Dreams in machines

In the Nagelfabrik Winterthur, machines no longer simply produce nails: they become memory, percussion, breath and metallic ghosts. With Archimedes träumt, the composer Nico Feer transforms a working-class site into a sensory laboratory, where the history of technology meets intimacy, philosophy and the body in motion. This recording, the result of a vast transdisciplinary project, goes far beyond the simple framework of a soundtrack: it acts as a living architecture, an acoustic theater where every vibration seems to carry the rust, fatigue and beauty of human gesture.

What's immediately striking is the way in which the sounds of century-old nailing machines become musical material. Not just decorative samples, but real rhythmic organisms. The rubbing, clattering, saturation and mechanical pulsations make up a kind of archaic techno, industrial music in the literal sense of the word, but stripped of all coldness. One sometimes thinks of certain experiments by Pierre Henry, Nico Feer's talent for concrete editing and his ability to bring poetry out of noise. Yet Nico Feer never quotes; he absorbs, transforms and reinvents.

Its great strength lies precisely in this refusal of aesthetic hierarchies. Here, a minimalist motif can suddenly lead to an almost pop melody line, before being swallowed up by an abrasive electroacoustic storm. The «dirty» sounds, the crackles reminiscent of worn vinyl, the deliberate saturations are never surface effects. They serve a paradoxical quest: to achieve a form of emotional purity through the very imperfection of sound matter. As if crackling were proof of life.

The project's choreographic roots are constantly in evidence. You can almost hear the bodies. The workmanlike gestures reproduced and sublimated by the dancers seem to extend the metallic strikes, the mechanical breaths, the hypnotic rhythmic loops. There's something profoundly physical about this music: it moves with muscular impulses, repetitive tensions and interrupted impulses. An assembly line suddenly dreaming it's a ballet.

But Archimedes träumt is particularly striking for its symbolic significance. At a time when discourses of closure and cultural normalization proliferate, this work asserts a rare freedom: that of not choosing between learned and popular music, between experimentation and immediate emotion, between abstraction and social memory. Musique concrète, avant-garde, minimalism, spectral rock? All of these circulate simultaneously, without a heavy theoretical manifesto, with an almost organic fluidity.

So this recording is not just interesting. It's inhabited. Fascinating, like an abandoned factory where dreams still linger in the machines.

Nero Feci: Archimedes träumt. Nico Feer, Musik. Sàd Records, vinyl or digital