Oscillation
Public Address

Dear readers,

As we're writing this, the post-Oscillation blues still hang gently over a sunny Q-O2 office. What a glorious edition it has been; all the performances, walks, talks, workshops and countless encounters feel like one long-stretched hazy highlight, impossible to pick just one or two.

It seems the appropriate time to do a big round of thank-yous: hence, thanks to all the location part­ners and people involved (Decoratelier! Atoma! Zonneklopper!) who helped to make this pos­si­ble, to all the artists who in one way or anoth­er pro­vid­ed works and per­for­mances, to our radio partners, to the volunteers, and as last, but not least, to all of you who joined us in this grand four day celebration. In the coming weeks we will post some of the recordings made throughout the festival our Soundcloud, and, some of the festival specials are still available on our website.

Hoping to see you next year,

The Oscillation Crew

Dearest oscillators,

Today already marks the grand finale of our annual celebration. Still high-spirited after yesterday's performances, talks, walks and wonky dance moves, we're down at the amazing Zonneklopper and Abbaye de Forest sites for another day, with performances, talks and a label market. Tickets are still available at the door, and like the past few days, all acts are live relayed on our website.

You have another chance today to experience David Helbich's Figures of Walking at the Abbaye De Forest today. His score of chalk on grass in up to three tracks for any number of people is a social choreography, with figures and patterns inspired by concepts of institutionally and intuitively organized walking in groups, such as in dance or military drill. The individual and collective behavior of the self-performing participants sheds light on empowerment within such given structures. It opens at 14:00, and we can highly recommend you to perform it yourself, after doing that ourselves multiple times yesterday.

Lia Mazzari will perform Whipping Music at 16:00, on the same site. She hosted a workshop prior to the festival, teaching participants to swing and crack whips as an investigatory sonic mapping device to activate the architectures and sites around us. For this performance, the participants will perform their sonic choregraphy of whip cracks.

They are followed by BMB con., who developed a new site-specific performance for the Oscillation festival. For the last 30-odd years, they have been performing a balancing act between music and noise, sound and vision, indoors and out, digital and analogue, performer and audience.

At 17:00, we're opening the doors of Zonneklopper again, where food will be available. Perfectly fitting for a Sunday, we're hosting a record fair and bookshop by our favourite local independent labels (KRAAK, Ediçoes CN, Futura Resistenza, Lexi Disques, ...) and the nomadic bookshop Underbelly.

Half an our later, one of this week's central collectives, RYBN, will be summarising their experiences of the past week, realising the Offshore Tour Operator in Brussels, a psycho-geographic GPS prototype that guides you through the 800,000 addresses of the ICIJ's Offshore Leaks database. They hosted walks that bring the participants to search for the physical traces of offshore banking within the architecture of various neighborhoods of the city of Brussels.

At 18:00, Leandro Pisano hosts a talk about The Manifesto of Rural Futurism, an invitation to experience rural locations as spaces in which to question our approach to history and landscape. In this text, written in 2019 by Leandro Pisano and Beatrice Ferrara, listening practices are deployed as ways to critically traverse the 'border territories' of rural space, challenging persisting notions about 'inescapable marginality', 'residuality' and 'peripherality'.

He is followed by Fausto Cáceres (Shirley & Spinoza), with a remote performance live from New Zealand. He performs Street Cries & the Wandering Songs, a lyrical collage of the texture and life that traversed the little cobblestone intersection beneath his studio window in Dali, China. The melodic cries of peddlers, recyclers and spontaneous scenes were captured between 2006 and 2020, primarily with a stereo microphone suspended above the street or with binaural mics in other locations.

At 19:00, Jasmine Guffond takes the stage. She is an artist and composer working at the interface of social, political and technical infrastructures. Focused on electronic composition across music and art contexts her practice spans live performance, recording, installation and custom made browser add-on. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential of sound to engage with contemporary political questions and engages listening as a situated knowledge practice.

