→ THURSDAY 25/4• 18h exhibition and book launch
Exhibition opening with sonic interventions by ooooo & Lucie Vítková.
(at Q-O2)
• ooooo
QRBMHN
~~~.......CQ CQ CQ.....PAN PAN PAN../...**./ ooooo will arrive by boat on the Brussels Canal with a public performative interface for translocal radio telecommunicationbyPlanète Concrète, rock band, 206, . . . After the open lab session in which we grew crystals and experimented with their physical, acoustic, electric and electromagnetic properties we will be transmitting and receiving signals from the water to intra-acting frequencies. Over.
• Lucie Vítková
Portraying the Cityscape
Live performance, part of the residency project Portraying the Cityscape (see exhibition description).
→ FRIDAY 26/4• 20h concert: on waves
Enrico Malatesta, Doron Sadja, Tomoko Sauvage, Mark Fell
(at BRASSERIE ATLAS)
• Enrico Malatesta
Rudimenti
This is an open project, aimed at broadening the Enrico Malatesta’s personal research on percussion instruments and their surfaces, intended as habitable spaces able to receive the vitality of what surrounds them, to adapt and react. Rudimenticomprises multiple trajectories of research: from writing texts to the realization of scores/instructions for percussion ensembles, to the formalization of listening exercises, to the development of polyrhythms meant as the production of manifold information produced by relationships between movement, space and sound. During ths festival Rudimentiwill be presented in two different forms: a solo concert for acoustic percussion instruments and a workshop on the relation between the body and the vitality of surfaces.
• Doron Sadja
Hello From The Other Other Side (Other Other Side)
This work is the latest in a series exploring sonic phenomena and their perceptual effects. In this piece, Doron Sadja examines the idea of a sonic afterimage (or after-sound) in which a sound continues beyond its physical lifespan. Perhaps it remains for a brief moment in our auditory memory space. Perhaps it shifts and transforms into a new sonic territory completely. Or perhaps it doesn’t exist at all.
• Tomoko Sauvage
Musique Hydromantique
Over the past decade, Tomoko Sauvage has been working on a “natural synthesiser” of her own invention: waterbowls that combine water, ceramics and hydrophones (underwater microphones). Porcelain bowls, water drops, waves and bubbles as well as hydrophonic feedback and electronics are the main ingredients of her instrument, which generates sculptural and fluid timbres. Her musical experimentation is grounded in a live-performance-based practice that investigates improvisation and interaction with the environment – the acoustic space as it is affected by architecture, temperature, humidity and human presence. Through primordial elements augmented by technology and enlivened by ritualistic yet playful gestures, Sauvage’s work contemplates, tunes and connects with both the material and the immaterial in maintaining a fragile balance between chance and control.
Supported by La Pommerie/CRAFT (Limousin, France) and Aquarian Audio (USA)
• Mark Fell
Multistability#85
Fell presents the eighty-fifth version of Multistability(2010) - an ongoing series of microtemporal works, initiated in 2010 with an inaugural release on Raster-Noton. This collection of works shifted the emphasis of Fell’s practice from his earlier explorations of house music’s aesthetic vocabulary (circa 1998) to his later radical deconstructions of its rhythmic foundations, and forms a bridge to his more recent work with acoustic performers and explorations of non-European musical practices. For the pieces presented here, Fell uses a series of overly simplistic algorithmic approaches to pattern generation, which result in complex and dynamically evolving timing systems.
→ SATURDAY 27/4
• 20h concert: shifted meaning
Peter Ablinger, Lucy Railton, Andrea Neumann, Jennifer Walshe.
(at WERKPLAATS WALTER)
• Peter Ablinger
Weiss / Weisslich 7b: “Panpiece” (1999)Weiss / Weisslich 20: one or more cymbals (1992, 95) Das Wirkliche als Vorgestelltes (2012)In his ongoing series Weiss / Weisslich (“white / whitish”) Ablinger explores subtle variations in the use of Rauschen (roughly: white noise), not as a material but as a structural device and a screen against which to measure listening. For this concert, three pieces relating to white noise serve as intermezzi, occupying the gaps between the other performances.
Percussionist: Jacob Venneste
• Lucy Railton
Performance / Markings
There are no notes for this performance.
