Hide to show

C_Music NOW

There is a remedy for reality

It’s an imitation

Hyperreality. Post-truth. Algorithms. Memes. Deepfakes. Avatars. Words and concepts that initially appear unfamiliar, safely distanced from the bounded lives we inhabit in the physical world. And yet, in truth, they define far more than we are willing to acknowledge.

On stage, six cubicles stand in a row. Each one is occupied by a musician and becomes a private chamber of preparation – like glimpsing, from behind the curtain, the ritual of the artist’s attunement before stepping onto the stage and into the reality of performance. The cubicles are fitted with blinds, onto which streams of video are projected: actions performed by the very same players, capturing them in moments of isolation and interaction that recall the peculiar cohabitation of our existence within social media ecosystems. A question begins to hover quietly over the performance: are we listeners or spectators? Are the figures on stage musicians or actors? And what exactly unfolds before us? Is it a conventional concert, or a hybrid assemblage of sound, moving image, and set design that invites us into an altogether different performative experience?

In Hide to show – a work composed by the prolific German composer Michael Beil specifically for Nadar Ensemble, marking their third collaboration since 2011 – acoustic and electronic music meet video and cutting-edge technology, offering a condensed reflection on what constitutes the real today, while simultaneously sketching the topography of a world covered beneath a dense layer of virtuality.

With music as its principal narrative device – and more precisely, through the performative and multimedia capacities generated by contemporary music in its most adventurous and intellectually incisive moments – Beil and the Nadar Ensemble offer a navigational manual for the brave new world and wasteland of the internet. At the same time, they scratch a modern-day blues for our fleeting embodiments and encounters in the digital realm: a stuttering allegory of the self as currency and as exchange value within this new economy of images. Hide to show, thereby, becomes an ingenious cultural mash-up, one that encapsulates the extent to which our lives are now both interconnected and insulated, while posing a question we all carry on our lips as we rush to capture yet another latest post: perhaps, in the end, do we see less when we see everything?