She will perform Listening to Listening to Listening, an installative performance whereby she performs cut ups, random loopings and pitch manipulations of field recordings made by Margherita Brillada in and around the Zonneklopper building. Transmitted via transducers attached to specific points within Zonneklopper’s Salle Mouvement, sound’s potential as a vibrational force is activated to resonate the materiality of the room itself. What could it mean to listen collectively yet non-equivalently as the audience is invited to listen not only to the building but to Jasmine listening to Margherita. Could listening to listening be a technique for the appreciation of difference?

The festival's closer is Aymeric de Tapol who wrote this about his performance (read aloud in your head): 'This music is based on the listening of a cluster composed by written sequences for analogue synthesizer. It is the first time that the music seems to me to be the phenomenon itself, meaning that it is more at the centre of its history and is always questionable. In short, it is the observation of a repetition of moving sounds: the polyrhythm.'

We don't like mondays,

The Oscillation Crew

Dear addressed public,

We are still searching for our sense of time and space after last night's tour de force at Atoma ::: please, don't ever take us off this heavenly cloud. Today we are down to two new venues: the Abbaye de Forest and Zonneklopper in Forest. We provided an—open air—afternoon program, so don't hesitate to arrive early.

At 14:00, David Helbich's Figures of Walking installation opens at the Abbaye De Forest. His score of chalk on grass in up to three tracks for any number of people is a social choreography, with figures and patterns inspired by concepts of institutionally and intuitively organized walking in groups, such as in dance or military drill. The individual and collective behavior of the self-performing participants sheds light on empowerment within such given structures.

Alisa Oleva is hosting the last of her amazing walks today, starting at Zonneklopper at 15:00. If no one has told you about it until now: we guarantee you, this is an experience that will stay with you for a long time.

Amber Meulenijzer and Pak Yan Lau will collaborate to create a composition and live performance tailored to the grandiose SAAB SCULPTURES soundsystem, carried by a Saab 900 car that is placed in different contexts—questioning, transforming and pimping public/private space. Their performance starts at 16:00, also at the Abbaye De Forest.

They are followed by De zwarte zusters, who will make a —presumably— wild improvisation on sound, image and the narrative of De zwarte zusters as a community. During their performance, they explore in  the tension between the musical and the visual performative aspect, in which the search for collective values, friendship and trust are central. Playing football, running in circles around the audience, ... anything can really happen.

At 17:30, we're opening the doors of Zonneklopper, where food will also be available. Half an our later we're hosting a round table with  Alisa Oleva, Bill Dietz, RYBN and David Helbich, moderated by Elena Biserna. The round table is an occasion to discuss together about formats and apparatuses that destabilize traditional relationships between artist and audience through movement, walks, itineraries, and collective or private spatial explorations.

After a short break, Céline Gillain will talk about how listening to music is conditioned by context, based on her own experience as a performer. Performing in a music festival, an art institution, a concert hall or a club are very different experiences, with different conditions, sets of rules and expectations—she's interested in questioning the cleavage this creates between audiences and how it is rooted in issues related to class, sex and race.

The first musical performance of the night is an improvised concert by Peter Kutin and accordeonist Stan Maris at 20:30. The sound of the latter will be implemented and counterbalanced by Kutin’s Light-to-Noise Feedback Systems—sound and light will cast shadows.

Next up is Mariam Rezaei. Using two turntables, she improvises with vocal and instrumental samples in an improvisation bridging her Iranian and English heritage. Timbres moves between reductionism, noise, free jazz and absurdism with hints of opera and hiphop.

At 22:15 Thomas Ankersmit takes the stage. He uses PA systems and his Serge Modular analog synthesizer to activate real, physical spaces and bodies with sound, or rather to suggest imaginary spaces, often in contrast to each other. Inspired by the work of e.g. Maryanne Amacher and Dick Raaijmakers, he explores the potential of resonant frequencies and oto-acoustic emissions to 'hack' simple stereo PA systems for a more physical, three-dimensional way of listening. 