• Andrea Neumann
Solo Nr.4
In her piece Solo nr. 4, performer and public are surrounded by four loudspeakers, that project Neumann’s pre-produced inside piano sounds on four separate channels. The movements of the performer and the sound melt into a symbiotic entity, in which it is no longer clear if the movements are modulating the sound, or vice versa.
• Jennifer Walshe
Is It Cool To Try Hard Now?
Jennifer Walshe manages to devour the mess and madness of social media, the tweets, posts, junk ads, political poison, spurious stats and Reddit rants, and turn all this garbage into something truly, bleakly hilarious and poignant and very great.
Is It Cool To Try Hard Now? ends doped-up, with Walshe floating out the phrase “I will fight this/ with every fibre/ of my carbon-based being”. Is she blissed out? Or concussed? “Humans. Are. The. Next. Platform”, she sings, climbing beyond her vocal range, climbing, climbing, till her voice has become a faint scream.
-- Igor Toronyi-Lalic, The Spectator
→ SUNDAY 28/4
•14h - 18h durational performance: dara dara
Rie Nakajima, Aki Onda, Akio Suzuki & David Toop.
(at LA SENNE / In the framework of Art Brussels - Entry at all times if discreetly)
Visual and sound artists Rie Nakajima, Aki Onda, Akio Suzuki and David Toop, present a durational performance hovering in the liminal space between installation and concert. Through complex and diverse uses of objects, instruments and the performing bodies, the installation reorients the audience members' experiences of space and time.
The duration of the event is four hours. Audience members are free to quietly leave and enter at their own discretion.
→ MONDAY 29/4
• 20h film screening: TORSE (Maryanne Amacher, Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham)Preceded by a talk by Bill Dietz, followed by conversation between Bill Dietz and Lars Kwakkenbos.
(at ARGOS)
• Torse (1977)
In 1976, Maryanne Amacher created Remainder, a composition to accompany Merce Cunningham's Torse, a choreography from the same year. Charles Atlas’ two-channel dance film Torsewas produced in 1977 at the University of Washington with three 16mm cameras facilitating various simultaneous perspectives on the dancing event. This film is one of the only extant documents to have captured the entirety of an Amacher work from the period.
→ 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)
Eliane Radigue is renowned for her electronic music, in particular with the ARP Synthesizer. Her compositions are defined by micro-events due to subtle overtone shifts that dance above a seemingly static tone, with a profoundly moving result. In 2005, Radigue began composing for acoustic instruments: first Naldjorlak, her grand trio for two basset horns and cello, and now the ever-expanding Occam Oceanseries.
Enrico Malatesta presents Eliane Radigue’s Occam XXVI (2019), for two bowed cymbals and a frame drum. Emmanuel Holterbach projects the trilogy Adnos I-II-III (electronic piece, composed between 1973 and 1980).
→ WEDNESDAY 1/5
• 11h—22h in situ:
• 11h Isabelle Stragliati: Meditation/Sound/City: a soundwalk
(start at Place Lemmens, 1080 Bxl, please register on info@q-o2.be)
• 14h—18h Thierry Madiot with Yanik Miossec: Sound Massage
(15 minutes slots, registration possible at info@q-o2.be)
• 18h25 Oracle: Reading the Zone
• 19h30 Paulo Dantas: Conversations
(kruispunt Henegauwenkaai en Ninoofse Stwg / Carrefour Quai du Hainaut et Chée de Ninove)
• 21.30h Anna Raimondo: Derrière la mer
• Isabelle Stragliati
Meditation/Sound/City: A soundwalk
“Noise pollution results when we do not listen carefully. Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore. Noise pollution today is being resisted by noise abatement. This is a negative approach.” R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape(1977)
Isabelle Stragliati works on sound in relation to contemplation, meditation and perception, in interaction with the city environment – through writings, readings, discussions, and field recording, meditation and soundwalk practices. Her work has led her to establish a soundwalk method based on pure awareness of city sounds. She invites you to experiment with this method during a one-hour walk in the Anderlecht neighbourhood.
Start Place Lemmens, 1070 Bxl, please register at info@q-o2.be
• Thierry Madiot with Yanik Miossec
Sound Massage: “On Table” and “Head to Head”
Sound massages present an unprecedented sound art practice. It’s all about trust. The audience enters intoan unknown but familiar sound universe that is perceived through the entire body. Using everyday objects, a musician will produce acoustic, almost inaudible sounds close to or even inside the ear of the listener, radically upsetting their spatial and internal listening. By abolishing distance, a sonic microscope is established: the abandonment goes without saying. This live acousmatic mini-concert takes about ten minutes and awakens in you the sensation of a new life of sounds.15 minutes slots, please register at info@q-o2.be
• Oracle
Reading the Zone
A public intervention which aims to open oracular practice 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. Each session is unique to the moment and environment and involves individual expression in a collective setting.
