A 24-piece acousmonium will be installed for this evening’s event, creating space for an acousmatic listening experience – a cinema for the ears. An acousmonium is a loudspeaker orchestra: here, 24 speakers arranged around the audience, each with its own spatial and timbral character, shaping the sound in distinct ways. Dreamlike states emerge through the evocative sound worlds of Michèle Bokanowski, spatialized by Laryssa Kim, who will also guide us through ancestral memories with one of her own compositions: an 16-channel piece, offering a complex immersive spatial structure. Tom Mudd sculpts sonic architectures, created by virtually crafted instrumental gestures. Diane Barbé unfolds a rich interplay of sources – field recordings, synthetic mimicry, and acoustic sculptures performed live – multiplying and refracting them within the space. Miki Yui presents a work specially conceived for the Acousmonium, inviting listeners into an intimate, bodily experience of sound.

Michèle Bokanowski is a French composer. She received a traditional musical education before pursuing composition studies in Paris with Michel Puig. In 1970, she began working in electronic music at the Service de la recherche de l’ORTF, directed by Pierre Schaeffer. She also studied computer music at the Faculté de Vincennes and continued her training in electronic music with Eliane Radigue. After completing her studies, Bokanowski established herself as a composer and married filmmaker Patrick Bokanowski, with whom she has frequently collaborated on film projects. She has also worked extensively in other disciplines, collaborating with Catherine Dasté on theatrical works and with choreographers Hideyuki Yano, Marceline Lartigue, and Bernardo Montet in the field of dance.

© Patrick Bokanowski

Mfinda is a spiritual concept of the forest in Bakongo religion, the meeting place between the physical world and the ancestors’ realm. This project explores Afro-descendant memory in Europe – often fragmented or erased – using Congolese sound archives from the Royal Museum for Central Africa. These recordings surface in flashes within a broader sonic tableau, mirroring Kim’s own relationship to African origins. Through this work, she asserts her presence in contemporary acousmatic music while creating space for dispersed memory to recombine. Conceived in 16.2 channels, the piece bridges electroacoustic writing, archives, and rhythm. Ultimately, it celebrates transmission, ancestry, healing, and rebirth.

Laryssa Kim is an Italo-Congolese composer, singer, producer, and DJ whose oneiric soundscapes bridge concert halls, acousmatic cycles, stages, and screens. Born in Rome and shaped in Amsterdam’s dance-theatre scene, she settled in Brussels in 2013, earning a Master’s in Acousmatic Composition in Mons. Her works have been presented at leading festivals, including Espace du Son (2025), and she received the Métamorphoses award in 2020.

Based on physics simulations of acoustic instruments, Mudd’s music rubs algorithmic computer music against the cultures of practice that surround the acoustic instruments. Explored with brass instruments on 2019’s Brass Cultures, and with string instruments on 2023’s Guitar Cultures, the work “treats synthesis as a warped mirror in which is reflected our actual mode of being, which itself bears the obscured histories and origins of the sound-making apparatuses themselves.” – Sunik Kim, liner notes to Guitar Cultures release.

© Šimon Lupták

Tom Mudd makes music with computers, exploring relationships between software and music, software as material, and the histories and cultural life of synthesis processes. Recent work has revolved around physical models: digital synthesis processes based on physical simulations of acoustic objects and instruments. Earlier work explored digital synthesis as chaotic systems that can be prodded and provoked by the performer.

How do we know a dog is a dog, a nightingale is a nightingale, and a flute is a flute? Playing with sonic morphings and blurred identities, Diane Barbés live performance for a multichannel system presents several poetic pieces performed by an ensemble of handmade wind instruments and synthetic-acoustic sculptures built during her residency at Q-O2 in spring.

© Didier Allard

Diane Barbé works at the intersection of experimental music and anthropology. She is currently building wind and percussion instruments from organic materials and developing miniature multichannel sound sculptures. She practices field recording, scores for films, compositions for dance and theatre. Diane studied at the UdK Sound Studies Berlin and is currently based between Berlin and southern France.

Specially created for an acousmonium setting, the piece Transient – Aquosity invites the audience to discover a transitory state of the body and the environment. In this acousmonium concert, listening becomes a bodily experience, awakening the inner soundscape in every person differently.

© Olive

Miki Yui is a Japanese artist and composer based in Düsseldorf. She explores the grey zone of acoustic perception and imagination. Since her first album small sounds in 1999, Yui has been known for her unique minimalistic and organic approach to music, creating an intensely sensual, almost tactile listening experience with synthesizers, samplers, and field recordings.