J2DR, SubBar, Berlin, photo: Tommaso Revelant

Phantom Melodies

Review of Sub_Bar’s last performance night of the year

Samuel Hertz10.01.2025review

The ear searches for the body, my skin purring at its fuzzy limits, tuning into the intensive pressure that extends from each pulse of the subwoofers in a dim room.

How can I shift my listening strategies to meet vibration on its own terms? To feel depth, breadth, harmony, and rhythm with different sensitivities—and at different scales?

Sub_bar is a series of concerts initiated by Atelier Francesco, including over 50 artists contributing shorter audio works to the “Channel 1” program. This evening’s event begins with nine compact “Channel 1” works and follows with two live performances by Atelier Francesco and J2DR.

Cigarra’s intriguing entry “Cave” offers elegant echoing trails of subtle frequency changes. The sound is thick, yet with space enough to search within the alluring echoes to find light residue. Space resounds in polyrhythmic relation to the subwoofers, with sudden tempo changes that heighten the architectural activations by creating even more complex micro-moments.
Precise, rapid beating delivers a murmuring that is simultaneously unnerving and soothing.An extremely pleasing fade-out puts a cap on this physically and intellectually stimulating work.

“Subbass Invigorating Dose” by Stefanie Egedy develops a sophisticated and immersive journey through the limits of embodied perception. Slowly cascading strong waves of sound wash over the audience, steadily increasing in tempo yet resisting a settling.
I feel the boundaries of my body vibrating as a shimmering fuzz crests my skin. A bundled body with sound marking each layer. With stronger pulses, these subtle footprints sound like an effervescent optical afterimage.Frequency modulations shift these textures into clearly distinguishable characters as they coast across my body. Cross-modulating frequencies bring this stunning work to a close as I imagine the sharp shudder of metallic beams anxiously making contact, vibrations transferred from one to the other.

A fade-in of alternating, stuttering, yet clearly distinguishable frequencies marks John Kameel Farah’s standout work “Cauldron.”
From the outset, I feel an intriguing spatial depth, and am lost in thought at the limits of my sub-bass polyrhythmic perception: is my cochlear hearing clogging my embodied perception of rhythm?I try to feel these pulses before I hear them while glistening portamenti override this thought, thrumming as they coarse through the room. An intermittent growling like something straining to be understood behind thick glass. A return to rhythm coaxes the work to an end—thankfully unresolved.

Martine-Nicole Rojina’s “Autopoiesis” starts with barely perceptible pulses that gradually build into a delicate, syncopated horizon of sound. The piece feels narrative in nature, its textures inviting the listener to journey through the soundscapes rather than merely receive them. The work moves from simmering landscapes to distorted, club-like sounds that remain beautifully tangled, never fully resolving.

A subtle rumble overtakes my sensible horizon as the traces of a mesmerizing clutter of club music become apparent. Byetone’s “16Hz” crescendos, revealing its most intriguing sound element: rhythm, which is expertly established by a ‘negative’ beat, a sucking-in of sound from a pressurized room. Replacing the traditional kick transient with an inhale, the body feels compelled to lean into the beat rather than brace to absorb it.
The result is a somatic oscillation, a body tied in common with vibration.

Daisuke Ishida’s affective “Into the hottest July (2023)” trembles like a distant earthquake, the volume swelling and cresting but retaining its organic feeling in all cases. What it lacks in recognizable organized rhythm, it excels with an element of (welcome) chaos.
I feel these clusters of sound contain something: information or another life. Something scratches at the surface of these sounds. Or perhaps these are the sounds of our surfaces being scratched back.

SubBar, Berlin, photo: Tommaso Revelant

Atelier Francesco’s work “Blink Time” starts off the live program with persistent pulses sending waves across my forehead. Bisected text is projected in front of the audience: On the left, an unnamed narrator offers a winding meditation from an unknown positionality, while the right displays descriptions of the source sounds that constitute the work. We feel the subtleties of animal vocalizations: high-ranged birds and low-frequency whale songs meet at a vibratory middle space, offering possibilities for an embodied listening-with. Here, higher frequencies are activated, transmitting a decisive novelty in hearing higher-pitched sounds that seem to have an entirely different weight after an evening of sub-bass. Martian earthquakes and winds follow the elemental contortions of an alien planet whose shudders are only sensible through human technological intervention. In this work, vibration is positioned as a communicative bridge—perhaps across diverse intelligences and elemental forces alike.

SubBar, Berlin, photo: Tommaso Revelant

J2DR’s intensive live performance closes the evening with quaking that seeps out of the margins and cracks, spurring a search for where sounds begin and end.
Slowly, persistent rhythms enter and unfold to establish a ‘feeling procedure’ for the rest of the work: an invitation to sit inside these rhythmic spaces and feel them unfold.
There is a formal aspect to this performance: a series of rhythms are established and, subsequently, slowly begin to expand. Each develops via its own pathway, revealing rich sonic tapestries. Oftentimes, these sections reach a very satisfying peak wherein ‘phantom melodies’ become apparent through insistent repetition. I relax into these intense soundfields and begin to feel-with these vibrational possibilities. Phantom melodies become resolutely material, textural.

What lingers is an involuntary rocking motion, the slow oscillation of my body adjusting to the decrease in pressure. My mind just now catching up to my body, I let the sonic residue settle at the border of skin and air.

J2DR, SubBar, Berlin, photo: Tommaso Revelant

Samuel Hertz (he/him) is a composer and researcher in Sonic Geographies: Centre for GeoHumanities and based in Berlin.

Sub_Bar LIVE
J2DR debut

Artist(s): J2DR, Atelier Francesco, Byetone, John Kameel Farah, Stefanie Egedy, Daisuke Ishida

Curator(s): Eufonia

Date: 08.12.2024, 19:00 - 23:30

Location: Panke Culture, Berlin

00:00-00:00
  • Hanne Lippard, Homework, Talk Shop, 2024

    review

  • Amina Abbas-Nazari, Polyphonic Embodiments: Materials

    Article (Issue 01)

  • Giulia Deval, Audio Excerpts from Pitch

    Article (Issue 01)

  • Luïza Luz, Thunder, Music for Wild Angels

    Article (Issue 01)

  • Anna Bromley, No2 How Katrina Krasniqi almost gets lost

    Article (Issue 01)