April 25–May 5 2019, Q-O2 Brussels
festival centre Q-O2
Koolmijnenkaai 30-34 Quai des Charbonnages
Oscillation is a project and festival circling around various aspects of the nature of sound, with a special curiosity about its capacity for creating and sharing space, its propensity to occupy the zones in between spaces, positions, events, discourses, etc: a betweening space. Sound travels, hops borders, passes through walls. It is endlessly participative in that we share it all the time, often unwittingly. It entangles itself in the necessarily messy gaps between us. Sound offers a framework for thinking the in-between as a space that not only needs boundaries in order to exist (what is a space without limits to define it?), but whose very presence both creates and parodies the fixities of those boundaries. A discourse of inbetween-ness cannot be fixed but is always made up of a great many tentative constructions and holdings in place.
Part of sound’s particularity is its unflinching sitedness; hearing is always hearing in place. And yet, sound inevitably permeates between spaces: between walls, between the ‘external’ room and the ‘internal’ ear, between languages, across divisions between producer and listener, artist and audience. Sound plays an increasing role in our senses and connection to others. The artists, thinkers, and practitioners that make up this festival come from a diverse range of positions, formal backgrounds, and traditions. They split across continents, generations, and languages. But in the space that opens up between these different positions, there is a common practice of thinking with and through sound. Of using sound as a tool to occupy and energise the space in between: not absence but material, not lack but medium.
The festival takes place between April 25-May 5th, across a variety of formats and locations in Brussels.
Oscillation is organised by Q-O2 workspace, co-produced by RITCS-School of Arts.
It is part of the Interfaces project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.
It is realised in cooperation with Argos, Art Brussels, Brasserie Atlas, Cinema Nova, Collectif AuQuai, Decoratelier Jozef Wouters, Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste Molenbeek, La Fonderie, La Senne, Le Lac, Recyclart, Werkplaats Walter.
Q-O2 is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Flemish Community, and the Flemish Community Commission of the Brussels Region.
Exhibition
The exhibition is presenting installations by Lucie Vítková, Alice Pamuk, Melissa Logan, Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay, and Klaas Hübner, and audio walks by Justin Bennett and Wederik De Backer. The walks start at Q-O2, where you will receive players, headphones and instructions.
Vernissage Thursday 25/4, at 18h, with interventions by ooooo and Lucie Vítková.
Opening hours: 26+27/4 16h-19h, 1/5 11h-20h, 3+4/5 14h-18h.
Finissage 5/5 18h.
→ INSTALLATIONS
→ AUDIO WALKS
• Lucie Vítková – Portraying the Cityscape
Lucie Vitková portrays parts of Brussels as well as its people. During her one month Q-O2 Interfaces residency at MAAC, she used different media to dig deeper into the surrounding neighbourhood, met lots of new people, and invited many of them to participate on the project. She created over fifty graphic scores, made with make-up such as lipstick, eye shadow, eye pencils etc., based on which people could play, dance or write poems. The video presents various interpretations. During these sessions, Vitková wrote down new techniques which grew out of the collaborations. From time to time she played these materials in the street in front of the gallery, so people passing by could listen.
Featuring: Fhun Gao, Annalena Fröhlich, Julia Reist, Paulo Dantas, Alice Pamuk, David Alonso Morillo, Raphael Malfliet, Ian Mikyska, Haruhiko Okabe, Alhadi Adam Agabeldour, Dagobert Macib, Steven Jouwersma, Signe Boe, Lucie Vítková
• Justin Bennett – Multiplicity : a spectral analysis of Brussels
This project began during a residency at Overtoon in Brussels in 2017. Justin Bennett decided to focus on the idea of acoustic territories. Right from the start the idea was to produce an audio walk, but the complexity of the city proved very distracting. He spent time going for long walks, listening through DIY acoustic filters, analysing siren sounds and making a sculpture from broken brass instruments. Q-O2 encouraged the artist and hosted his research in 2018 and 2019.
Although spectral analysis suggests a scientific approach, Multiplicity is a multiplexed wild ghost chase through the urban fabric of the capital of Europe. A mashup of field recordings, sonic experiments, observations, theoretical and utopian texts, and conflicting multi-lingual instructions guide us through territories defined by language, politics, urbanism and sound.
• Alice Pamuk – Multiples
Alice Pamuk has developed a sound installation in which short phrases of pop music are looped and broadcast in the space. The proposal arose out of several years of research around pop music (including an earlier project which involved analysing interviews with American rappers and hip hop producers). Despite this fascination for pop music, Alice Pamuk never trained as a musician and sees herself as very much outside the tradition. She uses her lack of musical literacy as a tool to provoke contact with people from other musical backgrounds – both a trained music arranger and a pop singer from The Voice Belgium. The original phrases of pop music have been filtered both through Pamuk’s own skills and interests and those of her collaborators, resulting in a different kind of material which has been displaced from its original context.
