‘Scott Gibbons’ music feels like it’s happening inside your own head.’ – This is what the Guardian newspaper wrote about musician Scott Gibbons. In 1986, he formed the American dark ambient music group Lilith. It was a band with homemade audio equipment and improvised electronics. Scott is a composer noted for his careful use of isolated and unexpected objects as instruments. He created frames that were only a few milliseconds long for each sound. They were very fast, like a door opening, a river, a dog, a hammer, a window closing, the wind, an engine running. Scott’s music has no words, no speech, no singing, no human voice. In a sense, there is no music. Direct objects can be heard as music. As part of the musical arrangement, the group created sounds that accompanied the fireworks, incorporating the sounds of pyrotechnics. Gibbons also produced several works for large-scale spectacles using them.
In the early 1990s, Lilith’s music expanded. Lilith later joined the Sub Rosa label. In 1999, Scott Gibbons’ music and sound for director Romeo Castellucci’s theater was a landmark. Later he did a continuous music tour till 2019. ‘Third Raik’ is his 13th video installation theater performance at ItFolk in his music direction.
‘Third Reich’ is directed by Romeo Castellucci, an Italian theater director, playwright and stage designer who has been one of the main exponents of the European theater world since the 1980s. A noted designer of sets, lighting, sound and costumes, Romeo Castellucci directed many plays. Romeo, who mesmerizes the audience by combining multiple arts, has already performed more than fifty plays.
Performance in ‘Third Reich’ works like a totalitarian machine. Each frame is based on a representation of several nouns. Each place name image is projected on a giant screen on the back wall on a dark surface. It is possible that the nouns that appear in this way actually represent all named objects. This range of speed is provided by our ability to retain a word that appears in a flash—one twentieth of a second—based on our retina and memory. It limits our gaze. It soon reaches a tipping point where a convergence occurs. It becomes impossible to distinguish single words before our perception loses its grip. In the case of creating this crazy series of words, some of them leave a mark on the viewer’s visual cortex, while the majority of others are lost. Manipulated in this way the defenseless viewer is exposed to the human word as a matter of measure.
The audience is left with no room for choice or discrimination in the patchwork of names. The nucleus of language goes back to white noise, which leads to chaos. The ‘Third Reich’ is an image of repressed and coercive communication. Here, a language-machine erases entire domains of reality. Because nouns are all the same, mechanically mass-produced, like buildings constructed with no room for escape. Eventually everything stops. Invasion, cessation, the absence of words, becomes a battlefield for words and their military aggression. The nouns from the dictionary projected on the screen are the flags planted on conquered land. The sound accompanying the installation, composed by Scott Gibbons, will be apodictic. ‘Third Raik’ is a performance that exposes some political thoughts to the audience by deconstructing language into the possibilities of stage language.