The embrace of the digital, the rush in your e-veins as language mutates into overdrive. A synthetic otherworld where even tears flicker like jewels. No installation or hard disk required - simply jack in to the realm of the duo User Syndrome.

Influenced by her lifelong love of gaming, Rhéa Dally’s studies in sound engineering and production soon wound up bleeping out of Game Boys. Approaching political topics through a rare medium – circuit-bent instruments built from the bodies of exhumed gaming devices and her own mind – Dally’s chiptune compositions interrogate such themes as social communication, the dominating role cyberspace plays in our lives, and the constant conflict of her native Lebanon.

Freya Edmondes’ fragged beats as Elvin Brandhi are built from the backbone of a dedicated discipline focused on the immediacies of communication, her work context-determined and built around field recordings, tapes, vinyl, instruments and voice. A multidisciplinary sound and visual artist, the Wales-raised Edmondes reflects Dally’s interest in exploring and interpreting the incessant data stream we swim through via the medium of tape and tech, with their previous Beirut-based band ‘GAILVN KEILN’ linking their minds into a shared network of binary system-challenging neurons. Using asyntactical communications tech, every meatspace upload brings them one step closer to their goal - to humanise the digital and digitise the human.

User Syndrome are performing as part of the CTM Radio Lab which is a project by Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Hörspiel / Klangkunst and CTM Festival in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, and Ö1 Kunstradio. This year it takes place within the framework of the sound art initiative tekhnē, which is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.