Arranger : Loïc Bodson
Singers: Amalia Avilan, Ramona Sulita, Lucie Vítková
Artistic collaborator: Marc Doutrepont
• Wederik De Backer – Angst Walk
“Molenbeek is a hellhole. One of the scariest and most dangerous places in Brussels.” These are not the words of the artist, but a paraphrase of what has been said in the international media and by the current American president. Molenbeek could be this hellhole, but is also the place where Q-O2 is located. Wederik De Backer did research into the question of what the sound of danger and fear means for people from around Molenbeek. Through co-creation and sonic research, he has created a sound walk, pinpointing the places where inhabitants fears are most prominently represented.
• Melissa E. Logan – Split Sheets by University of Craft Action Thought
The point of departure of the installation Split Sheets is a symposium entitled From Split Sheets to the Streets which took place in Brussels in the context of a residency at Q-O2 workspace. The presentations were by artists, cultural thinkers, philosophers, and share culture practitioners: Femke Snelting, ooooo, Yoni Van Den Eede, Prodromos Tsiavos, Matthias Hornschuh, Christian von Borries, with the moderator Tamar Shafrir.
Video work from the symposium, including canvas, rope, wood, is set to AI-generated copyright free music which Melissa E. Logan has made with an app built primarily for advertising and film music.
• Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay – The Return (2010)
Sound, gold leaf, megaphone, 90 seconds ∞ at irregular intervals
The cry irrupts into the periphery of your hearing, on the border of your awareness of the city’s cluttered acoustic environment. Your ears are inured to these kinds of sonic emergencies in Brussels, the City of Sirens, so it takes a while to even register the alarm that is gradually getting louder somewhere in the distance. There is something melancholic, something anachronistic about the sound, like an air raid siren from war times, a sound from your memories. But then from within the rising and falling of the siren you discern the trembling of a human voice. This emergency is coming from a throat, a boy, a changeling at the interstice of human and machine, adult and child. Just at the moment when the siren’s call reveals itself to be human, it disappears, burning itself out in a final, quivering shriek.
• Klaas Hübner – A Pipe of a Different Colour
Under the synonym of Mr Tuttle, Berlin-based sound artist Klaas Hübner spent one month working in Brussels as a repairman, offering free repairs of any kind to anyone. He collected recordings and objects from the repairs and assembled them into audio sculptures that give an insight into his endeavours.
Events
→ THURSDAY 25/4
• 18h exhibition
Exhibition opening with sonic interventions by ooooo & Lucie Vítková.
(at Q-O2)
→ FRIDAY 26/4
• 10h – 17h: Symposium Day 1
(at RITCS)
• 20h concert: on waves
Enrico Malatesta, Doron Sadja, Tomoko Sauvage, Mark Fell.
(at BRASSERIE ATLAS)
→ SATURDAY 27/4
• 10h – 17h: Symposium Day 2
(at RITCS)
• 20h concert: shifted meaning
Peter Ablinger, Lucy Railton, Andrea Neumann, Jennifer Walshe.
(at WERKPLAATS WALTER)
→ SUNDAY 28/4
•14h – 18h durational performance: dara dara
Rie Nakajima, Aki Onda, Akio Suzuki & David Toop.
(at LA SENNE / In collaboration with Art Brussels)
Entrance possible at any point during opening hours, if discreetly.
→ MONDAY 29/4
• workshop: Enrico Malatesta →
• 20h film screening: TORSE (Maryanne Amacher, Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham)
Pretalk with Bill Dietz, followed by conversation with Lars Kwakkenbos.
(at ARGOS)
→ TUESDAY 30/4
• 20h concert: music by Eliane Radigue
Occam XXVII (percussion: Enrico Malatesta)
Adnos I-II-III (diffusion: Emmanuel Holterbach)
(at DECORATELIER JOZEF WOUTERS)
→ WEDNESDAY 1/5
• workshop: Oracle →
• parcours and in-situ:
11h Isabelle Stragliati: soundwalk (start Place Lemmens, registration at info@q-o2.be)
14h-18h Thierry Madiot with Yanik Miossec: Sonic Massage (15 minute slots)
18.25h Oracle: Reading the Zone
19.30h Paulo Dantas: Conversations (at Pt de Ninove)
20.30h Anna Raimondo: Derrière la mer
(on site and at Q-O2 / food provided at Q-O2)
→ THURSDAY 2/5
• workshop: Anne-Laure Pigache →
• 20h concert and film program: light and colour:
Manuel Lima, Michael Vorfeld, Mariska de Groot, Luke Fowler. Pretalk with Luke Fowler and Guillaume Maupin.
(at CINEMA NOVA)
→ FRIDAY 3/5
• workshop: Adam Asnan →
• 20h concert: sound and poetry
Paulo Dantas, Anne-Laure Pigache & Jérôme Noetinger, Marc Matter, Guillaume Maupin (troubadour).
(at LE LAC)
→ SATURDAY 4/5
• workshop: Jonathan Frigeri →
• 11h Justin Bennett: guided soundwalk (start at Q-O2)
• 14h Isabelle Stragliati: soundwalk (start Place Lemmens, registration at info@q-o2.be)
• 20h concert: on resonance
Adam Asnan, Sofia Jernberg, Rebecca Glover, John Butcher.