This performance is the outcome of the workshop which takes place the same day.
• Paulo Dantas
Conversations
This piece is the diffusion, through two megaphones, of excerpts of confusing conversations in some of the several languages spoken in the city of Brussels. The excerpts will be diffused at specific points throughout the city, interacting with their spatial properties through sound. Conversations is a (re)collection of recordings, translations and texts, focused on the themes of language, being foreign, memory and the oneiric. This intervention is connected to the project Language learning as field recording, body as media, an attempt at recording aspects of the city of Brussels in the body of Paulo Dantas according to a set of rules: avoid English as a language; try to communicate in local languages only.
• Anna Raimondo
Derrière la mer (2018)
A sound piece, score, and hand-made libretto, performed by Edyta Jarząb and Jérôme Porsperger.Derrière la mer is a composition and a score based on speech excerpts from people from different cultural and geographic horizons, in dialogue with Koranic and Biblical passages related to the sea. It proposes a vocal journey between cultures and languages and multiple visions of the sea, intended as an element which is impossible to break and not intended to separate.The score has three parts: “Toward the Sea” is the sensual relation with this element; “Crossing the sea” evokes the dangers that it represents; “Beyond the Sea” proposes a vision and a reflection on the symbolic end of the sea.
→ THURSDAY 2/5
• 20h concert and film program: light and colour
Manuel Lima, Michael Vorfeld, Mariska De Groot, alternating with short films by Luke Fowler. Pretalk with Luke Fowler and Guillaume Maupin.
(at Cinema Nova)
• Manuel Lima
Whistle Song
A work for organ (pre-recorded), electronics, whistle and red light. It takes as its point of departure a series of recordings of a security guard, Miguel Vianna, who has spent every night for over thirty years watching the same residential street in São Paulo. Whenever somebody arrives, crosses or leaves the street, he whistles longingly. The pipe organ, as a giant whistle, establishes a soundscape incorporating some of these recordings in a collage-like piece, together with an analogue synth, sine waves and filtered noise. After all those years watching the silent street Mr. Vianna says that recently a shadowy figure has been appearing to him in the dead of night. Now that a right-wing pro-gun government has been formed, he is anxious to buy a pistol (he has worked unarmed all these years). The red light embodies this phantasmagoric apparition. While the silence remains the same, a new fear is emerging.
• Michael Vorfeld
Light Bulb Music
Light Bulb Music is an audio-visual performance using sounds that are generated by different light bulbs and actuating electric devices. The use of different controllers such as switches, dimmers, relays, flashers and various others leads to changes in the light and the current flow. This is made audible by a range of microphones and pick-ups. In addition, fine mechanical sounds occurring inside the light controllers are amplified and integrated into the music. The changes in the light intensity, the incandescence of the filaments and the rhythmic variety of the flickering and pulsing lights is directly transformed into a comprehensive and microcosmic electro-acoustic world of sound.
• Mariska de Groot
NIBIRU—Planet of Crossing
No one ever discovered Nibiru, the ninth planet that is said to visit our solar system once every 3000 years. With its huge mass and elongated eccentric orbit it causes a slight perturbation in the movements of the known planets, sufficient to explain the discrepancy between their observed positions compared with human calculations. Intrigued by this ancient story, de Groot engages in conversations about the position and movement of this lost planet. What does the galactically old choreography of Nibiru look like, sound like? Nibiru is an audiovisual performance instrument constructed from simple, yet unstable handmade pendulum oscillators. The pendulums are activated by rhythmical body movements which then scratch complex curvilinear patterns into black glass treated with chalk. Noises of instability and resistance in the apparatus are amplified and sound patterns are created by light-sensitive speakers that scan the projected line image as it changes. Rhythmical movement, light and sound all come together naturally as an analogy for cosmological trajectories, as the drawing becomes a plotted chronicle of Nibiru’s dance.
