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Thursday, 16. May 2024

18:00-21:00 SONIC AGENCY – LISTENING SESSION XI

at Depot (1070 Vienna, Breite Gasse 3) – Free Entry

🌿 Listening to the contributions of RABIH BEAINI (LBN/DE), MOTHER (UK), MIA ZABELKA (AT), YUZU (BGR/AT)

Guests: Yuzu

Open discussion moderated by Li Falkensteiner, Samo Zeichen & Shilla Strelka

* All contributions released via our Website & Soundcloud

RABIH BEAINI

Lebanese-born producer and DJ Rabih Beaini (formerly known as Morphosis) specializes in grainy, imaginative analogue techno. In the past year however, his Morphine label has telescoped in on key (often overlooked) voices in avant-garde electronic and outernational music.

As Morphosis, Beaini has been crafting away in the nether-regions of the techno underworld since the 90s. Having cut his teeth as a DJ, a move to Italy in 1996 proved the catalyst to start experimenting in the studio. And he really did experiment – few people craft the sort of emotional, exploratory techno as Beaini has for labels like Sistrum Recordings (Detroit), M>O>S (Amsterdam), and Styrax (Berlin). His two most recent albums, Albidaya on Lebanese label Annihaya and Dismantle/Music For Vampyr on Honest Jon’s, follow his critically acclaimed 2011 debut LP, What Have We Learned, on Delsin.

Beaini’s genuine musical ability and a range of influences—from krautrock to new wave—seep into his inventive, dark, and emotional productions and immersive DJ sets. These influences also find their way into Beani’s productions with the Upperground Orchestra, a multi-headed improvisational ensemble that explores the terrain between electronica, techno, and improvisational jazz.

While his productions join the dots between raw, elementary electronica, and jazz, his Morphine label has put forward an equally forward-thinking selection of techno from the likes of Madteo, Hieroglyphic Being, and Anthony “Shake” Shakir. In 2014, the label entered a new era with a retrospective trilogy of works by US-based improviser and Buchla synth master Charles Cohen. The collection was the most comprehensive ever to be released, and was followed by an album of new material from Cohen in 2015. Beaini served as a producer for this and subsequent LPs from pioneering American composer Pauline Oliveros, French mechanical-orchestra creator Pierre Bastien, and explosive Indonesian duo Senyawa. He has also helped to organize concerts and tours with Cohen and Senyawa throughout Europe and Japan.

ARTIST

MOTHER – “413DN”

Glasgow based musician & DJ Mark Maxwell aka Mother attempts to weave together a palette of heavily processed samples, found sounds, field recordings, synthesis & electronic percussion, taking cues from early musique concrete, industrial, dub and the sampling techniques of old. Although not necessarily always at the same time…

ARTIST

MIA ZABELKA – “Noise, Listen & Be”

Austrian violinist, vocalist, sound artist and composer Mia Zabelka is at the forefront of international electro-acoustic performance art. She developed her unique musical language in a process she calls “automatic playing”, where the music grows out of her physical movement and finds its expression in her electric violin with electronic devices, alien objects, vocals, and/or the acoustic violin. Using this set-up, she expands her sound range so extensively that the violin itself becomes an interface, an electronic sound generator.
In her music, Mia Zabelka engages with the acoustic interaction between her body and the surrounding environment, with a special focus on the “sonic gesture”. The sonic gesture has to do with how sound moves and how it moves the body at the same time – the embodiment of sound, an intuitive body-sound-machine. Mia Zabelka’s sound art explores this interface and its expression of how communication between humans and autonomous machines can happen; the coexistence of humans and machines in hybrid environments is reflected in sound. Mia Zabelka is particularly interested in the interdisciplinarity between music and science and her work has been described as “scientific music”. It is music beyond melodies, harmonies and rhythm. Scientific music is concerned with making automatic, mechanical processes audible. It is noise, movement, automation, division, symbiosis, dissonance and resonance: an endless adventure of discovery.

ARTIST

YUZU – “Undercurrents”

Following personal obsessions and curiosity Yuzu approaches music by seeking a fluid, unbound sense of sound and listening. She threads with synthesized auralities, spiraling feedbacks, concrete textures, and samples tracing virtual and actual soundscapes. Happy, eerie and intimate fragments are woven together along zest and thrill. Irregularly penetrating bits and raving beats further shape these mutant bodies of sound into an entrancing beast.

ARTIST