WACKELKONTAKT is a three-headed A/V Psychotrap project that currently spearheads the Jerusalem experimental scene. From R&B to hip hop to industrial to power electronics and back to local influences, Wackelkontakt have already made a global mark with the sensory overload of their live multimedia performances and the scintillating presence of frontwoman Tomer Damsky AKA MC Slice, backed by Eyal Lally Bitton (electronics, visuals, scenography) and Marco Milevski Tomasin (drums and electronics).

Since 2018 The three have been developing an aesthetics manifested in their performances, sound installations and site-specific events, which challenge the relationship with the audience through social dissonance and emotional conditioning. Besides creating an ever-changing multisensual spectacle, they produce gallery peroformances and sound design for theater and dance.

WACKELKONTAKT's visual and sonic language is a result of the boiling life on the border between East and West Jerusalem, present in their work with a sense of an absurd vitality, paranoia and isolation.



HEAL THE SPLIT

The title of the trio’s debut full-length out on Barcelona-based label Màgia Roja, undermines the overwhelming sense that what was breached and broken can never be put back together. HtS doesn't attempt to capture the live Wackelkontakt experience – it is an independent studio entity.

The lyrics are contradictory, schizophrenic and chaotic. Emotional manipulation clashes with a desire to shake and be shaken, to allow oneself to become sucked as far as possible from self-loathing. When self-reflection arises it is bitter, ridiculous, pathetic, interweaving with philosophical texts lifted directly from the likes of Deleuze & Guatarri, Foucault, Artaud, WJT Mitchell and others. The quotes become seamless parts of the lyrical barrage, as Wackelkontakt crumble under the urge to say everything while understanding nothing, to understand everything while saying nothing.

The title track, a naked, instrumental noise assault, sits between Papamummy, the hip hop opener, and Zkhut Kium, offering what could be tagged doom R&B. The title undermines the overwhelming sense that what was breached and broken can never be put back together; that megalomania and inferiority complexes are two sides of the same coin; that blinding empowerment is immediately exchanged with absolute nihilism.

Wackelkontakt demand your attention, however only after you survived all trials of insistent, deliberate rituals of shooting themselves in the foot and blurring all possible traces of narrative. The result renders Wackelkontakt's angst locally Jerusalemite and universally millennial.


“The record is an accomplished and bold debut from a group at the forefront of Jerusalem’s defiant art scene… Wackelkontakt are staring, screaming and spitting into the void, but forever will the void be too afraid to spit back” 
                                                                                                     The Quietus


ReReBirthing /The Hygiene Museum
Captivated by their own spell and awaiting the change, an underground/exhibitionist group of artists with improbable dreams is imprisoned in an audiovisual performance they created themselves. Disoriented with sensory overload, with affectionate gaze in the eye, they are maneuvering and being maneuvered by a collection of insights about controlled consciousness, stimulation threshold and dysfunction. The dissonance between the chaos in the space and temptation it evokes is perhaps a reflection of the surreal environment portrayed in their life.

Sound, light and space serve the collective as raw materials to create objects which manipulate spectatorship. Through an aesthetic of excess, multiplicity, intensity and deconstruction, they examine extreme physical driving forces and their impact on the spectator experience.

In this performance the audience confronts a brutal audiovisual flood that acts on all senses, and has to decide whether to struggle or let the body immerse itself in the experience. The presence of the light and the image steals the spectator's awareness, as the thicket of smoke and frequencies moves the viscera and proves the existence of the body. 


A site specific A/V performance, Acco Festival of Alternative Theater 2019



                                                                     watch a trailer 

PAPAMUMMY
 
The two videos, PAPAMUMMY - the opening track of the LP Heal The Split [released by Barcelona-based label Màgia Roja in 2020], and PROGRESS [released in Raash Records RV/A003] are interconnected: you need two points in order to perceive a distance - both musically, visually and psychologically.


In PAPAMUMMY we played around with the idea of an ancient gift of false wisdom. The lyrics are a mixture of broken fragments from “The History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault, the schizo-philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and the late poems of Artonin Artaud, which also inspired the story: The Not-Girl meets the entity of The Papamummy, a manifestation of her subconscious and her entire ancestry, who offers her the food of eternal knowledge. In an attempt to help herself she is eventually sucked further into madness. This idea of a split identity echoes the title of the album, the sense that what was breached and broken can never be put back together.



                                                                     watch full video 

                                         read an article in FACT magazine

PROGRESS
 
The track PROGRESS is inspired by the moment you realize you face three possibilities: getting things together and trying to help yourself; pretending to be improving; or giving in to insanity. The pseudo-Industrial beat and the samples of lapsing pitch remind us of the never-ending circle of improvement-deterioration while the human condition rolls down the stairs. The character in the song calls us over and over in protest until she is encaged in a loop inside her head, swallowed by a world of her own shrieks eventually turning into the cries of animals, the outside universe where her suffering has no meaning and her madness is of a ridiculous proportion.


Both videos represent to us the idea of failed therapy and saving the psyche; PROGRESS is a bit like an abstraction of PAPAMUMMY’s script, expressing the deconstruction of both the soul and the visual media, its final scene a reminder of the overall absurdity of the attempt to even talk about these things.





                                                                     watch full video