The opening night of the festival is dedicated to the idea of “unboxing”, a method of understanding technology, isolating its parts and deciphering its underlying mechanisms. Pom Bouvier-b & Marjolijn Dijkman unpack the power of electricity, Michaela Turcerová explores the mechanics of her instrument, while Elijah Maja will speculate about call-and-response as a bridge across time and genre. Ka Baird will close the evening with an investigation on sound’s outer dimensions.

Electrify Everything turns the seductive spectacle of Enlightenment-era electrical demonstrations into a critical inquiry into the origins of the units and language that have shaped electricity for three centuries. The performance reflects on electricity’s structuring power and its ties to resources and exploitation. Pom Bouvier-b and Marjolijn Dijkman perform with experimental instruments that translate electric charges and magnetic variations into sound. Dijkman’s high-voltage electrophotography contributions reveal microscopic interactions, giving electricity an animistic presence. A text by Jean Katambayi Mukendi, voiced by François Makanga, traces the history and current realities of energy production through electrical terminology.

© Amélie Bouvier

Marjolijn Dijkman is a research-led, multidisciplinary artist working with film, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice explores the intersection of culture and other fields of inquiry, with a strong focus on the rapidly changing environment and its human and non-human interdependencies. In 2005, she co-founded the artist-run organisation Enough Room for Space, and is a Ph.D. researcher at LUCA/KU Leuven (2023-2027).

Pom Bouvier-b’s sound practice weaves a singular approach to music with inventive listening. She composes electroacoustic works, improvises in varied ensembles, creates performative spaces, sound walks, collective gesture scores, and handmade instruments. Trained in fine arts, sound engineering, and composition, her work sits between music, visual art, and embodied practices.

Michaela Turcerová is a Slovak composer and saxophonist who searches for the hidden and otherwise unheard timbres of musical instruments. In her solo project IN FLUX, she weaves modifications of the alto saxophone’s body, surreal amplification, external sound objects, and sine waves into a hybrid percussive organism, placed within an intimate electroacoustic space freed from traditional expectations, history, and cultural identity. Her debut album alene et was released on the Slovak label mappa in autumn 2024. She lives in Copenhagen, where she leads Doudouči Ensemble and Ensemble ŠUMUM, co-leads ALAWARI and Wolfskin Ensemble, and holds degrees in classical composition and saxophone from the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica and the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen.

© Šimon Lupták

Following on from his 2024 residency at Q-O2, artist and researcher Elijah Maja will deliver a presentation sharing ongoing research into the stylistic, technical, and ritual overlaps in process across musics. Partly philosophical, partly speculative, these threads of continuity will be explored to consider how encounters between performance practice, technique and quotidian life have impacted the sonic. He will then close with a short performance.

Elijah Maja is an artist, writer, and researcher from London. Maja’s practice is multidisciplinary, predominantly using sound, still, and moving image. Interested in the creation of assemblage through experimental sound and speculative musings across an array of textual, sonic, and visual through-lines, Maja ponders syncretism, space, and quotidian life in the formation of process.

Yomp is a performance piece featuring extended voice and microphone techniques, live-processed flutes, samples, feedback, fractured rhythms, and motion interfaces that both trigger and manipulate sound. The piece loosely plays with the idea of a march that repeatedly falls apart, furthering Baird’s investigation into sound’s outer dimensions through performance. Yomp embodies their signature tone that is simultaneously confrontational, visceral, ritualistic, and humorous.

“The general time pressures destroy all that has the character of a detour, all that is indirect, and thus makes the world poor in forms. Every form, every figure, is a detour. If walking lacks all hesitation, all pausing, then it freezes into a march.” – Byung-Chul Han

Ka Baird is an American recording artist, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and performer based in New York City. For more than twenty years, they have explored the outer dimensions of sound through performance. Extending far beyond their roots in the psychedelic folk movement of the early aughts, Baird is known for their raw, boundary-pushing solo performances that bridge experimental sound, performance art, and ritual. Their tool set in the live arena includes extended voice and microphone techniques, electronics, flute, and piano.