Akusmata Sound Weekend

June 7-9, 2018

Three days of adventurous music and sound art for adventurous minds. We are delighted to announce the line-up of the Akusmata Sound Weekend. Invited artists are from Nordic countries, Europe and the USA, offering wide spectrum of the present day experimental electronic music and sound art.

Supported by Nordisk Kulturfond / Puls, Nordic Culture Point, the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, République et Canton de Genève, Pro Helvetia.

Thursday, June 7, 2018, at 18:30

New Routines Every Day (SUI)

– ​​Rudy Decelière, field recordings and harmonium

– ​​Marcel Chagrin, guitar, amplifier, feet drums

Emma Souharce (FRA/SUI), solo electronics

Friday, June 8, 2018, at 18:30

Richard Lerman (USA), Border Fences (‘Tijuana Fence’, 2018) + talk

Daniel Araya (SE), solo electronics, synths

TMS

– ​​Malte Steiner (DE), various pedals, self-built controllers and Pure Data

– ​​Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (DK), various pedals, self-built controllers and Pure Data

Antti / Fisker

– ​​Antti Koukonen (FIN/DK), electronics

– Rasmus Fisker Pedersen (DK), electronics

Saturday, June 9, 2018, at 18:30

John Hegre (NO), solo guitar, electronics

Marja-Leena Sillanpää (SE), solo electronics

Leif Elggren (SE), solo electronics, dance

​​The Routes of Helsinki: Urban Sound & Poetry

– ​​Mikko Haapoja​, soundscapes, bowed lyre, live electronics​

​​– ​​illmari​, spoken word​​​

​​Sound Installation

Open: June 11 – 15, 2018, 14:00-18:00.

Antti Koukonen (FIN/DK) & ​​Rasmus Fisker (DK) ​
‘INDUSPHERE’
A multi-channel sound installation, field recordings ​

NEW ROUTINES EVERY DAY (SUI)
– ​​Rudy Decelière, field recordings and harmonium
– ​​Marcel Chagrin, guitar, amplifier, feet drums

MARCEL CHAGRIN is a musician with polymorphic styles and surprising sonorities. As a one-man orchestra, his performances are both hypnotic and narrative and their intensity can sometimes come close to slowly creating a sensation of vertigo. His guitar playing is a combination of held notes and powerful amplifications, producing long feedbacks in which his spontaneous and repetitive (and at times, kitsch) melodies create unusual contrasts. As unusual as his career, which has led him from place to place, a way of life fashioned by chance meetings along the way combined with the need for a demanding solitude. He has collaborated with Tivadar Pénzes, Nikos Veliotis, Lorna Snow, Noel Akchoté, Brian Eno, Georg Baselitz, Georg Traber, Christian Weber, Erik Minkkinen, William Parker, as well as D’incise, with whom he created the duo Heu{s-k}ach (2009). He currently lives between Switzerland, the Aran Islands and Alaska.

RUDY DECELIERE is a multidisciplinary sound artist who explores the art of sound mainly through installations. With these soundscapes, which range from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, he creates a sound architecture which, through its measured, protracted, calm detail, encourages the viewer/listener to create their own personal and interior intimacy with the work and its environment. Alongside this activity, he works as a sound engineer for independent art films and documentaries, which gives him the opportunity to feed his personal bank of field-recordings, compatible with his interests and his sensitivity for ambient sounds and the sonic events/accidents he encounters. Subsequently, he use these in the construction of music and sound design for theatre and contemporary dance. He has collaborated with Anne Delahaye & Nicolas Leresche, Vincent Hänni, Donatelle Bernardi, Maya Bösch, Marco Poloni, the CERN, and has obtained numerous grants

EMMA SOUHARCE (FRA/SUI), solo electronics

EMMA SOUHARCE is a sound artist who composes her pieces by the light of candles. Crackles, caresses, screams of micro-machines and symphonies of batrachians, Emma Souharce sculpts precise and intense archaeological footprints in the sound material. Through immersive landscapes, she weaves links between ritual and music, with the secret ambition of reaching complete symbiotic states. Her daily life is also animated by collaborative projects which the analogical orchestra Biblioteq Mdulair (co-founded with Daniel Maszkowicz) is part. Emma Souharce is also active in La Reliure collective and the publishing house Copypasta created in 2012. Emma Souharce lives and works in Geneva.

