrives too soon” and even “in the wrong order”. He was so right, that now, in full-blown post-modernity, the idea that machines can satisfy our primary needs rightly seems to us like a naive dream. If the future has already come and just passed, The Frankfurter Hannes Seidl tries now to question what has left of the solemn hope that everybody might be able to make music. “Free the machines”, this is the answer, with the explicit invitation to pass from the virtuosity to an “aware listening”, being honored – we don’t know with how much critical sense and with how much irony – to go beyond the society of work and recovering time and energy to dedicate to the good, pleasant, and sublime things of the life. […]