Pushing the Envelopes

On their self-titled debut album Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat, both trained pianists, re-invent their favourite instrument to make us hear it in a totally new way.

Thanks a lot Fabri!

"Animist Funeral Journey" is a performance by Per Huttner with Sámi shaman Jonas Engman. It was shown on a burial mound outside Krokvik, close to Kiruna in northern Sweden August 16, 2025.

The performance forms the last part of a larger project where visitors walk in nature with a group of artists. The work focuses on examining mankind’s connection to nature: to nature that is pulsating inside us and to nature which is sprawling and sprouting around us. Special attention is paid to reflections about how contemporary Western civilisation breeds insensitivity to the natural vibrations within us and around us. The reflects on how we, through rationality, have lost the connection to the outside world which is instead shaped by ideas and ideologies. This world view makes us focus on regrets about the past and the future and takes focus from life here and now. In the walk the group investigates how, through traditional Sami and Kven knowledge and the arts, we can reconnect to life in new and inspiring ways.

In the performance Engman wears his shaman attire at a sacred Sami burial mound. He starts joiking and playing his drum and embarks on a journey. After a while Huttner starts making electronic music in real time which is based on Engman’s recorded brain activity and natural sounds.

MORE INFO:
TRANSFORMATION IV: SHAMANIC SOUND EXPERIMENTS

Thank you Peri

Wander Steps (Pascale Criton)
for two microtonal accordions played by the duo XAMP (Fanny Vicens and Jean-Etienne Sotty), 2018

“Wander Steps is based on the interaction of two quarter-tone accordions. The instrumental playing involves the production of tiny differences carefully modulated by ear in course of the live performance by the accordionists. The sought-after interferences (beats, resultant tones, difference tones) generate certain acoustic phenomena sensitive to the response of the space and controllable through modes of playing.”
Pascale Criton

http://www.pascalecriton.com/en/biography

Like the slowly shifting topography of the city of New Orleans, Horizontal Drift stretches in two dimensions. The first is in the domain of pitch, where an altered fretboard gives the possibility of quarter-tone gradations. Second, in the realm of time: the piece is a series of flexible loops whose length and transposition are constantly varied, often overlapping as one fragment drifts into the next…

http://christophertrapani.com/wordpresssite/

∇ (nabla) is a mathematical operator which describes certain global characteristics of a field or region. ∇ may denote the direction and magnitude of the greatest rate of increase (gradient); the tendency to converge toward or repel from a point (divergence), or the infinitesimal rotation at a given point (curl). For a layman (like myself), it is a question of mathematically modeling the complex, dynamic movements of fluids, with ∇ expressing some of the ways in which physical quantities change in space. The symbol, an inverted delta, takes its name from the Greek word for an ancient Phoenician harp.
∇ was recorded live in concert at the Concordia University Hexagram Black Box, in Montréal, on 1 March 2015. The ensemble of compressed air instruments, Plateforme, was invented and developed by Jean-François Laporte. Plateforme consists of 2 Pipes, 8 Telescopic Tu-Yos, 10 Vibrating Membranes and 18 Overtone Flutes. All the parameters of the acoustic instruments and the real-time processing were controlled via computer by the composer.
Benjamin Thigpen

Commissioned by Productions Totem Contemporain, 2015
Duration : 21’ 39''

https://electrocd.com/en/artiste/thigpen_be/benjamin-thigpen/biographie

Raag Bhairav (Saraswati Veena)

Keshav Mohta inquires into the power of sound to influence the fabric of consciousness. He is interested in the re-construction of indian ragas (melodic structures) from an embodied state of meditative presence. His music on the veena, an ancient indian classical instrument, probes into the nuances of the micro notes (shruti) and on the subsequent creation of an aesthetic flavour.

For more information on his work:
www.dharmayog.co.in

Hailing from Porto, Haarvöl are a group operating in the best tradition of ensembles such as Morphogenesis, Double Leopards, 3/4 Had been Eliminated and the Starving Weirdos between textured drones, noise, electro-acoustic experimentation and indefinable manipulation of sonic detritus. Firefly Frequencies presents the second of three pieces for dance commissioned by Ballet Teatro for the play Revoluções (Revolutions).

