Exhilarating scenes from another world
Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers
Cal Revely-calder
★★★★★
Every nightclub in London is closed, and there’s little prospect of their return. But in Kensington, the Design Museum is making a lonely stand. Its new show, Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers, was delayed by the pandemic, and here it is, 122 days late. What was planned as a celebration of electronica – its aesthetics, politics and history – has now been realised as something more wistful: an elegy for vanished nights.
Electronic is the first music-themed show the Design Museum has staged. But the template is familiar: anxious to seem all-encompassing – as these cultural surveys must – it starts with the telharmonium, ondes Martenot and theremin. The first video is a fuzzy clip from 1934, in which a form of theremin is played by a French musician, Marie-antoinette Aussenac-broglie.
As elsewhere in the show, you bring your own headphones and plug them in. But, as elsewhere, you can barely hear her. Electronic has a pulsating soundtrack, curated by the DJ Laurent Garnier, which isn’t just audible throughout the exhibition but dominates the air. You sense the priorities: history will get rhythm in the Sixties, when the DJ era dawns.
Soon enough, we’re in cooler years, when electronica proliferates in both geography and style. Pioneers such as Jean-michel Jarre were paralleled by Kraftwerk and the “krautrock” wave. At their Seventies gigs, audio-visual spectacles – “live A/V” – become pageants of graphic design. Then, in
Eighties America, New York disco gives way to house in Chicago and techno in Detroit. Acid house comes to Nineties Britain, with a thousand sirens in pursuit. The innovations go on and on.
None of this story is new. But it’s nonetheless told with flair: as well as the videos, posters and cumbersome synths, among the 400 “objects” here are photocomposites by Andreas Gursky, drawings by Keith Haring and video art by Lawrence Lek. And some of the unexpected items are dazzling, too: a Raf Simons jacket with peaked lapels, inspired by the Antwerp techno scene, or masks worn on stage by Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, long before they were de rigueur.
On the other hand, Electronic can feel exhausting, like a mausoleum on amphetamines. The flyers for club nights in Chicago and London span only a couple of years, but fill entire cabinets. And the show is bewildering: its one-way system zig-zags through the twilit, narrow space, arranged into notional “zones” that you’ll struggle to discern. Garnier’s mix seems ecstatic, and inexhaustible. Just buy the ticket and take the ride.
At one point only, the show tries to conjure a nightclub vibe. Its final, intimate, pitch-black room was conceived by The Chemical Brothers and their set designers, Smith & Lyall. Behind the 2019 single Got to Keep On, you watch the visuals the duo deploy in concerts, with giant, luminous humanoid forms vogueing back and forth. There’s smoke, and vicious strobing, and a seismic level of bass. One woman tiptoed in as the song dropped from its bridge; within seconds, she wanted to dance.
Otherwise, though, Electronic is nothing like a night underground. It has arrived in the Covid summer with a self-consciously anxious air. These images of exhilaration are scenes from another world. My favourite was an understated photograph from Jeanchristian Meyer’s Lunacy series (1993), shot at a Parisian rave. A girl is singled out from the crowd, through wreaths of dust and haze. She tilts her face up, eyes closed. It looks like a beautiful dream – or, more sadly, a memory.
From now until Feb 14 2021. Details: designmuseum.org