Thomas Bernhard Machine

In the organizer's words:

Thomas Bernhard Machine is a musical-performative experiment that transforms the Austrian writer's power of language into a sonic thunderstorm - dark, powerful and surprisingly funny.

Christoph Grissemann (vocals), Manfred Engelmayr (electric guitar) and David Reumüller (drums) take Bernhard's work seriously - and at the same time tear it out of its literary comfort zone. Repetition, linguistic rhythm, polemics: everything that characterizes Bernhard's prose becomes a musical structure here. The stage becomes an amplifier for his unmistakable tone. Grissemann slips into changing roles: sometimes as a grim frontman who recites dark passages of text with a sombre timbre, sometimes as a disguised Bernhard actor in a café on Mallorca - inspired by the legendary television monologues recorded by Krista Fleischmann and Wolfgang Koch in 1981. In this play between profundity and absurdity, between genuine quotation and invented pose, seriousness and satire become blurred in a highly entertaining way.

Thomas Bernhard Machine is neither a reading nor a concert, neither homage nor parody - it is an evening of crossing boundaries. Linguistic art meets noise, literature meets groove. Bernhard is not explained, but felt.