25/04/2019
18:00_ exhibition_ Exhibition opening with sonic interventions by ooooo & Lucie Vítková.

26/04/2019
10:00 - 13:00_ Symposium Day 1: space and perception: Lila Athanasiadou, Annette Vande Gorne, Aki Onda (at RITCS) More...
14:00–17:00_ Symposium Day 1: ubliminal awareness: Xabier Erkizia, Pedro Oliveira, David Toop (at RITCS) More...
20:00_concert_ on waves with Enrico Malatesta, Doron Sadja, Tomoko Sauvage, Mark Fell (at RECYCLART)

27/04/2019
10:00 - 13:00_ Symposium Day 2: causing impact: with Juliette Volcler, Séverine Janssen, Salomé Voegelin (at RITCS) More...
14:00–17:00_ Symposium Day 2:voice and words: with Jennifer Walshe, Beatriz Ferreyra, Manfred Werder (at RITCS) More..
20:00_concert_shifted meaning by Peter Ablinger, Lucy Railton, Andrea Neumann, Jennifer Walshe (at WERKPLAATS WALTER) 

28/04/2019
14:00 - 18:00_ durational performance dara dara with Rie Nakajima, Aki Onda, Akio Suzuki & David Toop (at RECYCLART) 

29/04/2019
14:00–17:00_ Workshop by Enrico Malatesta (at WERKPLAATS WALTER) More...
20:00_ film screening: TORSE (Maryanne Amacher, Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham)
Pre talk with Bill Dietz, followed by conversation with Lars Kwakkenbos (at ARGOS)

30/04/2019
20:00_ concert/book launch: music by Enrico Malatesta
Occam XXVII (percussion: Enrico Malatesta )
Adnos I-II-III (diffusion: Emmanuel Holterbach)
(at DECORATELIER JOZEF WOUTERS)

1/05/2019
11:00 – 17:00_Workshop by Oracle (at AU QUAI) More...
11:00-22:00_ parcours and in-situ: actions for spaces with Oracle, Paulo Dantas, Anna Raimondo, Isabelle Stragliati (sound walk), Thierry Madiot with Yanik Miossec (sonic massage) (at Q-O2. Offsite from 18:00)

2/05/2019
11:00 – 17:00_Workshop: Anne-Laure Pigache (at AU QUAI) More...
20:00_concert and film program: light and colour: Manuel Lima, Michael Vorfeld, Mariska De Groot, Luke Fowler (at CINEMA NOVA)

3/05/2019
11:00– 17:00_Workshop: Adam Asnan (at RITCS) More...
20:00_concert sound and poetry by Paulo Dantas, Anne-Laure Pigache, Marc Matter, Guillaume Maupin (troubadour)

4/05/2019
11:00– 17:00_Workshop: Jonathan Frigeri (at AU QUAI) More...
11:00_walk: Isabelle Stragliati
20:00_concert on resonance with Adam Asnan, Sofia Jernberg, Rebecca Glover, John Butcher. (at CHURCH ST. JEAN BAPTIST)

5/05/2019
14:00 - 17:00_ in-situ performance: inbetween Klaas Hübner, Franziska Windisch, Els Viaene, Jonathan Frigeri, Pierre Berthet & Rie Nakajima (at LA FONDERIE)

 

Installations

Vernissage Thursday 25/4, at 18h, with interventions by ooooo and Lucie Vítková.
Opening hours: 26+27/4 16h-19h, 1/5 11h-20h, 3+4/5 14h-18h.
Finissage 5/5 18h.

Lucie Vítková - Portraying the Cityscape
Lucie Vitková portrays parts of Brussels as well as its people. During her one month Q-O2 Interfaces residency at MAAC, she used different media to dig deeper into the surrounding neighbourhood, met lots of new people, and invited many of them to participate on the project. She created over fifty graphic scores, made with make-up such as lipstick, eye shadow, eye pencils etc., based on which people could play, dance or write poems. The video presents various interpretations. During these sessions, Vitková wrote down new techniques which grew out of the collaborations. From time to time she played these materials in the street in front of the gallery, so people passing by could listen.

Featuring: Fhun Gao, Annalena Fröhlich, Julia Reist, Paulo Dantas, Alice Pamuk, David Alonso Morillo, Raphael Malfliet, Ian Mikyska, Haruhiko Okabe, Alhadi Adam Agabeldour, Dagobert Macib, Steven Jouwersma, Signe Boe, Lucie Vítková.

Alice Pamuk - Multiples
Alice Pamuk has developed a sound installation in which short phrases of pop music are looped and broadcast in the space. The proposal arose out of several years of research around pop music (including an earlier project which involved analysing interviews with American rappers and hip hop producers). Despite this fascination for pop music, Alice Pamuk never trained as a musician and sees herself as very much outside the tradition. She uses her lack of musical literacy as a tool to provoke contact with people from other musical backgrounds – both a trained music arranger and a pop singer from The Voice Belgium. The original phrases of pop music have been filtered both through Pamuk’s own skills and interests and those of her collaborators, resulting in a different kind of material which has been displaced from its original context.