The icing on the cake for this night is the infamous DJ Marcelle. 'Well known for her three-turntable setup, DJ Marcelle makes compositions out of songs and symphonies out of mixes — colliding disparate genres, appropriated vocal snippets and warped soundscapes into a giant Frankenstein-like melting pot.' - RA. We don't have anything to add to that.

Dear Q-O2 aficionados,

Still dreaming about last night's dazzling performances under Decoratelier's mesmerizing night sky, it's already time to look ahead ::: we're going to Atoma tonight. As per last night, doors open at 18:00, and the first act starts at 19:00 - tickets are still available at the door. For those unable to make it tonight: all acts are live relayed on our website, and surely don't hesitate to get in touch with other listeners via the chat.

The first performance is a site-specific action by Collective Actions Group that combines video and typescript documentation made in the Depot station on the Savelovskaya line in January 1990, originally made for an unrealised installation by the grandfather of Russian performance art, Andrei Monastyrsky. For Oscillation, this video, as well as other typescript documentation from the series Trips Out of Town, serve as a setting for a reading choreography to be realised in collaboration with the event's organisers. Performed by Sabine Hänsgen, Elena Biserna and Henry Andersen.

At 19:30, Bill Dietz will test our festival sound system by giving a lecture performance My Ears, The Police at and about the legal limits of sound: 'If listening could play a role in rethinking the public sphere, its mediations, complicities, and normalizing mechanisms would first need to be better articulated. To that end, the legal, infrastructural, and conceptual limits of listening, both those local to Brussels and to the zombie remnants of 'modern listening' as such, are amplified into audibility.'

Next up are Ryoko Akama & Anne-F Jacques. Filaments warming up, the slow deformation of materials, thermostats as controllers. In this performance, Akama and Jacques explore heat as an active force at work around us. Through sound, light, and barely perceptible movement, temperature becomes a noticeable presence in the performance.

Matana Roberts is taking the stage at 21:15. Roberts is an internationally renowned composer, band leader, saxophonist, sound experimentalist and mixed-media practitioner, best known for her acclaimed Coin Coin project, a multi-chapter work of 'panoramic sound quilting'.

Next up is Marta De Pascalis, an Italian musician and sound-designer based in Berlin. Her solo works employ analogue synthesis and a tape-loop system, which is used to create patterns of repetition that shape a sense of a dense, dynamic and cathartic distance. Her sound touches a wide range of electronic music genres, including ambient, Berlin school first excursions, psychedelic, and tape music.

This night's closer is the Open Mic Night, that will presumably take the form of a collective stroll down Expectation Avenue, guided from one performance to the next by the assumptions of Francesca Hawker, who will hopefully have some prior knowledge about what will occur. Probably, the event will last for about an hour (excluding breaks) and 5 performers will have 5 minutes each to deliver a well-adjusted and surprising offering to the audience.

It's friday, I'm in love,

The Oscillation Crew

Dear oscillators,

Tonight marks the grand opening of the Oscillation ::: Public Address Festival at the wonderful Decoratelier in Molenbeek. Doors open at 18:00, and we take away your logistics sorrows about when and where to eat tonight, since food will also be available. The first act starts at 19:00, and there are still tickets left at the door.

The first act, that is a listening sessions of The Soundscape Speaks - Soundwalking Revisited (2021) by Hildegard Westerkamp, a German Canadian composer, educator and radio artist whose work since the mid-seventies has centre around environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Note: this is a listening session; Hildegaard Westerkamp will not be physically present at the festival.

The listening session is followed by the talk Sound Walking As A Feminist by independent art historian and curator Elena Biserna. The talk focuses on feminist practices and approaches in soundwalking. And she aims to put in dialogue (and to promote) an array of approaches that engender other narratives of walking, soundwalking and public space, that challenge the assignation of certain bodies to certain spaces and thus become 'world-making' – they envision other spaces, 'spaces where things could unfold otherwise' (Leslie Kern).