• Luke Fowler
A Grammar for Listening Part 3 (2009, with Toshiya Tsunoda)Luke Fowler’s film cycle A Grammar for Listening addresses the question of how to create a meaningful dialogue between looking and listening, through the possibilities afforded by 16mm film and digital sound recording devices. In Part 3, Fowler furthers his on-going dialogue with the sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda (Yokohama, Japan).
Ridges on the Horizontal Plane (2011/2019, Luke Fowler & Toshia Tsunoda)Fragments of landscapes—projections of rippling water, reflections on glass—are magnified. Fowler and Tsunoda share a curiosity about the mechanics of perception and the ways in which worldly phenomena are typically received and understood. They distil the interrelated and frequently invisible elements that allow even the simplest action to occur. (Premiere of the cinema version)
David (2009)David is part of a series of portraits of four diverse individuals brought together through a shared residence—a flat in a Victorian tenement in the West End of Glasgow.
Mum’s Cards (2018)My mother is a sociologist and worked in the Politics Department of Glasgow University. Although the university furnished her with her own personal computer after retiring, she still used index cards to make notes on the books and articles that she read. Her house is filledwith shoeboxes and filing cabinets containing these cards. My mother was absent on the day that I shot this film; the interview and sounds were recorded at a later date.
→ FRIDAY 3/5
• 20h concert: sound and poetry
Paulo Dantas, Anne-Laure Pigache & Jérôme Noetinger, Marc Matter, Guillaume Maupin.
(at LE LAC)
[bʁy.sɛl] | [ˈbrʏ.səl]
The performance[bʁy.sɛl] | [ˈbrʏ.səl] is comprised of a (re)collection of recordings of banal situations; resonances / feedbacks; distortions of words; and confusing translations into French and Dutch of personal texts, focused on the themes of communication, memory and the oneiric. It is also a coda to the project Language learning as field recording, body as media, an attempt at recording aspects of the city of Brussels in my body following two “simple” rules: avoid English; try to communicate in local languages only.
• Anne-Laure Pigache & Jérome Noetinger
Paroles Paysages
Paroles Paysages is a regular radio program by Anne-Laure Pigache on Radio Campus Grenoble. It is a live radio performance in which Pigache plays with everyday talk and ongoing thoughts. It is a space where the word is sound and where sound becomes word at the interstices of language, at the limits of meaning. It is a dive down into the phonemes of the language. A wandering in the corporeity of speech. For this occasion Anne-Laure Pigache invites Jérôme Noetinger to join her. Noetinger’s very sculpted use of the tape recorder amplifies and deploys this deconstruction of the language, letting sound emerge from it.
• Marc Matter
Lingual Boom & Monotonous Mutations
The sonic qualities of language and the use of found texts (and sometimes voices) provide the basis for the word-compositions and sampler-poetry of Marc Matter. They are inspired by text-sound-poetry and conceptual / generative approaches in literature. He is interested in highly structured and standardised structures of speech and text, as in news broadcasts, dialogues or lists. He also uses the different grades of density in audio texts to create a mangled linguistic sound that uses sound effects and heavy editing to manipulate speech and voice recordings, a search for semantic collisions in the sound-space.
• Guillaume Maupin
Troubadour
Singer and musician Guillaume Maupin will create instantaneous chansons, that respond to the evening’s performances, accompanied by guitar and shruti box.
→ SATURDAY 4/5
• 11h Justin Bennett: Multiplicity—a spectral analysis of Brussels; guided soundwalk
(start at Q-O2. Description see > exhibition. Please register on info@q-o2.be)
• 14h Isabelle Stragliati: Meditation/Sound/City; guided soundwalk
(start at Place Lemmens: 1080 Bxl. Description see Wednesday 1/5. Please register on info@q-o2.be)
• 20h concert: on resonance
Adam Asnan, Sofia Jernberg, Rebecca Glover, John Butcher
(at Church St. Jean Baptist)
• Adam Asnan
Live set
Adam Asnan will present a live work that continues to explore the performativity of early digital reverb hardware, placing emphasis on the reverb as a voice in itself. It is mostly repetitive in nature, based on motifs that integrate sounds of percussion and FM synthesis.
• Sofia Jernberg
One Pitch: Birds for Distortion and Mouth Synthesizers
Jernberg’s solo vocal performance focuses on the sound qualities of the human voice. Text or anything that can be perceived as language has been washed away in the creative process. Using no electronic effects, simply one voice in a room, Jernberg aims to achieve a multilayered structure.