RICHARD LERMAN (USA), Border Fences (‘Tijuana Fence’, 2018) + talk

RICHARD LERMAN has created electronic music and interdisciplinary art since the 1960’s offering performances, installations and screenings in North and South America, Asia, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. He has collaborated with John Cage and David Tudor. At Brandeis College he studied with Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and David Tudor.

Lerman gained an interest in sound art in the early 60s. He soon met John Cage, a renowned American composer who opened the door to observing sounds and electroacoustic music.

David Tudor, an American pianist and composer of experimental music, suggested that Lerman must learn how to make his equipment because of the lack of technology in the mid 20th Century. Lerman makes most of his own equipment. In exhibitions he uses the space between the wall and photograph to produce sound. “I think that the wires need to visible because it is a very physical thing, sound,” Lerman said.

“I think the interdisciplinary nature of Richard’s work using images, videos and performance, is interesting, innovative, and his commitment to his subject/topic is second to none,” Jeffery Kennedy has said.

Lerman’s work involves a variety of tools to achieve the sound he wants. He uses carbon fiber rods, piezoelectric devices that can capture the vibrations of sounds, hydrophones to get sounds underwater and many more.

For 40 years, his work has often utilized piezo disk and other transducers that he has designed and built. These pick up sounds too quiet for our ears, extending our hearing.

His piece Travelon Gamelon (1978) for amplified bicycles has received hundreds of performances worldwide. In 2009 he completed Death Valley Cycle with video/audio gathered in each of the 12 months at this site. Recent Installations include: Alga-Aqua (2007), in Vigo, Spain and Sao Pedro do Sul, Portugal and Hoover: Water | Power at the ASU Art Museum (Oct 2009 – Feb 2010). In 2008 he performed new work at Roulette in NYC and in 2009 at the Chapel Performance Space for the Wayward Music Series in Seattle. In May 2012 he premiered a sound/video installation From the Galapagos at cuba-cultur in Münster, Germany, and also install Death Valley Cycle.

Lerman has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Arizona and Massachusetts Arts Councils, the NEA and many others. His films and video work have been screened widely, including seven super 8 films from his Transducer Series Pieces shown at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2007 a 2-CD set of earlier music and audio work, including Travelon Gamelon, was released on EM Records, Osaka, Japan. Since 1994 professor Lerman has taught at Arizona State University.

DANIEL ARAYA (SE), Acid Ambient for four Roland TB-303 bass synthesizers

DANIEL ARAYA have been making electronic music for over 20 years, mostly in the techno and acid house scene. Besides his dance music projects he also does installations, soundscape compositions and works based on field recordings and collage techniques and build custom instruments. Araya works as a Studio Engineer in EMS studio, Stockholm.
For Akusmata Sound Weekend festival Araya is presenting his Acid Ambient concept that is a work based on the live manipulation of four Roland TB-303 bass synthesizers. In this piece they are taken out of their usual dancefloor context with total focus on the very peculiar and alien qualities in their sound, the acidic essence of house music put under a magnifying glass.

TMS: movement(al) distortion(s)
– ​​Malte Steiner (DE), pedals, metals w/ piezos, self-built controllers
– ​​Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (DK), pedals, metals w/ piezos, self-built controllers

TMS is an experimental noise project by the artists Malte Steiner (DE) and Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen (DK). The format is improvisational sound pieces and concerts built out of Steiner and Madsen’s sonic interactions, where noise-scapes and complex structures emerge from intense layerings of various in- and outputs. Physical interactions with materials are here important for creating a performative and visual sound experience. TMS uses primarily various effect pedals, self-built controllers, sometimes combined with Pure Data, to create their compositions. The inputs can be analogue as well as digital; modulated, transformed and distorted.
TINA MARIANE KROGH MADSEN is a Danish, Berlin-based artist and researcher, who works primarily with performance art, sound and open technology. She has an education from the College of Arts Crafts and Design in Nørresundby (DK), where she began studying performance art in 1999, and holds a Master of Arts in Art History from Aarhus University (DK). Madsen’s research deals with theory as well as practice, where her sound work evolves around an investigation of the body in relation to space and acoustics/resonance. Her projects range from critical performance interventions, minimal and conceptual sound installations to intense noise performances. http://tmkm.dk/
MALTE STEINER (DE) is a Berlin-based artist, electronic musician and composer. Steiner started creating electronic music and visual art around 1983, developing his own vision of the interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk. Steiner’s musical projects are primarily the experimental electro-acoustic Elektronengehirn, the Industrial outfit Notstandskomitee, Akustikkoppler (with Matthias Schuster), Das Kombinat, TMS and codepage (both together with Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen). Steiner started in 1998 to create electronic art and installations, which have been exhibited internationally. http://www.block4.com/