At 20:15, Enrico Malatesta & Attila Faravelli will perform Caveja, an open project investigating the possible role of ancient/rural technology in the construction of a contemporary aural awareness. The work appropriates elements of folklore and rural Romagna rituality in order to produce multiple artistic outputs that deal with music and performative arts.

Next up is Kate Carr, who focus on building a soundscape from objects found in public space, combined with field recordings of the streetscape. She has been investigating the intersections between sound, place, and emotionality; her work centres on articulating our relationships with each other and the spaces we move through using sound.

We end the night with Lázara Rosell Albear, who will perform Unsurrounded, a project that started as a solo performance in which sound, movement, visuals and words collide. Each presentation draws on new inputs and new interactions that can extent to collaborations with other performers, musicians, artists and all kind of spaces and individuals (animals included).

Forever's gonna start tonight,

The Oscillation Crew

Dear connoisseur of the good things in life,

For a festival that is taking place in some of Brussel's most exciting collectively-run spaces, meanwhile exploring alternative formats for sound in (the surrounding) public space, a bulletin on the (public) spaces and how we will activate them can't be missing.

On Thursday, the ever-inspring Decoratelier will be our host. Located in an old factory building in Molenbeek, it is the base for various projects and artistic collaborations and an accessible workplace for artists from various disciplines. Space is tested, conversations take place in wood, iron and cardboard. It is a permanent place within the constructional quest for constantly changing spaces in which art, thought and artisans meet.

Friday, we will settle at ATOMA in Forest, a collectively-run space with workshops (wood, metal, music, sound, visual, photography, screen printing, brewery, bakery, chocolate...) and a living space. Like any collectively-run space, ATOMA looks for methods for collaborative organisation, fluid and sincere, on how to be together and how to talk to each other. Atoma is also a public space; during its events—which range from concerts to screenings to events linked to the workshops of the space—the fragile notion of experience and experiment with others emerges.

The last two days are taking place at Zonneklopper, a collective project formed around a temporary occupation in Forest where people experiment and shape new forms of self-organisation for activism, art, culture, and society. It can be seen as a varied and diverse village where public events such as concerts, performances and exhibitions are regularly hosted, artist’s ateliers are provided, and working spaces are shared, together with housing and accommodation for migrants in transit. Zonneklopper is self-managed and all the resources are shared and mutualised in a collective perspective.

On Saturday and Sunday afternoon, 3 open air performances per day will take place in the public spaces surrounding the Abbaye De Forest: Amber Meulenijzer and Pak Yan Lau will create a composition and live performance tailored to the infamous SAAB sound system, De zwarte zusters will create an improvisation on sound, image and their troupe as a community, Lia Mazzari will perform Whipping Music with the participants of her workshop, BMB con. is developing a new site-specific performance and David Helbich is setting up his Figures of Walking Together installation.

An artist very worth highlighting in the context of public listening is Alisa Oleva. She has a highly unique practice which tries to rethink walking practice within a contemporary, globalised world. There is an intimacy and a precision in Oleva’s work that sets it apart from many other walking practices. Growing up as a teenager in post-soviet Moscow, she took part in a nascent subculture of urban exploration (“urbex”) that blossomed up in the city’s newly deregulated urban sphere. Later, living in London, she connected these formative experiences with traditions of sound walking and psychogeography. Many of Oleva’s woks try to connect walkers in different cities via phone lines, drawing on communities of hers in Kiev, Moscow, London, Istanbul.

For Oscillation, don't miss the rare occasion to join of the 3 walks she is guiding: one on the experiencing of Brussels' (sound) environement, one that focusses on the collective act of listening and that questions individual listening.

T-t-t-t-tommorow is only one night away,

The Oscillation Crew

Tune in, drop out!