• Rebecca Glover
Fluid Bodies
Combining sound, sculpture and performance, Rebecca Glover’s work conjures up journeys through imaginary landscapes in which bodies, space, time and scale are completely fluid. Using small microphones to shift her perspective, Glover listens in to the sounds of objects, their resonance, their interior spaces and the way sound is coloured as it passes through them. In Fluid Bodiesshe uses sound as a sculptural material. Objects, bodies and speakers are used to filter, shape and spatialise sound, plotting routes through materials, space and the imagination.
• John Butcher
The Geometry of Sentiment
“A solo concert, for me,” Butcher explains, “is an opportunity to embrace the uniqueness of each playing and listening situation. Over thirty years I have presented solos in concert halls, churches, clubs, pubs, caves, theatres, the Texan desert, French forests, an underground Scottish reservoir, a hollow Japanese mountain, a giant German gasometer and more. From the driest rooms to the most extreme resonances. This has made sense because improvisation allows an especially creative and fluid response to the particular acoustics and atmosphere of different locations."
The Geometry of Sentiment is a set of pieces drawing on this long history. John Butcher (tenor and soprano saxophones) has a good idea of what is likely to happen, but, fortunately, not the complete picture.
→ SUNDAY 5/5
• 14h—17h in-situ performance: inbetween
Franziska Windisch, Els Viaene, Jonathan Frigeri, Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima
(at LA FONDERIE - in case of rain take the necessary clothes or an umbrella)
• Franziska Windisch
Encounters #06 / Chora
Encountersis an ongoing experimental series that circles around the question of how acoustic, spatial and temporal structures of a work define the interaction between the members of an audience and how these structures can be used as a material to compose spheres in which collective thinking processes and listening experiences are initiated. The sixth edition of Encountersfocuses on the choir as a polyphonic body, as a form of listening, speaking and moving together. Surrounded by the remaining walls of the former halle de coulé at la Fonderie Molenbeek, the multi channel sound performance juxtaposes and associates the possibilities and dynamics of choral actions with the notion of chora(ancient Greek: space), a term that originally meant the peripheral area outside the city proper and that contributed to an understanding of space that oscillates "between the logic of exclusion and that of participation." (Derrida, On the Name)
• Els Viaene
A point in time
Sound has the power to create a space, to inhabit a space. In this headphone performance, Els Viaene uses a binaural setup to allow the audience to become part of a common space. She constructs live a sonic space around a dummy head by moving different speakers closer and further away. It starts with one sound, a point in time, the point becomes a line, the lines become a landscape. Turning one sound into another, turning one space into another. Each step revealing another mode of listening, another way of tuning into and experiencing the sounds hidden in the landscape.
Can my ears become yours? Can the shared space become a place, somewhere we experience something together?
• Jonathan Frigeri
The Matter of Radio
It is in this space, of nothing, between the place of diffusion and the place of reception, that this story is formulated. An intangible space in which it can be accessed through hearing, a place of acousmatic listening, of absence and obliteration, a negation from which something else can emerge through the incitement of sound imagery. It is a place, but also a non-place, a space of location, but also of de-location, because it is not constrained to any topographical or architectural situation and it is able to create its own temporality. We can situate these divagations of thought in a hybrid form and close to the idea of a disoriented excursion into spectral territories.
• Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima
Dead Plants and Living Objects
Tin cans, whistles, locomotive suspension springs, porcelain bowls, compressor top bells, ping pong balls, dry agave leaves, sponges, steel wires, branches, paper foils, plastic bags, silver paper, pink gloves, piano, balloons, buckets, feathers, water, scraps, pebbles, flower pots, a guitar, metal tubes, paulownia tree seeds, pearls, bamboo sticks, logs, bones, stones, or filter queens.
Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima have been creating various ways to vibrate things in order to let their acoustic shadows dance around: invisible air volumes that constantly change shape, move in the space, enter into the most secret places, enter into us. A way to get closer to the spirits inherent in things is to listen to them. Eventually encouraging them to produce sounds and resonate by various means: to hit, caress, shake, beat, scrape, scratch, claw, boil, clap, rattle, rock, throw, move, magnetise, clamp, cook, pinch, galvanise, motorise, bow, blow, pluck, heat up, let flow, freeze, drop, drip, connect, roll, mix, ext