The electronic music trio Elektro Guzzi, consisting of artists Bernhard Hammer, Jakob Schneidewind, and Bernhard Breuer from Vienna, is returning to Riga to thrill the Hanza Perons stage.
It’s not unusual to listen to a piece of music and feel as though you understand how it was created—or at least performed. But then, to your surprise, it turns out that the compositions were created using entirely different technological and expressive means. In other words, neither “laptop black metal” nor “acoustic techno” are, in and of themselves, any kind of groundbreaking aesthetic discoveries these days. With the Austrian group ‘Elektro Guzzi,’ it’s a little different.
Since 2004, this trio—referred to here as “human-machines”— and here compared to a “clockwork mechanism” or a “techno organism,” has been creating the aforementioned danceable techno music using rock band instruments—guitar, bass, and drums. Their meticulously refined approach to music-making with these seemingly limited tools is both unusual and delicate, and 22 years and 11 albums later, it still keeps the group at the forefront of this musical avant-garde among its pioneers.
Without computers or devices that create sound loops—and especially in a live concert setting—the listener, or more often the dancer, sees how each sound is created right there and then, right before their eyes on stage.