Sudden Infant

condition (DVD/cover): NM / NM

A DVD of Joke Lanz's Sudden Infant performance work, released on Tochnit Aleph, the Berlin-based imprint run by Daniel Löwenbrück dedicated to the action-music and sound-poetry traditions that include Sudden Infant alongside Dave Phillips, Rudolf Eb.er, and the extended Schimpfluch-Gruppe orbit. The title names three of the cities where Lanz performed the material: Berlin (his base since the mid-2000s), Paris (a frequent performance venue for the Schimpfluch circuit), and Taipei (the Asian node of the international noise tour circuit).

Sudden Infant has always been as much a performance project as a recording project, and the distinction matters. Lanz's live work is built on contact-microphone body-action, ritualised object-manipulation, and the physical theatrical presence that descends from Hermann Nitsch, Viennese Actionism, and the Schimpfluch-Gruppe's own development of ritual action-music. The DVD format captures what audio recording necessarily fails to: the choreography of objects and body in space, the silences between the sonic events, the physical presence of the performer.

Tochnit Aleph's Löwenbrück is himself a Sudden Infant collaborator (credited on the My Life's A Gunshot retrospective as co-performer on "Finals"), which makes the DVD part of a deliberate programme of documenting the performance-side of the Schimpfluch-related body-action tradition. An essential companion to the audio discography for anyone taking Sudden Infant seriously as a project rather than a record label proposition.