ANTTI / FISKER
– ​​Antti Koukonen (FIN/DK), electronics
– Rasmus Fisker Pedersen (DK), electronics

ANTTI / FISKER is an experimental, electronic duo-project based in Aarhus, Denmark. Rasmus Fisker and Antti Koukonen shares an intuitive approach to improvisation, which is based on creating an atmospheric sound environments utilizing semi-random generative software, and a combination of field recordings, live processing and additive synthesis. The sonic output of the duo can be heard morphing between surreal timbres and soundscape collages made from environmental recordings and synthetic, melodic sounds.
RASMUS FISKER (DK) is an experimental electronic musician and composer from Aarhus, Denmark. His intuitive approach to music is prominent in his collaborations as the outcome often varies in constellation, genre and aesthetics. It is an urge to disappear into sound that drives his creative working process that functions as a personal output for both, abstract thoughts and concrete ideas.
Fisker creates music that explores the ever expanding possibilities of computer music. Since his debut as Sykofant at the 2010 STRØM festival Rasmus has been developing his sound, using a growing collection of recordings, effects and synthesizers. He is dedicated to exploring music with the intuition of a musician and the curiosity of a scientist. Rasmus loves detail, small breaks and weird timbres. Using a vast array of sources, he creates experimental, narratives for the ear. https://soundcloud.com/rasmusfisker
ANTTI KOUKONEN (FIN) is a Finnish field-recordist, soundscape composer and electronic musician. His artwork is mainly based on field recordings, which he modifies and combines with electronic sounds in order to explore the communicational potential between these elements, and reflect his emotional responses to places and situations. Through the special interest in creating abstract / surreal and atmospheric soundscape compositions, Antti’s distinctive artistic expression migrates between the extensive universes and aesthetics of soundscapes and musique concrete as well as anecdotal and ambient music.

JOHN HEGRE (NO), solo guitar, electronics

JOHN HEGRE is one of the cornerstones of Norwegian noise and experimental music. After working several years as a sound engineer he decided to continue by making his own music since the end of the 1990s. Hegre is the founding member of the famous Jazzkammer group together with Lasse Marhaug. The group was founded in 1998.
Hegre has been an active performer and producer of noise, improvised music and new electronic music since the mid-1990s, with projects such as Jazkamer, NOXAGT, Golden Serenades, Kaptein Kaliber and duos with Bjørnar Habbestad, Nils Are Drønen, Jean-Philippe Gross and Maja Ratkje, with whom he has also released an album. In the concerts Hegre uses a computer, guitar and some ‘small electronic devices’. Hegre lives in Bergen.

MARJA-LEENA SILLANPÄÄ (SE), solo electronics

MARJA-LEENA SILLANPÄÄ works in direct response to specific environments using different materials and electronic objects to build intricately assembled situations, both pointing to the contact with a possible past and a potential future. In other words; there are other ones with us in existing rooms. “Nowadays (these days) I work mostly with sound. I search for the right frequency to get in touch with another presence and the audience gives the opportunity to experience the same as me.”

​​THE ROUTES OF HELSINKI: Urban Sound & Poetry (FIN)
– ​​Mikko Haapoja​, soundscapes, bowed lyre, live electronics​
​​– ​​illmari​, spoken word​

Soundscapes from boundaries between nature and the city – built and unbuilt. The Routes of Helsinki tells about the roots and the present of the capital of Finland. In the project, sound artist Mikko H. Haapoja records Helsinki urban sounds and creates audio-visual installations, sound art compositions and multidisciplinary art performances. In Akusmata Sound Weekend 2018 Haapoja will perform with his bowed lyre and the soundscapes featured with spoken word artist illmari whose Helsinki poems add another dimension to the sound art of The Routes of Helsinki.