(at CHURCH ST. JEAN BAPTIST)
→ SUNDAY 5/5
• 14h – 17h in-situ performance: inbetween
Franziska Windisch, Els Viaene, Jonathan Frigeri, Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima
(at LA FONDERIE)
• 18h Food by Soft Boys Heart Choir (at Q-O2)
Symposium
→ FRIDAY 26/4
10h–13h
space and perception: Lila Athanasiadou, Annette Vande Gorne, Aki Onda.
14h–17h
subliminal awareness: Xabier Erkizia, Pedro Oliveira, David Toop.
(Moderator: LEONIE PERSIJN)
→ SATURDAY 27/4
10h–13h
causing impact: Juliette Volcler, Séverine Janssen, Salomé Voegelin.
14h–17h
voice and words: Jennifer Walshe, Beatriz Ferreyra, Manfred Werder.
(Moderator: LINNEA SEMMERLING)
Location and co-production:
RITCS School of Art
Rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 70
1000 Bxl
• Lila Athanasiadou – From the Mechanism of Speech to the Mechanism of Meaning
In the introduction to his Midtown 120 Blues album, Terre Thaemlitz unpacks the embedded context from which house music emerged, arguing that it cannot be intuited from contemporary methods of the production and dissemination of the genre. After a short examination of his methodology, Lila Athenassiado will introduce the situatedness of sonic experiences as produced, perceived and consumed by bodies. Departing from Alexander Graham Bell’s spatial exploration of the vocal cavities and through Sarah Ahmed’s queering of the normative understanding of perception, Athenassiado first foregrounds the material condition of sonic situations. then introduces the figure of Helen Keller, problematizing the given-ness of perception, before concluding her talk with a discussion of Keller’s role in the development of philosophy and in the work of poets, architects and visual artists Arakawa and Gins. Through her ability to construct images without seeing and soundscapes without hearing, Keller improvised the perception and consumption of sound as an embodied way of holding the world in place.
• Annette Vande Gorne – Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media
This reflexion on techniques for electroacoustic, fixed-media composition is the tangible result of more than 25 years of experience teaching the subject at the Belgian Royal Conservatories in Liege, Brussels and finally in Mons. Just as studying the techniques of harmony, counterpoint, and fugue serves as preparation for studying classical composition in European conservatories, the techniques presented here are useful for composers embarking on more experimental paths. Born from sound recording on fixed media – disc, magnetic tape, computer memory – Pierre Schaeffer remarkably foresaw many of the implications of this new repertory. His work is the true musical revolution of the twentieth century. François Bayle defined a further repercussion with his term acousmatic music, focusing on blind listening. Other schema linked to fixed-media composition followed: the creation of objectively organised and formalised events according to their interactions was replaced by approaches for guiding listening and communicating with the realm of the imagination.
• Aki Onda – On José Maceda
José Maceda (1917–2004) was a Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist who rigorously documented South East Asian musical practice through extensive fieldwork. Drawing on this archive of primary musical material, Maceda combined Filipino musicality with a knowledge European avant-garde composition and created one-of-a-kind works that fuse cutting-edge compositional techniques such as spatialization, attention to timbre, and use of radios and cassettes for sound diffusion.
In this talk, Aki Onda will discuss Maceda’s practice, re-mapping and re-contextualizing his legacy within the current global experimental music scene.
• Xabier Erkizia – The Sound of an Ox-cart :
Aesthetics and amnesia of a thousand-year-old noise
The idea of collectivity is one of the most important conditions when carrying out any exercise in sonic archeology. Noise, always foreign by definition, tends to become sound if there is a community that wishes it, even if this desire limits the meanings that each form of sounding conveys. Therefore, all collectivity supposes a political reading of our sound environment, a revision of our political reality through the sounds, an unstable reality that changes parallel to the sociopolitical changes that surround it. The sound of bullock carts or oxcarts is probably one of the oldest non-strictly musical sounds of the history of humanity, but above all, it speaks of a long and persistent social wound.
• Pedro Oliveira – 1,977 Ways to Say “No”
In this talk, Pedro Oliveira inquires into the materiality of voice databases, their semantic and political value, and their continued existence as archives. Oliveira is interested in exploring and intervening in the deployment of what he calls “sonic biometrics” in the border and migration industries of Germany and the EU. State-sponsored campaigns often transfer biometric assessment from machines to citizens, encouraging peer-surveillance in train stations, airports, and public offices, all the way to police-enforced racial profiling and violence. These forms of racial profiling, concomitantly, are fed back into machine-learning processes which reproduce systemic biases and colonial assumptions in their decision-making processes. Such feedback loops show how sound is instrumentalised to act as a disciplinary mechanism, and how biometry is fundamentally a performative gesture, that is, how it seeks to pinpoint that which it has tasked itself with revealing. The presentation unfolds by following Oliveira’s current research project on “accent recognition technologies” as its main narrative thread.
