The Sacred Realism label presents an evening with Laura Steenberge to kick off its 13th anniversary festival.

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Piriforms (low version) (2010)

Owen Gardner, Catherine Lamb, Bryan Eubanks, Dylan Kerr (voices)

​​⁍ Laura Steenberge, The Ademar Studies (2024)

Talk and performance by Laura Steenberge on 72 Verses for St. Martial by Ademar de Chabannes, an eleventh-century monk

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Ademar Studies 2-4 (2024) for voice and viola da gamba

The 72 Verses for St. Martial, one of the earliest notated polyphonic compositions, has for many decades been considered monophonic by the academic establishment. However, in the 1990s musicologist Manuel Pedro Ferreira wrote a paper calling this into question. Steenberge builds on this work by showing how, when analyzed polyphonically, the structure of the music reveals a medieval map.

Festival Sacred Realism 2024 devotes its second day to new ensemble works by Antti Tolvi and Stefan Thut.

⁍ Stefan Thut, aground (2024)

Stefan Thut (cello), Thomas Nicholson (viola), Bryan Eubanks (saxophone, clave, sine waves), Fredrik Rasten (guitar), Rebecca Lane (quarter-tone bass flute), Catherine Lamb (viola)

Stefan Thut presents a new ensemble work exploring Just Intonation and Rational Harmony developed over the past years, often in workshops and collaborative sessions with members of the ensemble.

⁍ Antti Tolvi, Future Ballet (Berlin septet) (2024) for claves, referee whistles, subcontrabass flutes, flutes, radios, door

As a modular composition, Future Ballet varies depending on the location where it is performed. Previously, the piece was performed outdoors: in the park, in the street, and in the forest. This will be the first time the piece is performed indoors. Or, actually, the piece will also expand partly to the space outside of the venue with the participation of Bryan Eubanks, Catherine Lamb, Laura Steenberge, Boris Hauf, Fredrik Rasten, Antti Tolvi, and Rasmus Östling 

Festival Sacred Realism 2024 concludes with works by Ahti & Ahti, Östling & Herr, and Laura Steenberge.

⁍ Marja Ahti (electronics, composition) & Niko-Matti Ahti (electronics, composition)

Finnish sound artists and members of the collective HIMERA perform a new piece—developed in residence at the solitary Örö Island, a former military base off the Finnish west coast—that focuses on acoustic explorations that open up to the materiality of sound within the continuous movement of natural life and the architectural particularities of bunkers and caves.

⁍ Rasmus Östling & Adrienne Herr, Respect & Admiration

Respect and Admiration is an indexical project of unfixed formatting, constructed of implementations of various kinds, such as quasi-lectures, listening groups, audio plays, speculative maps, slideshows, tools, and multifaceted publications. Taking Red Bull and its Music Academy as its core structure and subject of study, the project aims to pick the low-hanging fruit by questioning and satirizing an overtly problematic channel of expression.

⁍ Laura Steenberge, Piriforms (2010)

performed by The Present vocal ensemble: Olivia Stahn, Hanna Herfurtner, Bernadette Beckermann, Amélie Saadia

Featured artists (Day 1): bela (electronics), Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Susie Ibarra (drums), Yuko Kaseki (movement), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone), Lane Shi Otayonii (electronics), Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Lisa Ullén (piano)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.    

Featured artists (Day 2): Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone), Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Shige (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Viola Yip (electronics)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.  

Featured artists (Day 3): bela (electronics), Audrey Chen (voice), Che Chen (guitar), Tashi Dorji (drums), Alex Zhang Hungtai (trumpet), Yuko Kaseki (movement), Thom Nguyen (drums), Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø (trombone),Hyunhye Angela Seo (piano), Victoria Shen (electronics), Jamie Stewart (guitar), Lisa Ullén (piano), Viola Yip (electronics)

Since 2020, Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø have been organizing DEDICATED PLAY in Berlin, where they have invited diverse artists from around the world, primarily from diasporic backgrounds. While spinning a thread through the larger story of migration across continents/oceans and establishing the concept of home in shared relationships, this project seeks to bring together the commonalities of these experiences and express this communication through familial interplay, improvisation and the merging of sonic languages.

