Coordinates IV - New Sonic Geographies

04.02.2016 / 19:00 – 21:00
With Karen Power, Mazen Kerbaj

Concert in the context of CTM festival for adventurous music & art.

Pauline Oliveros with Mazen Kerbaj & Karen Power: improvisation with electronics

Sharif Sehnaoui with Omar Rajeh & Malek Andary: “Seif & Sound” (commission, UA) dance and electronics

Takuya Taniguchi: Percussion

This concert features three different acts that draw important connections between new sonic geographies and physicality.

American composer and instrumentalist Pauline Oliveros’s groundbreaking work in tape, electronics, and improvisation as well as her related writings and theory since the 1960s have earned her recognition as one of the most important voices in avant-garde electronic music. She performs with electronics and accordion, which she has played from a young age, often also making use of a signal processing system she developed, called the Expanded Instrument System (EIS). Influenced by Eastern philosophies, Oliveros’s ideas reach far beyond Western music tradition and have pioneered new ways of thinking about sound, significantly contributing to the theoretical canon surrounding the concepts of sonic affect and healing. Her writing about “deep listening” proposes that concentrated emotional and corporeal attunement to sound can bring about transcendent and transformative experiences, and her theory of “sonic awareness” describes the act of focusing attention, over an extended duration, on an environment’s aural characteristics.

This evening, Oliveros will be performing together with Lebanese trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj and Irish improviser and composer Karen Power. Both artists currently live and work in Berlin, thanks to a residency grant by the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. Preceding the concert, Oliveros will share the thoughts and philosophies that have shaped her work over the years in an artist talk.

On Friday, February 5th at HAU1, Oliveros is joined by word artist Ione for the world premiere of the improv piece “Mountain Above / Fire Below; Now”. On Saturday, February 6th, Oliveros invites the audience to “Listening for Peace”, an hour-long deep listening meditation. All proceeds from “Listening for Peace” will be donated to an emergency refugee shelter in the Turnhalle of the Hector-Peterson-Schule, which neighbors HAU3.

The achievements of guitarist and free improviser Sharif Sehnaoui’s musical career have been dependent on his equal role as pioneer and activist. With Mazen Kerbaj and Raed Yassin, Sehnaoui formed “A” Trio, whose first album release in 2003 was allegedly the first dated recording of Arab free-improv music. Sehnaoui’s co-founding of Irtijal, Lebanon’s only experimental music festival, was another groundbreaking act of ambition and expansion in the face of Lebanon’s landscape of political tension. CTM has commissioned a collaboration between Sehnaoui, Omar Rajeh, and Malek Andary. Rajeh is a Lebanese dance choreographer and founder of BIPOD, the biggest contemporary dance festival in the Arab world. Malek Andary has widely expanded the notion of folklore in Arabic dance. They will perform a contemporary rendition of traditional Lebanese sword dances & dabkeh propelled by Sehnaoui’s industrial/oriental rhythms and swirling improvisations.

To close this special concert night, Japanese musician Takuya Taniguchi performs a solo piece for Taiko drums. Continuing in the footsteps of his Master, Eitetsu Hayashi, who is regarded as Japan’s foremost solo drummer and co-founded the world renowned ensembles Kodo and Ondekoza, Takuya Taniguchi bridges the Taiko tradition with influences of a variety of contemporary music cultures.

Information: www.ctm-festival.de

A concert of CTM Festivals with Support by the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Goethe-Institut and the Federal Foreign Office.