• David Toop – Instruments of Darkness : A performance in which speaking may take place
David Toop’s improvised performances grow from curiosity about resonance: how to let the soft invisible characteristics of a space and its harder boundaries resonate; how to let materials of all kinds resonate; how to let time resonate, so that durations and our sense of quick or slow are in a state of complex vibration; how to let memory resonate, so that the phantoms of sound and the void of silence penetrate into personal history. The materials Toop uses vary, some of them conventional musical instruments, some electronic, some acoustic, some autonomous, some abject or without any boundaries. All of them ask questions of what an instrument actually is, a conglomerate whose pieces only come together in the darkness of deflected sight.
• Juliette Volcler – Sonic fences in public spaces
Sonic space is under construction. On this building site, there are no bulldozer alarms to be heard, and no pneumatic drills, but there are carefully worked silences, voices and sounds. There are no workers to meet, but there are designers, academics, advertisers, weapons manufacturers and composers. An aural geography slowly emerges, which can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the targets, the areas and the time of the day. When sound is used to shape public spaces and individual behaviours: a commented selection of sounds and videos from the emerging city.
• Séverine Janssen – Brussels’ Sound
For almost two decades, BNA-BBOT has been creating a history of Brussels. A micro-history in the medium of sound, its writing is the voice. The voice as a micro-trace that cannot be reduced to keyboard strokes, to its visual presence. An undefined collection of voices and sounds surging up from times past, the BNA-BBOT sound archive forms an organic, polyphonic biography of the city. It speaks to how the city might have been, how it is, how it might someday be. This factory at work uses convictions, visions and practices. Séverine Janssen will discuss both methodological and political issues relating to the production of public sound data and will reveal a couple of processes BNA-BBOT has investigated.
• Salomé Voegelin – Unstable Contacts: a political imaginary made from water and honey
Sound is always an unstable contact. It is an insecure and unsecured connection that when heard in its sonority rather than its semantic message or lexical referent presents the in-between: the fragile space between things that do not touch but generate an indivisible volume. This volume is not a measure of decibels but the capacity of sound’s invisible expanse and the demand of its forceful reciprocity. It is not outlined and bounded by walls, ceilings, floors and windows, “this” or “that”, but is the mobile and viscous encounter between things that does not keep a shape but grasps anyone who might listen. Thus it is the condition of listening, where my sound is part of other sounds and they are part of me: where we inter-are, objects and subjects as things, creating fluid approximations, converging towards each other and dissolving again.
This intervention invites a rethinking of politics, understood as the governance of interaction and living together, from a being according to listening as a being according to the in-between: performing the capacity of the world in the fluid and grasping capacity of sound.
• Jennifer Walshe – workflow, notation
Layers in musical performance – technical and aesthetic approaches.
• Beatriz Ferreyra – Identification of sound characteristics
A short presentation of an approach to identifying the characteristics of sounds by focussing on their internal and external morphology, as a basis for electroacoustic composition.
The approach is based on the idea of a “Solfège de l’objet sonore“ by Pierre Schaeffer, that was developed within the GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales) in Paris in the 1960s.
The aim was to develop a new vocabulary to describe and classify any sound, regardless of its origin. As a member of the group from 1963-1970, Beatriz Ferreyra, has been at the core of this change of perspective. With the help of her voice, she will introduce us to some elements of this vocabulary.
• Manfred Werder – this very passage
Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature. But the human is nothing other
than this very passage from pure language to discourse; and this transition, this instant, is history.
[Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History]
Manfred Werder will read from the ongoing work 20170 – a collection of found text that surveys 2800 years of discourse.
Workshops
→ MONDAY 29/4: 13h—16h
• Enrico Malatesta : Rudimenti
Rudimenti revolves around sound and its modes of perception and production, with a focus on the relation between objects and surfaces; the workshop is aimed at sharing Malatesta’s main research interests through simple practical experients that it is useful to observe:
\ sound as a form of movement
\ prehensility
\ spaces and bodies
\ sound as autonomous zone of connection between human and non-human beings
\ simplicity vs. multiplicity
\ dry sounds / resonating sounds
\ drums as a stage
\ fluidity and fixity
The workshop is open to performers, dancers, musicians, writers, theoreticians.
Maximum of seven participants, no prior knowledge assumed
(at AU QUAI)
→ WEDNESDAY 1/5: 11h—17h
• Oracle : Reading the Zone: introduction to oracular practice + public intervention
In this workshop Oracle will introduce oracular practice, an eyes-closed body-voice practice of ‘reading’ different spaces, from public space to the intimate setting of private living spaces. This vocal architectural choreography produces a peculiar performativity which depends on auditory perception rather than a visual logic and highlights the idiosyncratic nature of listening. Each practice session is unique to the moment and environment and involves individual expression in a collective setting.
During the workshop we will visit and practice in diverse spaces and examine the influence that these distinct environments have on the practice, on the individual practitioner, on the observer and on the spaces themselves. The workshop will culminate in a public intervention open to a broader audience. We will wander during the transitory moment when day turns into night, when nature holds its breath for a moment while the city continues on at its usual pace. We will welcome the darker matters of the day, ‘reading’ the prophetic information contained in this moment. Vocalizing is an alternative, obscure and concrete way to touch the unknown and hostile.
