A selection of compositions, performances, installations
2024_Tränenpalast "Palace of Tears"_this piece was composed for the 192 speaker wave-field soundsystem installed at the New Music Lab in Amare for the WFS Festival. The piece centers around the former border-crossing point between East and West Germany at Berlin’s Friedrichstraße. Here, the glass panelled building was the site of German division and the final threshold for the departing to say goodbye. After the fall of the Soviet Bloc, it resigned its duties of border control and reopened its doors as a concert hall and cultural venue for the reforming city. The piece weaves together music from musicians that performed there between 1993 and 2004 with personal recordings of the many train rides made between Berlin and The Hague in 2023 and 2024. After relocating to the Netherlands, the long train rides back to Berlin became a liminal space of contemplation and the arriving/departing Friedrichstraße a site of longing, separation, reconnection, and remembrance of a history that still resonates today.
_01.06.2024 Amare, The Hague
2024_Parent_is the duo of Viktoria Nikolova and Isul Kim, exploring the collaborative potential of operatic voice and power electronics in performance theatre. Their diverse practices merge into scene-by-scene narratives with a tongue-in-cheek approach to traditional opera, blending elements of the ordinary with contemporary motifs and modern tragedies. The interplay between voice and electronics unfolds in a semi-improvised space, fostering an ambiguous exchange between acting and performing, where the boundaries of meaning, emotion, and human connection become fluid and undefined. Meanwhile, the scenographic stage and sonic spatialization create an immersive, multi-sensory situation, dynamically transforming the space into a living, breathing instrument.
Performed at
27-4-24 Sophia Underground, Bulgaria
26-6-24 Crawl Space, The Netherlands
18-10-24 Sophia Experimental, Bulgaria
20-10-24 TAM, Bulgaria
12-12-24 10 to 10, The Netherlands
2024_Breathing Spaces_was a groupshow of up-and-coming sound artists selected for the Sonic Acts Biennale 2024. The meetings were held at Zone2Source artspace in Amsterdam and involved investigations of sound & space within the context of the 2024 biennale programme through the mentorship of composer and educator, Ji Youn Kang. Here, I developed and presented the performance/installation "The Backyard", a collection of field-recordings made during the working period played-back through an open wireless feedback system with FM transmitters and receivers that were mapped through a Max patch for delays and textures. The installation interlaced a sound journal of the residency with the live exhibition space and radio on-air.
_installation excerpt
_28.02.2024 @Zone2Source
2023_Anatomic Buoyancies_is a collection of work arranged from material collected during Justin Bennett's field-recording workshop (The Hague). The works seek to explore the characteristics of each microphone through the choice of environment2 they are placed inside. Each microphone embodies a unique shape and size, bandwidth, field of capture, and usability requirements that situates it in unique contexts. The (self-proclaimed) objective was to explore the characteristics of microphones presented to us, through imagining a suitable environment to capture. The following recordings were complied and composed during a week's excursion through the city, shifting sands, an elevated dinner, and a practise of non-listening.
_geophone
_hydrophone with Harry Golden
_lavalier
_binaural
_voronoi diagram
2023_Corpus ii_was a live performance of Corpus i through a 4-channel speaker configuration and three receiver radios; spatialized according to the voronoi principle.
_ii.30.3.2023_schwarzhaus
2022_Kairos_is a sound collage commissioned for Refuge Radio Berlin as a part of Alifiyah Imani's artistic research on Sonic Rituals. The piece constructs sonic clusters of events that happened in 2022 as an interpretation of kairos, or non-linear time, and how memories take on the retrospective marker of time. The composed situations play with the proximities of encounter with the social-political landscape of Berlin. By drawing in major events: the Artemis launch, war on Ukraine, feminist protests in Iran, and how these remembrances entwine with our ordinary soundscapes, it achieves an abstracted journalism or journaling of events from an individual perspective. The audio samples that mark each sonic event was taken from Instagram. Full stream here.
_untimely
2022_Floating basin_is a sound essay broadcasted on Cashmere Radio as a part of a cumulative work on Diasporic Listening to Berlin soundscapes with artist Yara Mekawei. The site chosen for this investigation is Floating University, a public intervention and recreation space above the rainwater retention basin of the old Templehofer airport. It is an urban sanctuary for wildlife and microbials. Inspired by their resistance to uphold against urban redevelopment pressures and the societal activation of post-COVID lockdown, the essay uses this site as a departure point to question the meaning of change. Full stream here.
2020_Returning to zero time_an immersive biofeedback environment was installed for the Reeperbahn Festival, in Hamburg Germany. Taking the anatomic womb as inspiration, audio and visual impulses are tuned to the average heart rate of visitors as an investigation on the social experience of synchronisation during the first COVID lockdown. Commissioned for the artist collective Frank Nubala.