Oscillation ::: Festival wouldn’t be Oscillation ::: Festival if there weren’t some radio waves involved; hence, a bulletin dedicated to all things radio, to get you prepared at the start of the festival (that is, only in three days!). Be sure to grab your tickets and reserve for the workshops and walks in time.

Get in the mood for our four day celebration: listen to festival previews on Klara's Late Night Shift (the Oscillation part starts at 1h 22’) by Bart Vanhoudt and Gerrit Valckenaers, Kiosk Radio by Caroline Profanter and Margherita Brillada and Cashmere Radio (Tuesday, 15:00 Brussels time) / We Are Various (Wednesday, 17:00 Brussels time) by Margherita Brillada.

During the festival, all of the acts are live relayed via the festival website. Our radio partners Listening Arts channel, radio P-node and Shirley & Spinoza are also broadcasting parts of the program. The acts that are streamed are indicated with the red dot on the festival website. The first act starts Thursday, 19:00 Brussels time.

We also like to highlight RYBN as a very special addition to this year’s festival. We came across the practice of RYBN while researching contemporary sound-walking as part of an upcoming book in collaboration with Elena Biserna. The collective has been operating in Paris since 1999 in a wide variety of formats and guises, drawing on computer programming, activism and experimental art. There is a forensic precision to their work, paired with an expansive attitude to research and presentation, drawing parallels and comparisons across various systems and technologies that shape the world we live in.

For their contribution to Oscillation ::: Public Address, RYBN proposed to stroll through the murky world of international finance. The Offshore Tour Operator is a Situationist Dérive charting the opaque territories of Offshore Finance. The project starts out with the Paradise Papers, a 2017 leak of some 13.4 million documents detailing international tax evasion. This evasion was made possible by a vast network of so called “shell companies”, which use physical addresses all across the world to move money in and our of tax jurisdictions. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, RYBN will lead a performative hunt for shell companies, trust firms, domiciliation agencies, and shadow finance offices—in short, the physical infrastructure of international tax evasion, reshaping the city by virtue of its shadow finance. The walks make use of specially designed players built by the collective to capture and document these addresses.

This is a rare and intimate occasion to encounter the work of RYBN, so don’t wait too long to sign up for a walk and discussion on Friday, Saturday or Sunday, followed by a collective discussion in various locations around Brussels.

Lastly, Den Haag-based sound artist and electroacoustic music composer Margherita Brillada will kick off the workshop program with her Radiophonix workshop, in which we dive deep into radio art, broadcasting technologies and discuss our own radiophonic pieces. Be sure to subscribe for this and the other workshops in time.

Hoping to meeting you later this week,

The Oscillation Crew

Dearest readers,

Welcome to the second episode of our Oscillation ::: Public Address bulletin. In this communiqué, we’d like to highlight our extensive program of workshops and walks; be sure to subscribe for them in time, since places are limited!

On Tuesday, April 26, Den Haag-based sound artist and electroacoustic music composer Margherita Brillada will kick off the workshop program with her Radiophonix workshop, in which we dive deep into radio art, broadcasting technologies and discuss our own radiophonic pieces.

The day after, the infamous RYBN collective arrive at our place and start a two-day open lab, where they will plot, trouble-shoot and discuss their walks focussing on The Offshore Tour Operator. Public visits in the open lab are welcome with appointment, by e-mailing to info@rybn.org. Friday, saturday and sunday walks organized by RYBN bring the participants to search for the physical traces of offshore banking within the architecture of various neighborhoods of the city of Brussels. On sunday afternoon, the collective will summarise their experiences of the past week, realising the Offshore Tour Operator in Brussels.

Also on the program April 27: a Whip Cracking workshop by Lia Mazzari, teaching participants to swing and crack whips as an investigatory sonic mapping device to activate the architectures and sites around us. Later that day, Elena Biserna's workshop aims to be a platform to reflect together on gendered (listening) experiences in public space and to unlearn some of the behaviours that are assumed as appropriate, safe or expected when we walk.