For the fourth edition of this project, BEAM SPLITTER will be expanding the concept, teaming up with XIU XIU (Hyunhye Angela Seo & Jamie Stewart) to curate a six day event across two countries, split between KM28 on Dec 7, 8, and 9 in Berlin and London's Cafe Oto on Dec 11, 12, and 13.  

DLW perform Grammar III & Extended Beats  

Christopher Dell (vibraphone), Christian Lillinger (drums) & Jonas Westergaard (doublebass)

In search of new music, the trio Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard has been working at the intersection of contemporary and experimental music and the avant-garde since 2010. Dell-Lillinger-Westergaard’s work is documented through numerous recordings released on Plaist, enw, HGBS Blue and bastille musique. In 2024, the release DLW: Extended Beats received the German Record Critics’ Award.

"We are a trio of composers. Our work aims at the process of exploring a new musical aesthetic. Our works move at the intersection between contemporary and experimental music and the conceptual avant-garde. Our music is characterised by its energetic intensity, physicality and architectural complexity. Breaking all genre boundaries, our music is characterised by great depth of field and plasticity. Our music derives its tonal and structural richness from the development of innovative compositional processes and conceptions. Our knowledge structure, developed over many years of collaboration, provides a stable basis for forward-looking musical research.

We position ourselves as representatives of what we call "New New Music." The heroic modernism of serialism, structuralism and musique concrète and their procedures form our reference space. The clear thrust of our trio of composers is to lift up the "unacknowledged" (Ernst Bloch) of New Music in order to make it fruitful for contemporary relevant work. Focusing on the in-between of difference and repetition, our music uses mathematically structured micro-timing, multi-perspectival looping, micro-tonality and complex superimpositions of irrational rhythmic relationships."  

www.dell-lillinger-westergaard.de 

Labor Neunzehn's Cluster #37 

Alessandro Bosetti, Plane/Talea, a multichannel piece for polyphonic vocals

Plane/Talea is an archive of anonymous voices that composer Alessandro Bosetti has been collecting for several years.
The archive preserves tens of thousands of audio files of short vocal emissions—utterances—almost all of them barely shorter than a word endowed with meaning, stored in folders that specify their characteristics but omit all biographical details about the person who originally produced them.

Each time Alessandro Bosetti performs the archive he finds himself going through it in new directions, recomposing the vocal fragments without ever altering their sound nature.
Plane/Talea performances take place through a multi-channel sound system in which the audience is immersed, with chairs distributed chaotically in the space.
Each sound performance is preceded by a few days of recordings during which, through a call for participation, anyone is invited to give fragments of their voice during individual recording sessions.

with kind support from inm Berlin e.V.

Morton Feldman's Three Voices (1982) for voice and tape, performed by Nina Guo (soprano) 

Morton Feldman's Three Voices is a nearly hour-long work for three voices, usually performed by one singer accompanied by prerecordings of the other two parts. The piece is dedicated to the singer Joan LaBarbara and incorporates text from Frank O'Hara's poem WIND. 

Zeynep Toraman, solo works for electric guitar

Marta Forsberg, solo for voice and electronics

Zeynep Toraman performs a solo set of well-tuned romantic harmonies, reimagined for electric guitar and electronics. 

Marta Forsberg performs a short set of new music based on processed choir recordings.

The book release concert for Graphème, Volume 4, featuring works by Zeena Parkins, Rabih Mroué, Catriel Nievas, Rana Baba, Magda Mayas and Carl Ludwig Hübsch 

Ute Wassermann (voice, objects), Tony Buck (percussion), Magda Mayas piano), Andrea Parkins (accordion, electronics) & Mike Majkowski (double bass)

Graphème is a publishing project featuring unconventional, hybrid notational formats and graphic scores by international composer-performers. It aims to bridge areas between improvisation, composition, interpretation and performance. The book release of the 4th edition will be accompanied by a concert featuring the ensemble Smallest Functional Unit augmented by Andrea Parkins and Mike Majkowski.

program:

Zeena Parkins, Learning to Disguise Myself in Words Which Were Really Clouds, puzzles for a small group of improvisers  (2014/2024)
Rabih Mroué, My last visit (2024) (UA)
Rana Al Baba, Pink Noise (2023)
Catriel Nievas, continues spaces (2017)
Carl Ludwig Hübsch, 131 ways to begin (2002-2024)
Magda Mayas, Murmur (2024)