The multiple lives of the Cave 12

Spotlights 21.04.2023

Born in Geneva at the end of the 1980s in the middle of the occupation movement in a cellar on Boulevard de la Tour, evacuated in 2007, nomadic but still active for several years, Cave 12 has for ten years now found a place that Fernando Sixto and Marion Innocenzi, who have presided over its destiny since 2001, have been able to freely conceive and build. Portrait of a venue that was, since the beginning of the 1990s, one of the emblematic places of experimental music in Europe.

In front of the Haute école du paysage, d'ingénierie et d'architecture (HEPIA), at 4 rue de la Prairie, in Geneva, a grey concrete passage between two white tiled walls slopes gently down. It leads to a former bicycle parking lot that became, in 2013, after long works, the new Cave 12, a concert hall dedicated to experimental music, which Fernando Sixto, its artistic director since 2001, prefers to call "research music". The Cave 12 has had several lives - four if you don't count the countless others that have passed through its walls - but they all began in the cellars of 12 Boulevard de la Tour, one of the three buildings of the Rhino (an acronym for "Retour des Habitants dans les Immeubles Non Occupés"). The Rhino was one of the most famous and lasting squats in Geneva. From November 1988 to July 2007, it hosted dozens of people in need of shelter - the occupation was at the time one of the ways to alleviate the crisis that was affecting the city: in addition to the low number of available housing units, many buildings were left empty by owners who were speculating on real estate prices. But the occupation also had other effects. It made possible the expression and formation of a culture that was not or hardly relayed in official places. In the 1990s and 2000s, a significant part of Geneva's cultural life found refuge in its squats: at the Rhino, in the group of buildings of Îlot 13, at Artamis (which housed a theater, a club and several concert halls), at the Arquebuse (known for its parties and exhibitions), at the Garage (founded by a very active theater collective), at the Goulet (one of the places where the hip-hop scene emerged in French-speaking Switzerland), etc, not to mention l'Usine, a major rock venue in Geneva, which was not a squat but a self-managed center by a group of associations that had renovated and fitted out a place that the city had merely made available to them (a former gold-mining factory on the banks of the Rhone), and which today houses concert halls, a theater, a cinema, a radio station, workshops, etc.

The cellar at 12 Boulevard de la Tour became a concert hall almost immediately after the occupation. Denis Rollet (who would become a musician and sound artist), joined a few months later by Marie Jeanson (who today co-directs the Archipel festival), were the main initiators. For ten years, they programmed concerts of free improvisation*, free jazz, noise rock and indie folk (Borbetomagus, Nezh Dali, Shirley Hofmann, Joëlle Léandre, Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Krakhouse, Volapük, Ned Rothenberg, Fat, Nimal, Third Person, Dorothea Schürch, Phil Minton, Joane Hetu, eRikm, Otomo Yoshihide, etc.), organized balls and support parties, recorded two records and gradually built up the space. Born in clandestinity, the Cave 12 quickly became one of the most important places for experimental music in Europe. Its economy was based on voluntary work and the constant help of the inhabitants of the Rhino. The musicians were housed and fed on the spot, the money for the fees came from the concerts and the income from the bar. It was not until 1992, when the Solo festival was created, that they asked the City for the first time. A grant was given to them, which was renewed in the following years. In 1997, the Cave 12 became dormant.

Its second life began when, on January 29, 2001, Fernando Sixto, looking for a place (and a sound system) to program the composer and sound artist Franciso Lopez, resurrected the Rhino's cellars. He became the programmer until July 23, 2007, the day the squat was evacuated by the state police. In the meantime, in duo with Marion Innocenzi, the Cave 12 hosted a little over 300 concerts that explored all the corners of sound experimentation: from free improvisation to the Japanese, from the emerging Australian scene to the French-speaking bruitism, from the electronic harshness to the revival of the American psychedelic rock, the programming was at the same time open and specific, attentive to the current researches from where they come as much as to the radicality and the coherence of the proposals, In other words, six years of discoveries and amazement that ended in July 2007, when Daniel Zapelli, the Attorney General of the State of Geneva, ordered the evacuation of the Rhino a few days after having ordered the evacuation of the Tour.(Chronicles).