Maximum of 15 participants, no prior knowledge assumed
(at AU QUAI)
→ THURSDAY 2/5: 11h—17h
• Anne-Laure Pigache : Speech is full of noise
This workshop is based on Anne-Laure’s work on speech and langage. Its aim is to practice the musical plasticity of speech, to practice the plasticity of the talking brain that listen to the sounds of the words formed through the mouth, to be overwhelmed by your own dyslexia, to trick yourself, to play with, mess with, and disrupt your own speech.
Maximum of 12 participants, no prior knowledge assumed
(at AU QUAI)
→ FRIDAY 3/5: 11h—17h
• Adam Asnan : Location sound recording, and the influence of Phonogeny
In this workshop, Adam will introduce some themes that are essential to his working practices, from both a conceptual and technical perspective, with the aim of assisting in developing the participant’s awareness of and proficiency in sound capture on location, and in evaluating the results. Certain subjects will be proposed, such as the notion of “phonogeny” as a parallel to “photogeny”, and the influence of this concept on one’s approach to recording and mixing, and how we might determine an aesthetic criterion for the balance between sounds or sound and space.
The workshop will include a performance activity that will place the participants in control of the recording, with a specific focus on the art of dynamic and creative mixing as a voice in itself. For this, the participants are invited to bring a single sound object, instrument or text with which to contribute.
Prior knowledge of recording is beneficial, but not necessary in this regard, having an interest in sound as a creative medium is all one might need to make the most out of this opportunity.
Maximum of 12 participants, prior knowledge welcome but not requested, bring your recording device if you have one.
(at RITCS)
→ SATURDAY 4/5: 11h—17h
• Jonathan Frigeri : Induction into dream (radio workshop)
What could radio be, other than a propagator of information? In this workshop, radio is conceived as a creative tool, a medium, by which to enter into the dream zone. Radio is the liminal space between “here” and “there” and it has the power to reach our subconscious. The exploration of the electromagnetic fields and radio phenomena has a subversive potential to destabilise certain processes of a mass-media system. In referring to Gaston Bachelard (the right to dream), Walter Benjamin, and Gregory Whitehead, the workshop will be started by an introduction, and will lead to a series of practical exercises, with an attempt to transpose those dream states into a short piece of radio.
Maximum of 10 participants, basic knowledge of sound-recording/editing/mixing required. Please bring computer and headphones, and if possible a portable recorder (otherwise provided by us).
(at AU QUAI)
Artists
Adam Asnan
is a professional location sound recordist and electroacoustic musician based in Berlin. In 2009 he acquired a master’s degree in acousmatic composition under Prof. Denis Smalley. Asnan is a dedicated advocate for location sound recording and its craft, working across different capacities, including for film and TV, live performance, and capturing natural environmental sound.
Aki Onda
was born in Japan and resides in New York. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories — works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected over the last three decades using a Walkman cassette recorder. From these sound memories he creates compositions, performances, and visual artworks.
Akio Suzuki
is a “quester after sound and space”, a pioneer of sound art. During the sixties, Suzuki’s sense of playfulness led him to undertake a series of Self-Study Events, where he exploring processes of “throwing” and “following”, with the natural world as his collaborator. This led him in the seventies to invent an echo instrument he named Analapos, followed by Conceptual Soundwork in the 80s. In recent years, Suzuki has recorded and created sound sources by using electric amplification on self-designed devices, reconstructing sounds and listening to the “factors of place”.
https://www.strasbourg.fr.emb-japan.go.jp/francais/culture/mani-f/presentation_akio_suzuki.htm
Alice Pamuk
is a visual artist based in Brussels. She has a double degree in Japanese and visual art. She typically works with sound, video, and text. Her works often unfold from research into sound and music. Recently she has worked with and on the voice, both as a tool and an object of observation.
http://www.artsplastiques.cfwb.be/index.php?id=15567
Andrea Neumann
has been a musician and composer in the field of new and experimental music since 1995. She has been involved in the formation and development of the echtzeitmusik scene in Berlin, which borders on fields like electronic music, contemporary composed music, performance, and sound art. She has co-organised the Labor Sonor series in Berlin since 2000.
https://www.discogs.com/fr/artist/243758-Andrea-Neumann
Anna Raimondo
seeks for encounters, reflecting and questioning multiple and gender perspectives within and on life. It is a journey into social diversity while creating possible areas of interaction. Her method is flexible and variable, accepting the accidental and the unforeseeable. Her process enables her to be part of the exchange and aims at making her art a meeting place.
http://annaraimondo.com/portfolio/
Anne-Laure Pigache
works on the boundaries of sound poetry, theatre and experimental music, with a particular interest in improvisation, performance, and radio. Since 2010, she has been interested in the musicality and poetry of daily speech. She builds artistic works on the basis both of forms of orality occurring in intimate and social space, and of language as a site of singularity and identity.
http://www.annelaurepigache.fr/
Annette Vande Gorne
music focuses on the sounding energies of nature, and transforms them in the studio to create an abstract, expressive, and non-anecdotal musical language. The relationship between text and music is another subject she often explores. She interprets acousmatic repertory, including her own works, on a 80-loudspeaker acousmonium.
http://www.musiques-recherches.be/fr/musiques-recherches/presentation
Beatriz Ferreyra
worked at ORTF (French National Television), and as a member of the GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicale) as part of Pierre Schaeffer’s team. She has worked a composer since 1970, and had commissions for concerts, festivals, films and TV music, theatre and video. She writes articles and gives seminars and lectures.
http://beatrizferreyra.odavia.com/
Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
is an artist, diarist and researcher. His artistic work mediates emotional encounters with musical, art historical and queer cultural material, encouraging deep listening and empathic viewing. In his work you will find bells, bouquets, ceramic vases, enchanted forests, gay elders, gold leaf, love letters, madrigals, megaphones, sex-changing flowers, sign language, and voices of birds, boy sopranos, contraltos, countertenors, and sirens, among others.
