Future Soundscapes Festival 2023

concerts, A/V performances, sound installation

silent green presents: Future Soundscapes Festival 2023 invites you once again on a journey into the audiovisual future and presents artists at the intersection of music, media art and sound art. With Bruce, Hannan Jones & Shamica Ruddock, Klara Lewis & Nik Colk Void + Pedro Maia, Oval, Simone Aubert, Sofie Birch, upsammy + Jonathan Castro, Zoë Mc Pherson + Alessandra Leone.

 

Bruce

You may have already known Bruce, a name renowned amongst dance music heads with releases on the likes of Hessle Audio, Hemlock and Timedance. But this is Bruce as you’ve never seen him before, ushering in a bold new chapter, facing in the direction of tenderly woven, avant-garde, delicately deconstructed pop tracks. The new project sees Bruce wear his heart on his sleeve. Centring themes of love, lost and found, self-discovery and intimacy, this affective essence to his work is also acutely tangible in his live performance. Unveiling this new direction on home-turf at En Masse (Bristol) last year, Bruce had the city talking for months, furthered by a show at Glastonbury Festival 2023, the pace for what’s to come is set: a new, deeply personal spectacle to the stage.

Hannan Jones & Shamica Ruddock: Re-imagining in conversation

Hannan Jones’s (Glasgow/Scotland) research draws parallels of personal and collective histories; navigating this through themes of hybridity through language, rhythm, and psycho-geography.
Shamica Ruddock (London/UK) is an artist-researcher often found working between sound, text, and moving image. Ruddock’s research considers Caribbean masquerade and oral folk storytelling practices, Black technopoetics, sound culture, and technosonic production. Fugitivity and refusal are also key departure points.
The sound performance Re-imagining in conversation is cooperation of Future Soundscapes Festival and the Digital Solitude programme of Akademie Schloss Solitude. The project is further developed in the frame of the web residency “Algorithmic Poetry”. A cooperation of Akademie Schloss Solitude and Liquid Architecture.

Klara Lewis & Nik Colk Void with live AV by film artist Pedro Maia 

This is a uniquely audio visual collaboration project developed in 2021 by musicians and composers Klara Lewis and Nik Colk Void along with visual artist Pedro Maia. Guitars, synths, euro rack modular systems, voice, sampling and outboard processing are presented uncompromisingly when Lewis and Void's single approaches unite in a playful collage of sonic U-turns intertwining Pop and Noise. Presenting the project live, Lewis and Void are accompanied by the live visuals of Pedro Maia, following his 16mm analogue film manipulations as a point of departure.

Oval

Oval began in the early 90’s and rapidly gained acclaim for its innovations in electronic music. Composer Markus Popp championed software intuition over his own role in music making for many years, anticipating the AI trend in composition by nearly 30 years. Each new Oval release saw Popp radically redefine his practice, integrating cutting-edge technology and processes into his practice to ensure that each record sounded as contemporary and exhilarating as the last. His new album Romantiq (Thrill Jockey 2023) turns the producer’s inquisitive ear to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art – the romantic.

Simone Aubert: Sound of Space

Simone Aubert is a Swiss-based multidisciplinary artist. As musician she composes sonic worlds for the theatre and dance, as well as for contemporary music ensembles. Aubert’s primary concern for Sounds of Space was to bring space back into relation with our bodies. Based on the notion that space is silent, and that sound waves cannot pass through dark matter, Aubert decided to concentrate on sounds recorded on other planets, mainly from the Mars Perseverance rover instead of using noise from the voids of the cosmos. The resulting eight-speaker “octophonic” sound installation, Sounds of Space, is composed for one voice and five sounds captured in space.

Sofie Birch

Sofie Birch is a sound artist and producer known for her extensive work with soft ambient releases, live shows, animation films and art installations. With electronic hardware and field recordings, she creates melodic compositions that are produced with a sense of brightness and spirit encouraging its listeners to dream and dwell. She is engaged in creating compositions for installation works varying from award winning VR-experiences and animation films to multidisciplinary art and science projects. When performing, Sofie Birch uses hardware machines to build spirited and improvised live shows.

upsammy + Jonathan Castro

Having studied Image and Media Technology at the Utrecht University of the Arts, Thessa Torsing/upsammy is intrigued by the rhythms and vibrational qualities of her surroundings – shaping a singular aesthetic that blurs the synthetic – natural divide. As a multidisciplinary artist she researches these interactions through sound, photography and video, explorations which simultaneously influence her music production process. On her last album Germ in a Population of Buildings, upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures.

Zoë Mc Pherson + Alessandra Leone

Berlin-based Zoë Mc Pherson is a French-Irish multimedia artist whose practice absorbs elements of performance, sound design, installation art and DJing. Their breathless third album and AV show Pitch Blender (2023) is a tight set of cybernetic dancefloor experiments that flicker between the rave and the art space, and arrives courtesy of SFX, the boundary-pushing A/V-focused label Mc Pherson runs with their long-time collaborator Alessandra Leone. The remix EP boast an exciting line up consisting of Jana Rush, Scratcha DVA, MC Yallah, Kasimyn and Jessica Ekomane, that’s sure setting the dancefloor on fire!

Alessandra Leone is Motion Designer, Director, and Live Visuals Artist, crafting memorable audiovisual experiences for both screen and stage. With over fifteen years of experience in the creative industries her work includes commercials, music videos, visuals for stage and events, and new media art. Through collaboration with agencies, design studios, production companies, musicians, artists, and cultural institutions, she creates captivating visual experiences that immerse, engage, inform, and mesmerize audiences.

Friday, 22 + Saturday, 23 September
Betonhalle / Kuppelhalle
Start: 7 pm
Tickets

A project by silent green Film Feld Forschung gGmbH
The concerts are part of the Monat der zeitgenössischen Musik Berlin