«I’m made of many circuits that don’t fit together. Because I believe in dissonance.» The world is not black and white, but many things in-between: something that Kubin has embraced in the most delightful, creative, artistic and wonderfully weird manner. Acclaimed French filmmaker Marie Losier – who has done numerous documentaries on avant-garde directors, composers and musicians, among them her first feature-length film on artist Genesis P-Orridge and his wife Lady Jaye in The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jay (2011), that won among others the Caligari Film Award and Teddy award at Berlinale – portrays the wonderful self-proclaimed Dadaist and German electronic musician Felix Kubin. A defining artist in the electronic music scene who has, from a young age on, proven that although he might have been born too late to be a pioneer of the Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW), he has conquered it masterfully and advanced to becoming the embodiment of what is considered revolutionary, intellectual, rebellious, opposing, progressive, rational, yet irrational and experimental all at once. Throughout the film we see various projects of his, ranging from the composition of an orchestra piece that fuses synthesizer music with strings and a boys choir traced with abstract noise and poetic expressions inspired by String theory, Chaos theory and quantum physics – his father was an atomic physicist – to numerous sound and noise experiments such as the noise of a dog chewing on a microphone or the voicing under water of a supposed baptism in a bathtub. It quickly becomes clear that this man, who is very much influenced by the avant-garde, most notably by the Futurists, the Dadaists and the radio, aims to break the conventions of the ordinary and to battle the monsters of capitalism. Losier not only succeeds in depicting one of the most interesting and fascinating artists, but she creates beautifully composed surrealist, atonal and abstract scenes that reflect on Felix's way of expression – and, how else but filmed on 16mm, like-minded to Felix's preference of his analog KORG MS20. His labor of love is the antithesis to Theodor Lessing’s proclamation in 1908, that «culture is evolution towards silence» - just like the futurist composer Luigi Russolo, noise and sounds are his essence of being.
Let yourself be dazzled by this superb glimpse of Kubin's curious Twilight Zone of utopian idealism. Or as Felix would put it: «I need things in-between. I need interferences.»