Bill Dietz
is a composer and writer. His large-scale works have been realised at locations such as Le Corbusier’s Cité radieuse in Marseille, the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, and along the entire length of Im Stavenhof in Cologne. He has published in his Tutorial Diversions series, works to be performed at home, and L’école de la claque, made up of concert pieces.
https://www.tutorialdiversions.org/
David Toop
has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970. This encompasses improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes seven acclaimed books, release of thirteen solo albums, and collaborations with a wide variety of artists.
Doron Sadja
is an artist, composer, and curator whose work explores modes of perception and the experience of sound, light, and space. Working primarily with multichannel spatialised sound – combining pristine electronics with lush romantic synthesisers, extreme frequencies, and sonic phenomena, Sadja creates hyper-emotive sonic architecture. His output spans over Wave Field Synthesis, kinetic sculptures, string orchestra works, to large-scale immersive environments.
Els Viaene
started as a sound artist with a set-up of two small microphones, listening, zooming into and enlarging the surrounding the aural landscape with its hidden natural rhythms and textures. Her compositions and installations allow the listener to travel through imaginary environments, creating new spaces which emphasise or wipe out the physical borders of the space they are in.
http://www.aurallandscape.net/index.php?current
Enrico Malatesta
is a percussionist interested in experimental research on music, performance and pedagogy. He explores the relation between sound, space and movement, with attention to the multi-material possibilities of percussion instruments. This research places a strong emphasis on the material’s potential to produce a multiplicity of information through simple actions, the motion and experience of listening, and the sustainability of the presence of the performer.
Franziska Windisch
his work moves between performance, text, composition and installation. She composes scores for performative acts which interrogate notions of trace, medium, sound and listening, and which she then incorporates in linguistic, sculptural and installative arrangements. Situations that illustrate transformative processes and have unforeseen or irreversible results are key to her artistic practice.
http://www.franziskawindisch.com/
Guillaume Maupin
is a Brussels-based singer, guitarist, filmmaker and curator at Cinema Nova. He is known for his project Human Jukebox, and sings with the a capella trio Tartine de Clous.
https://folkinapleasantmood.bandcamp.com/
Isabelle Stragliati
is a sound and radio artist, composer and DJ. Having practiced meditation for eighteen years, she likes to bring together her sound and meditation practices through reflections on mind, sound perception, and ways to listen to the environment. Her productions and live performances involve field recording, documentary, radio drama, electroacoustic music and techno.
Jennifer Walshe
is a composer and vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. She has developed projects such as Grúpat, which assumed twelve different alter egos, and created compositions, installations, graphic scores, films, photography, sculptures and fashion under these alter egos. Her most recent project, Aisteach, is a fictional history of the musical avant-garde in Ireland.
Jérôme Noetinger
is a composer, improviser and sound artist using electroacoustic devices such as tape recorder Revox B77, analogue synthesisers, mixing desks, speakers, microphones. He works with music, dance, film and painting, and performs both solo and in ensembles. He has been director of Metamkine and member of the editorial committee of Revue & Corrigée.
http://www.erratum.org/old/noetinger/index.html
John Butcher
has collaborated with hundreds of musicians since the early 80s. Butcher’s music ranges through improvisation, his own compositions, multitracked pieces and explorations with feedback and unusual acoustics. Recent compositions include “Penny Wands” for Futurist Intonarumori, “Good Liquor…” for the London Sinfonietta, and “Tarab Cuts”.
http://www.johnbutcher.org.uk/
Jonathan Frigeri
is a sound artist, radio producer, sound collagist and electronic musician. As sound artist he is mainly interested in revealing hidden sonic layers of reality, to open spaces of imagination. In his work for radio he incorporates the creative process, the radio device and the space between the transmitter and the receiver, thus emphasizing the space in between, between here and there.
Juliette Volcler
is an independent researcher, sound critic and curator from France. She is the author of two essays, Extremely Loud: Sound as a weapon (The New Press, 2013) and Contrôle: Comment s’inventa l’art de la manipulation sonore (La Découverte / La rue musicale, 2017). She is the co-editor of Syntone, a review dedicated to radio and sound art critique.
http://syntone.fr/author/_juliette-volcler/
Justin Bennett
works with sound and image, using drawing, video, sculpture, and a diverse array of sonic forms in his research. A recurrent theme is the experience of architecture, urban development, and (un)built space. He employs sound in order to render it audible as well as palpable: in his work, listening carefully provides a radically different way of seeing and experiencing.
https://vimeo.com/justinbennett
Klaas Hübner
is a sound sculptor, improviser and instrument maker. His work honours sound as a live medium with which to craft, shape and play in real time. He has developed a playful practice reaching from punk to minimalism, from installation-based works, to live improvisations, to theatre and dance.
