Built with the aid of cutting-edge architectural and technological means as the ideal concert hall, free of inherent noise: The Helmut-List-Halle is an almost perfect white cube for music. For the opening of steirischer herbst, Staalplaat Soundsystem will for the first time use the hall not as a flawless shell for music but rather play the hall itself as an instrument – in a duet with the noises that surround it and that are usually locked out.
For seven years, Staalplaat Soundsystem, that developed from Geert-Jan Hobijn’s influential experimental independent label Staalplaat, has been creating sound installations that are often of gigantic dimensions: converted household appliances and other items of practical use, washing machines, floor polishers, vacuum cleaners, kitchen blenders and fans. Staalplaat Soundsystem transforms them into unusual sound generators that perform together as a vast mechanical orchestra, thus celebrating the poetry of everyday life and the supposedly banal.
When the international artist formation within the series of “Architone” not only plays in but with the Helmut-List-Halle, coaxing sound out of it, the audience is an accomplice and living part of the music that emerges around and with it – a music that gives the Helmut-List-Halle its greatest performance, at the same time critically questioning the form and function of the concert hall institution.

Composition / Space / Production: Carlo Crovato (GB), Geert-Jan Hobijn (NL) & Carsten Stabenow (D)
Guests: Mark Bain (USA), bmb.con (NL), Justin Bennett & Roelf Toxopeus, Olaf Matthes & Jens Alexander Ewald, ART BOX, Gunther Kögl, Roland Gschaider, Martin Putschögl & Martin Peßl
Staalplaat Soundsystem