A paradoxical situation, to say the least, insofar as, by evacuating the Rhino, the State put a de facto end to the activities of a concert hall subsidized by the City since 2003 (to the tune of 60,000 Swiss francs per year, i.e. much more than between 1992 and 1997). A paradox, and a hypocrisy, which will become glaring when, two years later, the State will decide in its turn to help a Cave 12 that has become homeless. The opposition between those who defend the law (the one that protects the owners) and those who defend the places of culture that transgress it is insoluble as long as one does not admit an obvious fact: that these places of culture were only possible (notably in their economy) because there were squats; that there is a culture of squats which, although illegal, enriches the life of the inhabitants of the cities concerned; that it is therefore sometimes necessary to choose between legal life and cultural life. What Geneva, taking advantage of its institutional bicephalousness, State on one side and City on the other, has apparently refused to do.


The third life of the Cave 12, between 2007 and 2013, was thus nomadic and peregrinating. Without losing its rhythm of a hundred or so concerts a year, it moved from the Usine to the Écurie (in Îlot 13), from the Grütli to the Étage, from the AMR to the KAB, the hospitality of the places showing, if it were necessary, that the culture born in the squats could find refuge elsewhere and spread its adventurous programming in almost all the districts of the city. Far from stifling it, the evacuation contributed in a certain way to multiplying it - as the messages from all over the world in support of Cave 12 testified in the days that followed.

The fourth life of Cave 12, which lasts until today, began on November 21, 2013 with the inauguration of a new venue at 4 rue de la Prairie. The result of a long and winding negotiation with (and between) the State (which lent the space) and the City (which financed the work), Cave 12 / Prairie is one of the very few venues to have been thought of and built to host experimental music concerts: the dimensions, the conception of the space (kitchen-office-lodge on one side, room-bar-lounge on the other), the acoustics (very matte so as to avoid reverberations as much as possible), the sound-system (six subwoofers and eight King&Freitag loudspeakers, an analogical Midas Venice F-32 mixing desk), etc., Everything was conceived in the perspective of a possible extreme music, whose reference was, from the beginning of the project, the one of the Polish musician and composer Zbigniew Karkowski, a regular of the first Cave (and known for testing the limits of the sound systems on which he played). He died one month after the opening of the Cave, but unfortunately never had the chance to play there.

Fernando Sixto has always programmed the concerts of the Cave 12 from the proposals he received. For the past few years, he has been receiving an average of thirty proposals per day, of which fifteen are acceptable. So he has to listen and choose, which he has been doing every day for the last 22 years. I asked him if he could make a list of the successive styles that have dominated research music since the late 1990s. It's not so much a question of styles, he replied, as of geographical zones: the evolution of sound arts is a matter of territories and more precisely of environments. What threshold of saturation must a milieu of practices reach for new music to emerge? A cycle lasts on average five years. Between the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, there was the Japanese scene; then the Australian scene; then the American psychedelic rock renaissance; then the English neo-punk and post-techno scene; then Norwegian noise rock; now there is the African scene, of which the Ugandan Nyege Nyege festival is one of the emblems - Ugandan musician Ocen James will be in concert at the Cave 12 on May 31 in a duo with Rian Trenor. 

I asked him about his most vivid memories: his first concert at Cave 12 with Francisco Lopez, which almost went wrong, four out of eight speakers failed during the sound check and a fifth during the concert, but by all accounts it was one of the most beautiful; the musical performances of Zbigniew Karkowski, the first person to make him experience the physicality of sound; a 2016 concert by Kevin Drum in which he pushed the bass cabinets to the vibratory point where the membrane began to beat against the speaker structure; Jessica Moss 's violin performance augmented by a carpet of effects pedals one evening in November 2021; the ever-new proposals of Australian musicians Will Guthrie and Anthony Pateras; a concert by Iranian musician Sote in November 2022, who, rather than perform the scheduled set, projected a selection of his recordings of demonstrations in Tehran in total darkness.

Cave12_Jessica_Moss_7November2021_long from Association So Close on Vimeo.