Leonie Persyn
is a researcher who develops a phenomenological-philosophical approach to sound in the contemporary performing arts, claiming that sound provides the spectator with new possibilities to re-connect with the image in a more profound way. This heautonomous relation of sound and image opens up an in-between-ness where auditory imagination can arise.
Lila Athanasiadou
is a freelance writer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work misreads and appropriates artistic, academic and architectural milieus exploring feminist and queer pedagogical practices and intersections of human, non-human, machinic and territorial bodies.
https://flaxfoundation.org/people/lila-athanasiadou/
Linnea Semmerling
is a PhD candidate who explores the exhibition history of sound in visual arts institutions in Germany and the United States since the 1960s. As a curator, her research interests concern socially engaged artistic practices and the relationships between technologies, institutions and the senses.
Lucie Vítková
is a composer, improviser and performer (accordion, hichiriki, harmonica, voice and tap dance). Her compositions focus on sonification, while her improvisation practice explores characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In her recent work, she is interested in the musical legacy of Morse Code and the social-political aspects of music and art in relation to everyday life.
Lucy Railton
is a cellist, composer and curator. Her expansive and variegated interests have led to collaborations and international appearances, most recently with synthesiser pioneer Peter Zinovieff, in Everything that rises must dance with Sasha Milavic Davies, Complicite for 200 female participants, and around the repertoires of Morton Feldman and Iannis Xenakis, Catherine Lamb and Kali Malone.
Manfred Werder
composer, is wandering through the abundance. His scores feature words and sentences found in poetry, philosophy and the world. Earlier works include stück 1998, a 4000 page score whose nonrecurring and intermittent performative realization has been ongoing since December 1997. Lives in situ.
http://manfred-werder.blogspot.com/
Manuel Lima
is a performer-composer. Themes in his work often include creating irony around the notion of high culture, destabilizing the traditional concert setting, with intimate stories including confessional elements and multimedia created for site-specific performances. He has composed work for dance, theater, (live) cinema, video, television, installation, orchestra, and light.
http://www.mslima.com/myhome.cfm
Mark Fell
is an electronic musician, multidisciplinary artist and producer whose work has persistently challenged the boundaries between electronic dance music and academic computer music composition. He has fused ideas from contemporary Western philosophy and experimental cinema with emergent club music styles. Fell has composed complex dynamic works, and more recently moved into explorations of the interplay between algorithmic systems and acoustic performance, typically including choreographic and text-based elements.
Marc Matter
is an artist, researcher, and lecturer on sound and text, and member of Institut fuer Feinmotorik. He is the composer of several audio texts for radio, and a performer of electroacoustic sound poetry. He has released work on various labels, and is co-director of Cosmosmose, a festival between poetry, music and performance.
https://kraak.net/avant-guardian/marc-matter
Mariska De Groot
is intrigued by the phenomena and history of optical sound. She makes, performs and composes for comprehensive analog light-to-sound instruments and installations which explore this principle in new ways. Her work often has a reference to media inventions from the past, with which she aims to excite a multi-sensorial and phenomenological experience in light, sound, movement and space.
http://www.mariskadegroot.com/
Melissa Logan
works with performance, installation, video, painting and electronic music, layering meaning, contradiction and process, cliché and duration. Her work treats authenticity, touches on theory, shifts to artificial exaggeration, post punk urgency, avant-garde nonconformism. She is part of the collective Chicks on Speed, and has founded the University of Craft Action Thought.
Michael Vorfeld
is a musician and visual artist, plays percussion and self-designed string instruments and realises electroacoustic sound pieces. He works in the field of experimental, improvised music and sound art, realizing installations and performances with light and sound, photography and film. He collaborates with various ensembles and artists in different formats.
ooooo
is a transuniversal constellation that initiates, mediates and facilitates, curates and appropriates projects, abducing thought, reflection and praxis on relevant issues. oooo is hosted by Marthe Van Dessel, an activist and performer who creates interfaces, devices & protocols to instigate our urban and institutional hardware & software. She engages in the administrative, cultural, socio-political dimension of personal and collective identities. By triggering intersubjective alliances she confronts the ‘self & other’ with the commons, co-authorship and the redistribution into the public domain.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/OOoOO
Oracle
is a collective practice that was developed by Caroline Daish, Justine Maxelon and Michel Yang as a need to voice, to heal and to collaborate. Oracle spans the artistic field to social and educational contexts including the care sector. The members share their practice in the form of open labs, workshops, publications, presentations or as a spontaneous interventions in public space.
https://www.budakortrijk.be/en/residenties/caroline-daish-justine-maxelon-michel-yang-oracle
Paulo Dantas
is a musician, sound artist, teacher and sound technician. His interests as a researcher resulted in a deeper engagement and collaboration with other artists, doing technical phonographic work as well as organizing concerts, publishing articles, playlists and compilations. His recent artistic work is connected to improvisation and composition with field recordings and synthesisers.
