The Day the Earth Stood Still, takes its title from a 2023 sound sculpture by Pyrolator, aka Kurt Dahlke, which imagines a day when progress comes to an abrupt halt, freezing the world in a disarming chill of horizonal dimensions where sound stretches out and surrounds the viewer with nihilistic dissonance. Dahlke, the legendary Düsseldorf native, has consistently made innovative contributions to the German music scene starting in the late 1970s by playing in D.A.F , the post-punk Fehlfarben, and the band known as dangerous clowns, Der Plan. He has also realized a significant body of solo work under the name Pyrolator, where he pushes the boundaries of sonic production through MIDI controlled electronic instruments and acoustically responding to synaesthetic environments. Recent commissions include site specific installations for the Heinrich-Heine-Allee subway station in Düsseldorf and the new Hotel Château Royal in Berlin. Our presentation will be the debut of this newest sound sculpture in the Rhineland.
For this special exhibition project, the work will be presented in dialogue with images and other artists’ works from Dahlke’s developmental years, particularly revolving around Düsseldorf’s infamous Ratinger Hof. Often regarded as the birth place of German punk, the bar which was run by Carmen Knoebel and Ingrid Kohlhöfer, created a space for deviant expression and experimentation. By bringing together documentation and art from this period, contextualized by the lured sound scape of Dahlke’s multichannel sound work, the exhibition will reflect on the ambition of this nearly utopian period of creation in Düsseldorf. In addition to documentary photographs of the action at Ratinger Hof from the archive of Carmen Knoebel, we will present sound works by Katharina Fritsch produced by Dahlke’s label Ata Tak, a poetry performance by Martin Kippenberger and Ulrich Meister at the Hof, performances curated by Knoebel for DIA Köln and documenta VII with Dahlke, The Red Crayola, Mittagspause, and Babeth Mondini-VanLoo, an archive of albums published by Ata Tak, and art works by Moritz Reichelt and Milan Kunc that survey the graphic irreverence which typified this time.
In The Day the Earth Stood Still, an immersive sonic experience is realized through a four-channel installation which continuously reconfigures the source and orientation of the sound. Driven by a sampler to a quadraphonic speaker arrangement, long dissonant lines of sound draw us into their subtle nuances. Evolved from fragments of classical composition, these motives are stretched rhythmically and harmonically out into time’s horizon, extending our senses towards a vanishing point.
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