Austrian Cultural Forum NYC

BARBEZ: SONGS FOR PAUL CELAN
MAY 12 | 07:30 PM

The Austrian Cultural Forum in cooperation with Deutsches Haus at NYU, presented musician Dan Kaufman, the man behind the eclectic Brooklyn-based ensemble Barbez, along with a few of his band members and avant-garde classical musicians in a concert featuring music from the band’s new album Force of Light. Inspired by the verse of Jewish poet Paul Celan, their latest album sets some of Celan’s most haunting lyrics to fine, elegiac music, conjuring beautifully melancholic moments via strings, theremin, marimba, bass, and drums. The performance was accompanied by video projections by John Jesurun, the MacArthur winning filmmaker and playwright.

Dan Kaufman, a long-time reader of Paul Celan, has crafted a song cycle in Barbez’ new album that mirrors Celan’s brutal rhythms and intricate melancholy. Barbez swoons and cries, as vibraphones and drums toll out the relentless passage of time. The songs flow into each other, lapping against the shore in a black tide of clarinets and strings and Theremins. Post-rock is usually good at manufacturing a mood, but this music is deeper in its demon conjuring ambience.

The New Yorker writes that the musical compositions of Barbez “capture the angst, joy, and strangeness of life in the twenty-first century,” and the Washington Post has called Barbez “the most musically adventurous of the blooming ‘ethno-punk-cabaret’ movement.”

Paul Celan, née Paul Antschel, was born in 1920, into a German-speaking Jewish family with roots in Romania.  Along with a number of other Jews, he and his parents were rounded up in the early forties. While Celan’s parents died in the camps, he escaped the roundup in which his parents were captured.  However, Celan was then sent to a forced-labor camp in southern Romania, and spent nearly two years in a series of labor camps across the country.  He again survived, and two years after the war he fled Romania, eventually settling in Paris. He married a French artist, Gisèle Lestrange, and began writing poetry, deliberately and with great anguish, in German, his mother tongue. In a speech to a German audience in 1958 he said: “In this language I have sought...to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.”

Celan's power, like the only true power in us all is in persistence. He once said "There is nothing on earth that can prevent a poet from writing, not even the fact that he's Jewish and German is the language of his poems." This sense of dogged nagging existence in a world that seemed bent on destroying him eroded Celan's early eloquence to a pulse in his later poems, often monosyllabic stabs in and at the language of his oppressors. The tragic guilt of being a survivor of horror, of being haunted by the great thinkers he admired and what atrocities in which they did not denounce strongly enough or even worse, were complicit in, likely became too much to bear. Dan Kaufman has written that “perhaps what is most moving about him is, to put it in a Celan-like way, his searched-for hopefulness.”

Dan Kaufman is the mastermind of the popular and eclectic band Barbez, which has become an important fixture in the New York music scene, working at the cross-section of rock, Eastern European folk, downtown experimental, and punk-cabaret. The band’s last release, Insignificance (2005), won sterling reviews, despite its unconventional sound (without a doubt the world’s only Theremin-marimba-vibes-guitar-bass-drum combo). Since then the group has toured widely all over the world, including performances in Russia, the Balkans, and across Western Europe and the United States.

Line-Up:

Dan Kaufman: guitar

Peter Hess: clarinet, bass clarinet, percussion

Catherine McRae: violin

Danny Tunick: vibraphone

Peter Lettre: bass

John Bollinger: drums

Cassie Terman: vocals