Furthermore, Alisa Oleva will host no less than 3 sessions: a walkshop about the sound of a city, a collective walk following a shared score and a more individual workshop, discussing the sounds somebody in Ukraine is hearing the present day. Attila Faravelli offers a presentation and a practical exploration of the Aural Tools on friday, which consist in a series of objects designed to produce and broadcast sound in ways that traditional recorded media (LPs, CDs, digital) cannot. On sunday, Jérôme Giller proposes to survey the bottom of Vorst/Forest by connecting blocks of habitation that allow us to understand the historical, sociological and economic evolution of of the industrial area, distributed around the railway line 124 which connects Brussels to Charleroi.

And lastly: Caroline Profanter and Margherita Brillada previewed the festival this week on Kiosk Radio: get hyped!

Kind regards,

The Oscillation Crew

Dear all,

Right now, you are reading the very first sentence of this year's series of Oscillation Bulletins. The next three weeks, many more will follow, and will keep you regularly updated about our Oscillation ::: Public Address Festival.

The website and full festival program are online now, available in English, Nederlands and français. The posting of this bulletin also marks the official start of the ticket sales, both for the workshops as for the festival. Be sure to take your time to discover our new website, the designers and web developers at OSP made us feel rather proud about it.

After two years of remote festival versions, it's about time to meet each other again; the concerts, sound walks, talks and workshops will all be spread throughout Brussels. Our hosts for this year are the ever nice Decoratelier near our base in Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, and Atoma and Zonneklopper in Vorst/Forest. Fully in line with the focus of this edition, the surrounding public spaces of these locations will also be used.

So, time to dig deeply in our program and discover what artists like RYBN, Enrico Malatesta & Attila Faravelli, David Helbich, Jasmine Guffond, Kate Carr, Mariam Rezaei, Marta De Pascalis, Matana Roberts, DJ Marcelle, Thomas Ankersmit, Collective Actions Group, Pak Yan Lau & Amber Meulenijzer and many more have to offer for you. This year's workshops are held by Margherita Brillada (Radiophonix), Lia Mazzari (Whip Cracking), Elena Biserna (Feminist Steps), Alisa Oleva (A Listening Walkshop), Attila Faravelli (Aural Tools), and walks by RYBN, Alisa Oleva and Jérôme Giller.

To contribute a performance to the The Open Mic Night on Friday 29/4, please send a 1 paragraph proposal, as well as technical requirements to margherita@q-o2.be before April 22. Sets are limited to 5 minutes and should be acoustic, limited to a single microphone or able to be installed direct-to-mixer without sound check ('plug and play'). Performers will receive a ticket to the festival for Friday 29/4 and drink vouchers.

Kind regards,

The Oscillation Crew

Wherever you are in the world, this collective Listening diary is an invitation to pause, listen and note down what you hear in this precise moment of time. You can take just a moment to listen or you can choose to do it for 10 minutes, half an hour or more. You can come back any time on a different day as well. You are also welcome to come and just read what others are hearing.

Watch the full video, as a companion piece of the CAG performance on friday, here.

Exploring Balance & Focus in Acoustic Ecology

A network of listening paths presented by Hildegard Westerkamp at the International Conference of the World Forum of Acoustic Ecology in Corfu, Greece in 2011. Listen here

Acoustic Ecology is the research field created by the World Soundscape Project, an international research project founded by Murray Schafer, at the Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (CA) in the 1960s. As one of the core members of the project, Westerkamp developed her research about attention and listening awareness within soundscapes, and her educational approach through sound walks, field recording and radiophonic works, as well as her long-standing compositional practice.

In this talk she guides through the following questions: 'How can we find focus and balance in such a vast interdisciplinary intercultural field? In a field that has listening as its very core of study, and educational action, and therefore naturally touches on all aspects of life?'

21 Tracks by Jasmine Guffond in HART.