Curated by Julian Warner
The Brecht Festival Augsburg is organised by the Brecht Office in the Cultural Department of the City of Augsburg in cooperation with the Staatstheater Augsburg. Partner of the Brechtfestival is the Stadtsparkasse Augsburg. The main sponsor of the Brechtfestival is the Stadtwerke Augsburg. With the kind support of the Bavarian Ministry of Science and the Arts, the District of Swabia, the Goethe Institute and the media partners ARTE, Augsburger Allgemeine, taz, Theater der Zeit and Bayern 2 / Zündfunk.

Curated by Julian Warner
The Brechtfestival Augsburg is organised by the Brechtbüro in the Cultural Department of the City of Augsburg in cooperation with the Staatstheater Augsburg. Partner of the Brechtfestival is the Stadtsparkasse Augsburg. The main sponsor of the Brechtfestival is Stadtwerke Augsburg. With the kind support of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts, the District of Swabia, the Goethe Institute and the media partners ARTE, Augsburger Allgemeine, taz, Theater heute and Bayern 2/ Zündfunk.

Concept: Julian Warner
Room: Julian Dostmann
Sound: Nico Sierig
Music: Markus Acher, Micha Acher and Julian Warner
Voice: Beverly Patricia Daley
Research: Boygar Alpaslan
Production management: Sabine Klötzer

A production by Julian Warner commissioned by the donaufestival and the Kunsthalle Krems

At the interface of performance art, science and discourse, Warner plans to stage a “convention of fear” in three acts in the center of Munich and at the Muffathalle. In the “Parliament of Fear”, critical philosophers and theorists such as Bini Adamczak, Klaus Theweleit, Timnut Gebru and Dolkun Isa will meet with international artists and artists’ collectives, e.g. Slavs and Tatars, Heba Y. Amin, and some members of The Notwist. Together they will collect and address the various facets of global fear in lectures, discussions and performances and reveal the mechanisms behind its instrumentalisation and how it shapes emotional policymaking. In the second part of the project, a parade through downtown Munich (Parade of Fear) will bring the Bavarian Refugee Council, the feminist fraternity Molestia and other civic organisations and protagonists together with artists in a “Coalition of Fear”. The climax and conclusion of the three-day conference will be the ceremonial burning of the collected fears via a five-metre-tall “Wicker Man” on top of the Olympiaberg by the artist and musician Anna McCarthy.

Curated by Julian Warner
A project of the international theatre festival SPIELART. Supported by the: Federal Cultural Foundation. Funded by: The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. In co-operation with the Goethe Institute and Radio80000.

Produced as part of the festival After Europe, 9-13 October 2019 at the Sophiensæle. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe - Multi-sector funding.

Listen to these songs of infrastructure and appraisal of the welfare state. Join me in mourning the broken promises of prosperity for all. Send that “Ausländer” of your mind to heaven. Colonialism fucked you up. Platform Capitalism is keeping you in chains. Are we to unionise all human and non-human workers at amazon? Will modernity always have that “forever nigger”? What about those dispossessed field hands harvesting your asparagus?

All is lost. The system is rigged. Because all histories, gestures and identities have been absorbed into this late capitalist apparatus we call diversity. It can integrate anything and anyone. It made me. It is the price of the ticket. And it is unable to challenge its own premise of an atomised society. As if you and I had so little in common.

They will try and help you. They will build you a museum for your history and an innovation hub for your future. I warn you. Don‘t let them give you a name. Resist appellation. Don’t get that German passport. Don‘t eat asparagus. – Fehler Kuti, Spring 2021  

All songs by Julian Warner. Produced by Markus Acher and Tobias Siegert.
Markus Acher – drums, percussion, backing vocals
Micha Acher – sousaphone, trumpet
Cico Beck – synthesizer
Jenny Bohn – backing vocals
Pacifico Boy – vocals
Katja Kobolt – spoken word
Theresa Loibl – bass clarinet, backing vocals
Sascha Schwegeler – steeldrum, kalimba, percussion, backing vocals
Tobias Siegert – bass, synthesizers, percussion, backing vocals
Julian Warner – piano, memotron, vocals
The album Fehler Kuti “Professional People“ is part of the same multiverse as "The History of the Federal Republic of Germany as told by Fehler Kuti und die Polizei". A production by Julian Warner. In cooperation with Münchner Kammerspiele. Funded by the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich.