Haarvöl’s three permanent members — Fernando José Pereira, João Faria, and Rui Manuel Vieira — collaborate with Xoán-Xil López, a Galician sound artistic working on field recording and experimental music. Haarvöl develops cinematic soundscapes, with analogue or digital sound sources weaved in complex and detailed compositions.

The Pulsating Waves (Reality)
Pulse tone waves are frequencies embodied in a pulsar that is at the same time decisive for all humans and, metaphorically, for the revolution. Feeling the pulse of events, of agitation, of breaking, is essential for the revolutionary moment. It is this kind of continuous auscultation that determines success or, rather, the inversion of the whole emancipatory movement in the process of pragmatic transfiguration which, by obvious ineffectiveness, becomes implosive. The pulsations of events thus assert themselves as a decisive engine, and yet, in the face of the weakening of the utopian drive in its inevitable collision with reality, everything changes. The passage from one moment to the other brings with it the presence of the now and the consequent structural modifications that the utopian impossibility needs to maintain itself as an emancipatory impulse. It will then be in the programmatic transfiguration of the revolutionary event that its pulsation is played, more or less strong, but never absent. The decisive clash also affirms the reality, stripped of all the romantic drive that forms the revolutionary utopia. The fracture induces realism, and this is never the dreamed face of emancipation. We are told in the last book of the Invisible Committee that “All the reasons for making a revolution are there. There is none missing. The wreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of the false, the vulgarity of the rich, the cataclysms of industry, rampant misery, naked exploitation, the ecological apocalypse ... do not deprive us of anything, not even being informed of this. ‘Climate: 2016 beats record of heat’ says Le Monde in its main title, now already like almost every year. All the reasons are met, but not the reasons that make revolutions; are the bodies. And the bodies are in front of the screens.” Right.

https://haarvol.bandcamp.com/
https://cronica.bandcamp.com/album/unwritten-rules-of-a-ceaseless-journey

Enregistrement à partir du texte "Le poids du ciel" de Jean Giono dans la minuscule chapelle de Boussac Bourg, lors du deuxième confinement en Novembre 2020.

Voix improvisées : Christine Shaller et Natacha Muslera
Lecture & composition Natacha Mulsera
Texte: Le poids du ciel de Jean Giono

RADIO SCHREBER, SOLILOQUIES FOR SCHIZOPHONIC VOICES

"Radio Schreber, Soliloquies for Schizophonic voices" investigated the recurring theme of 'hearing voices' in sonic and literary works by paying homage to Daniel Paul Schreber's "Memoirs of My Nervous Illness" (Denkwürdigkeiten einen Nervenkranken). Written at Sonnenstein Public asylum and published in 1903, the Memoirs detail and map an alternate delusional world.
For the centenary of Schreber's death, this sound performance gives voice to Schreber's visionary text through a specially created composition that premiered at the Freud Museum, London. As a continuation of his project "Imaginary Hospital Radio", Richard Crow explores a sonic tableaux of phantasmic and disembodied voices embedded in the text as well as in its physical and imaginary locations inhabited by Schreber.

A performance curated by Lucia Farinati with the assistance of Rita Correddu
Recorded and engineered by Colin Potter of Nurse with Wound

Live electronics, sound objects, tapes, live sound mix: Richard Crow
Phantasmic voices of Radio Schreber: Richard Crow, Gabriel Séverin, Anna Teresa Scheer, Nick Couldry, Adam Bohman, Douglas Park and others who remain obscure and unknown...

https://institution-of-rot.org/

Ghost (Given: 1, a drum kit, 2. a room for staying alone)

The parenthetic givens of "Ghost" are somewhat of a provocation. How exactly can one stay "alone" in a room given also that one has a whole drum kit for company? Questions of co-existence (of musician and instrument, sound and its absence, rhythm and interval, action, event and process, sounding, playing and listening) abound in Seijiro Murayama's improvisations, where each sonic gesture or statement engages in the construction of a problem that unfolds along multiple timescales. Not only how to be alone (together) in the room but how to make room for each other (a problem that extends to the individual components of the kit and the sounds they make) in terms of the potential of each for expression or its withdrawal, provocation, conversation, connection certainly but interleaved with moments of mute cohabitation in which what is felt is neither one nor the other but the making room itself.

https://urojiise.wixsite.com/seijiromurayama