Ridin´ A Train
A musical train ride by night through the plant grounds of the VOEST steel works.

'Wolfgang Fadi Dorninger Wolfgang Fadi Dorninger

For the last three years, Ars Electronica (program: Wolfgang Fadi Dorninger) has been staging a midnight ride through the plant grounds of the VOEST steel works on a train featuring special ”panorama” observation cars. The 1996 tour by Aural Screenshots featuring James Plotkin was a melancholy look back at industrial romanticism of the good old days, whereas Death Praxis (Ikue Mori & Tenko) placed human beings at the centerpoint in 1997. Last year, Pan Sonic explored microdomains of technology by means of home-brewed analog electronics. In 1999, the Viennese group RADIAN will explore the field of tension and interplay between electronic and acoustic instruments, from which resounds a self-defined microcosm in which minimal shifts and modulations within the structure of the sound and rhythm determine the actual dynamics. The individual levels coalesce and stratify to form a unitary sound-tone-texture. The Radian trio—Martin Brandlmayer (Drums, Programming), Stefan Nemeth (Analogue Synth) and John Norman (Bass)—close ”circuits, but never wildly; rather, they keep them under control, committing themselves to the human expression. Radian pieces are poetry from control centers, songs of an electronic park.”

(Die Presse)

Thanks to VOEST-Alpine Steel, the company’s rail operations staff, and the train crew.