© 2021 Alien Transistor

The police are on stage. Frontman Fehler Kuti sings about the German obsession with public order and homeland: from the transfiguration of the German forest, via deindustrialisation and class struggle, to the information society and racial profiling. Together, they reveal the racist and capitalist power relations of a country in which there have never been equal rights and opportunities for all. But who is actually the police, who enforces the prevailing order, who keeps it alive?

By and with: Markus Acher, Maasl Maier, Sachiko Hara, Julian Warner, Theresa Loibl, Sascha Schwegeler
Stage: Jana Schützendübel
Costume: Katharina Böhringer
Production: Veronika Heinrich
Lighting: Jonaid Khodabakhshi, Dennis Dieter Kopp
Sound: Nicolas Sierig
Dramaturgy: Adele Mike Dittrich Frydetzki
Booking: Wieland Krämer

A production by Julian Warner. In cooperation with Münchner Kammerspiele. Funded by the Department of Arts and Culture of the City of Munich.

I remember the first time I read W.E.B. DuBois eclectic masterpiece The Souls of Black Folk. The way in which this Weberian scholar flowed from personal account to prose to sociological analysis to music and even political intervention has had a lasting impact on my own work as a cultural anthropologist. It made me understand that as scholars we must use different means in order to give expression to the totality of the lived experience: There is only so much in an academic text.

The experience of alienation has always been at the heart of my scholarly and artistic practice. I have used academic writing, lecturing, theatre performance and electronic improvisation to understand and represent it as a theoretical concept, postcolonial condition and lived experience. I believe, some issues need to be told like a story, some analyzed in most abstract terms and others need to be sung like a gospel. The medium changes the message.

In this sense, I guess, I’m a singing cultural anthropologist.

For some time now I have been engaged in the use of dystopian themes and sounds to paint a sonic picture of structural racism and whiteness of our present. But recently I have grown weary of this Ballardian idea of Future Now and the resulting phantasmagorian aesthetics myself and others have been invested in. The widespread availability of Digital Audio Workstations, sequencers, loopers and delay pedals has lead us into a futuristic cul de sac best described by Mark Fisher as the very absence of future.

Likewise, I am most skeptical of the “naturalist” countermovement, the return of folk. Especially in Germany, I am convinced there is no such thing as an innocent or progressive folk musical expression as it is always connected to the idea of the homeland (“Heimat”) which in turn produces the colony. It seems to me, the current zeitgeist is stuck between a “museum of a dystopian future” and a “museum of an idealized past”, but I wanted to sing about the present.

So, I involuntarily returned to pop music in its two-folded meaning of something popular and addressing not an essentialist notion of “Volk” or its woke cousin “communities”, but society as a whole.

I entered the studio just with a few lo-fi sounding melodies and rhythms from my circuit bent CASIO synthesizer. I had no clue what the finished product would sound like. But as soon as Markus started drumming, in a way strangely reminding me of CAN’s Ethnographic Forgery Series, my uptight sounds were suddenly embedded within a warmer global sound spectrum. The alien at home and abroad and the strange overlapped: We were seeing one and the same sound differently but were gently held together by Tobias’ producing.

Making music is about building coalitions. It’s about suggesting an articulation of styles, sounds and people, that hasn’t materialized, yet, but may help us in the current crisis: I wanted Amon Düül II to send their drug induced archangel thunderbird to rescue the refugees, that had tried to escape the police by climbing up a tree in Munich in 2016. I wanted Sun Ra to taunt far-right protesters in Chemnitz in 2018. And I wanted to mourn the loss of a former kebab shop cum discotheque that served as proof that there is such a thing as a minoritarian universalism. – Fehler Kuti, Autumn 2019 

Music by Julian Warner, Markus Acher & Tobias Siegert
Saxophone on RINDERMARKT by Franz Brunner
Trombone on RINDERMARKT and IL by Matthias Götz
Recorded and mixed by Tobias Siegert in Munich.
SONTAGSFAVORIT mixed by Dario Albiez in Dusseldorf.
Mastered by Duphonic in Augsburg.
Artwork by Atelier Grande, Munich.

© 2019 Alien Transistor