The second evening hosted at Beursschouwburg focusses on tools and their crafting. Augustė Vickunaitė plays an installative set involving analogue tape machines controlled by the force of her hands, Ikbal Lubys features his noise guitar made from a discarded tree trunk, Lawrence McGuire dialogues with a voice crafted with AI, and MSHR play in a set with a multiplicity of self-built machines, tools and instruments.

Le poids de la journée is a performance for the human body, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and magnetic audio tape. These elements intertwine in a closed system where recorders and tape become extensions of the body, while the body acts as a stopping force, preventing playback. The work visualizes the transformation of bodily energy into the mechanical energy of the recorders’ capstan motors, manifesting as sound. It sonifies the “fight for” and exchange of energy within an internal system composed of the human body and mechanical analog machines. The sonic material on the tape is forcefully restrained by the performer’s body, preventing playback until the body becomes exhausted and gives up. At that moment, the sound and the tape break free – briefly – before being torn and destroyed by the tape recorders.

Augustė Vickunaitė is a sound experimentalist who employs vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record, and create sounds, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, music instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. She specializes in tape, noise, and collage music, known for her theatrical and darkly humorous approach, often exploiting errors of analog audio equipment.

The Witness Trees is a sound performance inspired by Lubys’s research in the tropical forests of Kalimantan, where he witnessed the devastating impact of deforestation. Felled tree trunks, some freshly cut, others decades old, became silent witnesses to the transformation of the forest. In this work, he uses an electric guitar whose neck is replaced with a broken tree trunk or branch, stripped of strings, allowing the natural textures of the wood to produce sound. The instruments “play” the forest’s memory, echoing its changes and testimonies. The performance is interactive, inviting audiences to engage alongside him.

Ikbal Lubys is an Indonesian artist, sound artist, musician, instrument builder, and improviser. Co-founder of Yogyakarta’s creative space Ethnictro, he studied classical music and guitar at ISI Yogyakarta. In his work, he transforms social issues, images, and forms into sound across diverse formats. He collaborates internationally, mentors, and leads workshops for innovative music and art projects.

In line with McGuire’s recent works, he’ll present a suite of recitals and monologues to question how text, image and symbol finds their path to the mouth. Compared to his previous Suites, he’ll be sourcing these materials, either manually or programmatically, solely from the libretto of Gertrude Stein’s opera “Four Saints in Three Acts”. Synthetic and acoustic voice will interpret characters, strings, speech acts into a play consisting solely of arias, so that Stein’s literary method of insistence, which makes something exist through repeated attention, essentially becomes the form of each part in the suite. Co-curated with In vitro.

Lawrence McGuire is an artist concerned with sound and text. Presenting his work in both live and fixed settings in which voice, both in its acoustic and synthetic manifestation, is seen as a starting point for experimentation. His outputs cross the text-sound practices of the sound poets as well as machinic thinking found in computer music and sciences.

MSHR’s performances weave electrical signals and human presence into dense networks of causality that babble with life-like current. Their homemade instruments unfold spatial feedback systems of light and sound, opening a flickering space of translation between sonic and sculptural dimensions. Acting as elements within the system, the duo navigates the electronic ecosystem through a tangle of agency and circuitry.

MSHR, established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, is an art collective that collaboratively creates and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their performances and installations present cybernetic audiovisual environments as living compositions. Their name is a modular acronym designed to hold varied ideas over time, pronounced as letters or as one who meshes.