Experimental audiovisual artist Sabiwa draws inspiration from a myriad of personal recordings – among other daily family life, natural and surrounding soundscapes, sounds and ancient music traditions from native tribes of Taiwan – to create a beguiling journey through traditional Taiwanese folk musics turned concrète. Incorporating her own voice and manipulating and fragmenting source material to the point of it becoming unrecognisable, her mesmerising performance will explore psychedelic narratives through a live multi-projection AV show with additional performers.
Ojoo, a selector with a head spinning knack for combining genres and tempos across the gamut into an irresistible vibe, performs in RSO as part of a Femme Bass Mafia curated lineup.
Harnessing sequenced machines, digital samplers, and a plethora of multi-effects, the trio NZE NZE build tales of dystopian fact and speculative fiction, interweaving traditional Central African warrior songs with clamorous mechanised post-punk noise and ritual rhythms into a disorienting experience.
Petra Hermanova’s new release, In Death’s Eyes, combines folk and sacred musical technique and instrumentation which drift between song and heavy distorted drones. Performing on autoharp and voice, she will be accompanied by Jon Eirik Boska (percussion and voice) and the organist Elizaveta Suslova as they perform material from the album. To Hermanova, religious music offers spiritual solace from grief, but folk speaks to the human and earthly as told by the individual, through songs of suffering or joy, sin or salvation. With lyrics riddled with symbolism and allusion and contrasting the affordable and easy-to-master autoharp with the gargantuan organ reserved for skilled performers, »In Death’s Eyes« blends and contrasts the sounds of transcendence with the worldly, poignantly expressing Hermanova’s struggle for spiritual resolution against the reality of death and loss.
With »Kalkül der Form,« the SHAPE+ supported artist Max Eilbacher, and Phillip Sollmann (Efdemin), present their first collaboration, a multichannel digital synthesis system. The duo's system materialises a perceptual fusing of ten sonic actors, running against and alongside each other in a constant morphology of different designs. At the core of their idiosyncratic electronic music structure, their piece, and their live presentation the idea of the distinction (or lack thereof) is foregrounded.
Two artists appear within CTM 2024 with works that are amplified by short residencies with local Berlin artists.
Inspired by diverse writings such as The Sea Around Us by the environmentalist Rachel Carson and Thinking Like An Iceberg by the philosopher Oliver Remaud, in which he paints a web of reciprocal connections between icebergs and human life, the SHAPE+ supported electroacoustic composer Félicia Atkinson will premiere »Thinking Through the Iceberg,« an experimental oratorio for three characters, with the collaboration of the abstract guitarist Jules Reidy and sound artist crys cole. Here, the scenography is the development of the music itself, unfurling an open reflection about what it takes to care about an environment and each other, and what also links solitude to togetherness, a poetic argument between written elements and improvised words, movements and sounds, a meditation on vulnerability. For Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak; her artistic work imagines possibilities of animating and entering into dialogue with such entities. A five-part performance that will drift and melt slowly, »Thinking Through the Iceberg« combines grand piano, guitar, field recordings, voices, and whispers into an abstract minimal grunge, full of small details, metaphors, abstractions, revealing a complex and fragile interconnectedness even in places where there seems to be no life at all. Produced by CTM and Shelter Press.
Channelling historical instruments like the gigantic theorbo lute, the baroque alto viola, and the baroque oboe, as Heinali the Ukrainian composer and musician Oleh Shpudeiko resynthesises early music with a modular synthesiser, exploring intersections of past and present. In exploring the roles of providence and contingency, he provides a bridge with which to connect the worlds of High Mediaeval polyphony and modular synthesis. The SHAPE+ supported artist will be joined by the Berlin-based visual artist u-matic & telematique, who hold a particular fascination for intangible processes including perception and the sense of time.
Both Félicia Atkinson and Heinali will also give talks within CTM's Discourse programme, giving further insight into their practice.
SHAPE+ is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