Since 2011, various The Routes of Helsinki works have been presented in Helsinki and New York galleries, and in Helsinki City Museum, Music Centre and public city space, including the metro platforms of Helsinki Central Railway station. Mikko H. Haapoja’s sound art piece ‘Luotisuora / Beeline’ is a part of the permanent ‘Helsinki bites’ exhibition in the new Helsinki City Museum. Together with spoken word artist illmari and visual artist Elina Aho, Haapoja has made audio-visual live performances since 2014 under the name Helsingin reitit: Sound Landscapes. Furthermore, illmari’s Helsinki-poems together with The Routes of Helsinki pieces ‘Twilight’ and ‘The First Route’ are included in haapoja & illmari collective’s folk-rap- sound art album ‘Uusi maailma’ (‘The New World’) released in late 2017. ‘The First Route’ (‘Ensimmainen reitti’) has been released also as a video art piece in 2018: https://youtu.be/3DVyJgH-dxw.
See more: http://mikkohaapoja.net/helsinginreitit

SOUND INSTALLATION

Antti Koukonen (FIN/DK) & ​​Rasmus Fisker (DK) ​
INDUSPHERE
A multi-channel sound installation, field recordings
Exhibition open: June 11-15, 2018, 14:00-18:00.

INDUSPHERE is a multi-channel sound installation based on field recordings from the urban and industrial sites of Aarhus, Denmark. The presented recordings function as documentations of sounds, both hidden and unconcealed, found in various locations in the rapidly developing harbour site and in the city centre; areas where human operations extensively shapes Aarhus’ sonic environment and acoustic ecology.
The installation includes different length loops and is constructed in such way, that the sound material creates a constantly changing sonic environment in the gallery’s space consisting of sound objects and ambiences.

Hugo Esquinca (MX)

Untitled
(exercise on adaptability)

Multichannel sound installation

Open 23. – 25.4.2018

Opening time: Mon-Wed 14-18.

Hugo Esquinca’s concert on Wed 25.4. at 18:30-19:00 at Akusmata.

Hugo Esquinca’s talk on Wed 25.4. at 15:00 at Radical Relevances conference, Aalto University.

Untitled (exercise on adaptability)

‘Untitled (exercise on adaptability)’, analyses intensive and extensive properties of acoustic resonance through material explorations as co-constitutive elements of sonorous variation, through elastic potentials as mediating variables among diverse parameters deriving in rapidly changing audible wholes.

The exercise is based on a system tuned to a deformable surface operating as the speaker enclosure, through which a generative composition arbitrarily excites its stretchable material qualities subjecting them to its natural oscillating modes.

Hugo Esquinca (MX) is a Berlin-based sound artist and researcher from Mexico. He investigates the diverse spatio-temporal relations deriving from transductive interactions between technology and the sonorous, expanding within and beyond audibility.

His work has been presented in diverse contexts and venues such as CTM Festival Berlin, Mira Contemporary Art Museum Siberia, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Loop Festival Berlin, NII Science and Arts Moscow, CMMAS Center For Music and the Sonic Arts Mexico, Forum Stadtpark Graz among others. He is a founding member of the Berlin-based Oqko collective.

As a founding member of the Berlin-based oqko collective under the alias DEKJ, Esquinca makes and performs noise music that is visceral and confrontational, preferably delivered in pitch black environment, speakers screeching their conic guts out. Berlin’s CTM Festival took notice and in January 2018 Esquinca performed at Berghain alongside Okkyung Lee, Marcus Schmickler and more for the Unease part of the festival’s programme.

Esquinca states on his recent work:
““Study on (in) operable rigour” is a site-specific performance deriving from the convergence of defined qualities within space, each loudspeaker of the sound system and the different temporalities between digital-analog “real time” events, all of these taken as the rigurosity from which our audibility generally operates, yet most of these variables also provide the opposite, meaning that a controlled environment in which listening happens can be as bendable and transgressive as the apparent rules that conform it.”

Works: https://www.dekj.org/actualities/
Writings: https://www.dekj.org/