Killing Joke

The noise-music nom d'étage of Switzerland-born, Berlin-based performer Joke Lanz, Sudden Infant combines playful absurdity with unnerving gibberish to create what he describes as "an exploding kaleidoscope, an acoustical Rorschach inkblot test." During his last San Francisco show at Art S.F., Lanz used a small collection of stompboxes, mixers, and looping pedals to take familiar sounds — mostly generated by his own voice — and reprocess them into a confusing array of baby cries, echoing sighs, and psychotic laughter, augmented by prerecorded loops of post-industrial machine rumbles. Lanz twisted his skinny body, all bony angles and scribbly black-and-white tattoos, with theatrical flair as he contact-miked his larynx, sampling his voice while pantomiming the action — almost as if the body were controlled by the sound, rather than vice versa. Thus Sudden Infant's "physical sound-poetry" often becomes an external manifestation of internal mental states: Jokey one moment and serious the next, Lanz is a marionette yanked from emotion to emotion in a manic dance, like Howdy Doody thrust into a starring role in the Theatre of Cruelty.

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More About

• Joke Lanz
• Berlin (Germany)
• Howdy Doody

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Sudden Infant performs with R. Jencks, Tralphaz, and Horaflora.
Sun., Jan. 31, 8:30 p.m., 2010