A concert comes to mind. The one of the Japanese saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe on October 20th 2004. The program on the Cave 12 website says that he was playing that night with guitarist Rinji Fukuoka, but I only remember him. "This saxophonist crawling, dunces from the BRUT" writes Fernando Sixto on the page of the concert. He didn't play, in fact, he crawled, his saxophone scraped the concrete floor, what came out was a rattle, an agony, and at the same time a scraping, the friction of a breath so dense that it seemed to scrape the brass. His presence was no less strange, a wavering, involuted body, on the verge of blackness or disappearance and yet so solid and consistent that it seemed to be made of stone. And it moved, it advanced, parallel to the ground, in the manner of an insect, indeed, carapace of sounds, hard, mobile, breath and metal. It did not play, it was the music made body, crumbly and dense, entirely concentrated in this movement of reptation and entirely in our bodies to the listening, stunned as much as stunned, seeing-hearing the so little probable and the very real.

Nineteen years have passed. This Wednesday, April 12, 2023 is a concert day. Beyond the two double doors that hermetically isolate the room from the outside, Cave 12 is already rustling with the conversations and music of the record players. To the right, a space lined with tables and chairs where one can drink and chat to the sounds of two loudspeakers branded with the music of Zbigniew Karkowski, memories of the first Cave 12. Still in working order (relatively speaking), they broadcast the music of the turntables. Between this space and the bar, a table where cassettes, vinyls, magazines and books are piled up. A few treasures emerge, like this double vinyl of Mika Vaino, recording of his last concert at the Cave, on April 12th 2007, two months before his death.

To access the room itself, you have to pass the velvet curtain with its bangs worn by time and bodies, another memory. People come and go. Instruments are waiting for the musicians. A carpet has been laid out in front of the stage, behind some chairs in arcs. On the program, The Dwarfs of East Agouza, an Egyptian-American-Canadian trio born in Cairo, preceded by Hassan Wargui, banjo player and Amazigh singer from southern Morocco. Hassan Wargui is a brilliant representative of Berber music from the Anti-Atlas, but the highlight of the evening was undoubtedly the performance of the three Dwarfs. Rarely have I witnessed a concert so free and so unpredictable. Started under the auspices of the most consistent noise -Alan Bishop 's feedback approaching-removing his guitar from the amp, Sam Shalabi's saturated riffs, Maurice Louca 's beats drawing from the infra-bass - it quickly took a shaabi turn, moving seamlessly from noisiness to Egyptian folk music, as if the Cave 12 listeners needed this sound lock to access Agouza's delights. What followed was no less exploratory, the shaabi was disseminated in unbridled free, which led us to the blues (Alan Bishop), the blues to the declamatory spoken word (always Alan), leading to the psychedelic rock of Sam Shalabi, which, after a suspended time, left its place to the rhythmic Arabian layers and often abrasive but always hypnotic Maurice Louca, and so on for more than an hour of a sound art to the paths that do not cease to fork.

Thirty-five years after its first steps, Cave 12 is now safe, at least for a few more years. The city's subsidy has just increased and the state should soon be back in the game after a long absence. Every year, one of the previous year's concerts is released on vinyl on the Cave's label, which is managed by Marion Innocenzi - my favorite is the vlan_voilà by Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang released in 2017. Coming up this Sunday, April 23, Carl Stone, American pioneer of live laptop and master of computer sampling preceded by the English turntablist Niknak on turntables and electronics, but I want to finish by quoting the presentation offered by Fernando Sixto, whose words received every week have never ceased to delight his readers, even (and especially) when they were far from Geneva: OVER THE TOP ELECTRONICS QUESTS SOUNDS IRREDUCTIBLE FIGURES: FROM RADICAL INNOVATION BOUNDARIES PUSHING INCREDIBLE WIIIIDE MUSICAL POLYMATH TURNTABILIST TO ABSOLUTE HISTORIC CULT KING OF SAMPLING & LIVE COMPUTER MUSIC PIONEER HERO 70TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR.

Bastien Gallet

Discover the videos of the Cave 12.

* One film was decisive in the history of Cave 12, Step Across the Border by Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel (1990), a documentary devoted to the English musician Fred Frith, a major figure in free improvisation and avant-rock. For Marie Jeanson, Denis Rollet, Marion Innocenzi and Fernando Sixto, the viewing of this film was a revelation. 

Posters © Harrison Vermot, Denis Rollet, Xavier Robel
Photos © Marion Innocenzi, Serges Frühauf, Vania Aillon 

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