Pedro Oliveira
is a researcher, sound artist, and educator working in, with, and around decolonial and sonic thinking. He is one half of the design education duo A Parede and a founding member of the Decolonising Design platform. He holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin.
Peter Ablinger
claims that sounds are not sounds. They are here to distract the intellect and to soothe the senses. Nor is hearing even ‘hearing’: hearing is that which creates me. The composer is a skeptic who understands the cultural rules and (destructive) habits enforced by tradition. So let us play further and say: sounds are here to hear, but not to be heard. That’s something else. And that hearing is here to be ceased.
Pierre Berthet
is musician, composer and sound artist. He composes and builds sculptural sound objects and installations (steel, plastic, water, vacuum cleaners, …). He presents them in exhibitions and solo or duo performances in galleries, outdoor contexts, music venues and more.
Rie Nakajima
is an artist working with installations and performances that produce sound. Her works are most often composed in direct response to unique architectural spaces using a combination of kinetic devices and found objects. She has produced Sculpture with David Toop, explores music with no genre with her project O YAMA O with Keiko Yamamoto, and works with Pierre Berthet on Dead Plants/Living Objects.
Rebecca Glover
is a multidisciplinary artist working across sound, foley, sculpture and performance. Diving inside different bodies and materials her work seeks out alternative perspectives for listening and re-engaging with the world.
Salomé Voegelin
makes sound and writes about sound to access through words and ephemeral things the indivisible sphere of a connected world. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010) and Sonic Possible Worlds (2014), and most recent book The Political Possibility of Sound. Voegelin is a Reader in Sound Arts at the London College of Communication, UAL.
http://salomevoegelin.net/public_html/salomevoegelin.net/Home.html
Séverine Janssen
studied Philosophy at the University of Liège. After having spent some time on teaching and researching, since 2009 she has been coordinating BNA-BBOT, an organization dedicated to the sonic history of Brussels. She’s interested in sound as a historical, social and political vector, but also as a spectral figure capable of founding a common world.
Sofia Jernberg
is an experimental singer, composer, improviser and performer. One of her deepest interests as a singer is to explore the “instrumental” possibilities of the voice. Her singing vocabulary includes sounds and techniques that often contradict a conventional singing style. She has dug deep into non verbal vocalizing, split tone singing, pitchless singing and distorted singing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofia_Jernberg
Thierry Madiot
is a musician and sound artist. He plays air and sound objects, and bass trombone. He questions the contemporary sound practices in all types of social situations. In addition, he creates and modifies instruments, unidentified sound objects and sound installations by intervening directly in the architectural space of reception. He is the initiator of Sound Massages and Being Listening.
Tomoko Sauvage
studied jazz piano and Indian music. When discovering the Jalatharangam, a traditional Indian instrument with water-filled porcelain bowls, she got fascinated by the simplicity of its device and sonority. Sauvage immediately started to hit China bowls with chopsticks in her kitchen. Soon her desire to immerse herself in the water engendered the idea of using an underwater microphone and led to the birth of the electro-aquatic instrument.
Wederik De Backer
is a Belgian radio maker, specializing in radio drama, satire and radio documentaries. He creates audio for radio and theatre productions. He has produced documentary features and audio plays for several radio broadcasters.
Xabier Erkizia
is a musician, sound-artist, producer and journalist from the Basque Country, working in formats such as sound installations, recordings, musical compositions, radio-art, bands, and collective improvisation. He is member of the association AUDIOLAB, and since 2000 he has directed the annual Other music festival ERTZ.
Infos
WHERE
→ Au Quai
Henegouwenkaai 23, Quai du Hainaut
1080 Bxl
→ Argos
Werfstraat 13, rue du Chantier
1000 Bxl
→ Brasserie Atlas
Vrij-Onderzoekstraat 15, rue du Libre Examen
1070 Bxl
→ Cinema Nova
3, rue d’Arenbergstraat
1000 Bxl
→ Decoratelier Jozef Wouters
24, rue de Liverpoolstraat
1080 Bxl
→ Eglise St. Jean-Baptiste
Parvis Saint-Jean-Baptistevoorplein
1080 Bxl
→ La Fonderie
27, rue Ransfortstraat
1080 Bxl
→ La Senne
Zennestraat 88, rue de la Senne
1000 Bxl
→ Le Lac
36, rue de Witte de Haelenstraat
1000 Bxl
→ Q-O2
Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, Quai des Charbonnages
1080 Bxl
→ RITCS School of Arts
70, rue Antoine Dansaertstraat
1000 Bxl
→ Werkplaats Walter
43, rue Van Lintstraat
1070 Bxl
INFO
Ticket information
6€ on 26/4, 27/4, 28/4, 29/4, 30/4, 2/5, 3/5, 4/5.
Tickets available at the door.
All other events and symposium free.
Workshops 25/20€
festival centre Q-O2
DESARTSONNANTS - SONOS//FAIRE 