I Love Wooden Veil

The Wooden Veil Awaits



Wooden Veil: Gravity Problems by Hanayo

Wooden Veil is a Berlin-based art group formed in 2007. Inspired by the shared hauntedness of their respective homelands, they combine elements from forgotten and misremembered traditions to create a microcosmic world which only Wooden Veil inhabits, complete with its own symbols, clothing, food and shelters. Performances, installations and videos are characterized by an expansive wardrobe of ritual dress, and the creation of shrines, relics and talismans used to create music.

The group consists of artists Marcel Türkowsky (also a composer, founder of Snake Figures Arkestra, Cones, Uuhuu, collaborations with Datashock and Christoph Heemann), Hanayo (known for her solo work as a photographer and singer, collaborating with the likes of Christoph Schlingensief, Merzbow, Red Crayola, and Kai Althoff), Christopher Kline (Valkenburg Hermitage, †, Night Music, and Soft Peace), Dominik Noé (member of krautrock legends Lustfaust), and Jan Pfeiffer (Songs For Rocks, Soft Peace, Purple).

To understand:

Hold right hand, cupped near right ear; turn hand back and forth slightly with wrist. Bring left hand to opposite eye with the second finger pointing in the direction one is looking. With index and thumb of right hand, form an incomplete circle, space of one inch between tips; hold hand towards the earth, then move it in a curve across the heavens and back toward the horizon.

moon & hamburg wooden veil

"The music of Wooden Veil is at once chaotically ritualistic and curiously precious. From all indications it would seem that the Berlin-based collective have gone to great lengths to reach this dichotomy. Maintaining the project as a way to create a unique world that only Wooden Veil inhabits, the group's performances bring together symbols, clothing and rituals that are to be regarded a part of this world. Borne out of half-remembered traditions and etched in the fringes of culture, the music seems tribal through the eyes of a post-catastrophic modern man. Pieces of a once great culture slip in but it seems that much of their sound inhabits a forced forgetfulness, both innocently and ferociously using the remnants of instrumentation to create a new life in music. Among the pound of drums, the scorch of drones and the wail of frightened voices some beautiful moments emerge; alive but tenuously testing to see if, how and why that's possible." Raven Sings the Blues (includes two Mp3s)


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"Belonging to a world that is at once pre-millenial and post-apocalyptic, Wooden Veil’s music is the drumbeat of an ancient yet technological past channeled through the sounds of a post-human race. Masked and costumed, the players invoke a musical force as a shaman would a ghost. Collecting rhythm like wind collecting a storm, Wooden Veil gives grand form to noise – they make it an event. Drums, drones, harmonies and screams clamor in their songs, erupting now and again into a plainsong that rings just long enough for a melody to take shape, before it dissolves back into sonic entropy."
- Carson Chan, Program – Initiative for Art + Architecture, Berlin

"Playing like a semiotic mist, Wooden Veil approach their performances as handmade, patchwork quilt-like structures with emphasis on showing the lines of assembly, sewing together mythologies, traditional song, craft, ritual and acoustics."
- Steven Warwick (Heatsick, Birds of Delay)


Gloom Across the Ice

Wooden Veil on MySpace