Arranger : Loïc Bodson
Singers: Amalia Avilan, Ramona Sulita, Lucie Vítková
Artistic collaborator: Marc Doutrepont

Melissa E. Logan - Split Sheets by University of Craft Action Thought
The point of departure of the installation Split Sheets is a symposium entitled From Split Sheets to the Streets which took place in Brussels in the context of a residency at Q-O2 workspace. The presentations were by artists, cultural thinkers, philosophers, and share culture practitioners: Femke Snelting, ooooo, Yoni Van Den Eede, Prodromos Tsiavos, Matthias Hornschuh, Christian von Borries, with the moderator Tamar Shafrir.

Video work from the symposium, including canvas, rope, wood, is set to AI-generated copyright free music which Melissa E. Logan has made with an app built primarily for advertising and film music.

Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay - The Return (2010)
Sound, gold leaf, megaphone, 90 seconds ∞ at irregular intervals.
The cry irrupts into the periphery of your hearing, on the border of your awareness of the city’s cluttered acoustic environment. Your ears are inured to these kinds of sonic emergencies in Brussels, the City of Sirens, so it takes a while to even register the alarm that is gradually getting louder somewhere in the distance. There is something melancholic, something anachronistic about the sound, like an air raid siren from war times, a sound from your memories. But then from within the rising and falling of the siren you discern the trembling of a human voice. This emergency is coming from a throat, a boy, a changeling at the interstice of human and machine, adult and child. Just at the moment when the siren’s call reveals itself to be human, it disappears, burning itself out in a final, quivering shriek.

Klaas Hübner - A Pipe of a Different Colour
Under the synonym of Mr Tuttle, Berlin-based sound artist Klaas Hübner spent one month working in Brussels as a repairman, offering free repairs of any kind to anyone. He collected recordings and objects from the repairs and assembled them into audio sculptures that give an insight into his endeavours.

Audio Walks

Justin Bennett - Multiplicity : a spectral analysis of Brussels
This project began during a residency at Overtoon in Brussels in 2017. Justin Bennett decided to focus on the idea of acoustic territories. Right from the start the idea was to produce an audio walk, but the complexity of the city proved very distracting. He spent time going for long walks, listening through DIY acoustic filters, analysing siren sounds and making a sculpture from broken brass instruments. Q-O2 encouraged the artist and hosted his research in 2018 and 2019.
Although spectral analysis suggests a scientific approach, Multiplicity is a multiplexed wild ghost chase through the urban fabric of the capital of Europe. A mashup of field recordings, sonic experiments, observations, theoretical and utopian texts, and conflicting multi-lingual instructions guide us through territories defined by language, politics, urbanism and sound.

Wederik De Backer - Angst Walk
“Molenbeek is a hellhole. One of the scariest and most dangerous places in Brussels.” These are not the words of the artist, but a paraphrase of what has been said in the international media and by the current American president. Molenbeek could be this hellhole, but is also the place where Q-O2 is located. Wederik De Backer did research into the question of what the sound of danger and fear means for people from around Molenbeek. Through co-creation and sonic research, he has created a sound walk, pinpointing the places where inhabitants fears are most prominently represented.

Workshops

29/4/19: 14:00—17:00 (at AU QUAI) | Enrico Malatesta : Rudimenti
Rudimenti revolves around sound and its modes of perception and production, with a focus on the relation between objects and surfaces; the workshop is aimed at sharing Malatesta’s main research interests through simple practical experients that it is useful to observe:
-sound as a form of movement
-prehensility
-spaces and bodies
-sound as autonomous zone of connection between human and -non-human beings
-simplicity vs. multiplicity
-dry sounds / resonating sounds
-drums as a stage
-fluidity and fixity
The workshop is open to performers, dancers, musicians, writers, theoreticians. Maximum of seven participants, no prior knowledge necessary.

1/5/19: 11:00—17:00 (at AU QUAI)| Oracle : Reading the Zone: introduction to oracular practice & public intervention
In this workshop Oracle will introduce oracular practice, an eyes-closed body-voice practice of ‘reading’ different spaces, from public space to the intimate setting of private living spaces. This vocal architectural choreography produces a peculiar performativity which depends on auditory perception rather than a visual logic and highlights the idiosyncratic nature of listening. Each practice session is unique to the moment and environment and involves individual expression in a collective setting.
During the workshop we will visit and practice in diverse spaces and examine the influence that these distinct environments have on the practice, on the individual practitioner, on the observer and on the spaces themselves. The workshop will culminate in a public intervention open to a broader audience. We will wander during the transitory moment when day turns into night, when nature holds its breath for a moment while the city continues on at its usual pace. We will welcome the darker matters of the day, ‘reading’ the prophetic information contained in this moment. Vocalizing is an alternative, obscure and concrete way to touch the unknown and hostile.
Maximum of 15 participants, no prior knowledge necessary.

THURSDAY 2/5/19: 11:00—17:00 (at AU QUAI)| Anne-Laure Pigache : Speech is full of noise
This workshop is based on Anne-Laure’s work on speech and langage. Its aim is to practice the musical plasticity of speech, to practice the plasticity of the talking brain that listen to the sounds of the words formed through the mouth, to be overwhelmed by your own dyslexia, to trick yourself, to play with, mess with, and disrupt your own speech.
Maximum of 12 participants, no prior knowledge necessary.

3/5/19: 11:00—17:00 (at RITCS) | Adam Asnan : Location sound recording, and the influence of Phonogeny
In this workshop, Adam will introduce some themes that are essential to his working practices, from both a conceptual and technical perspective, with the aim of assisting in developing the participant’s awareness of and proficiency in sound capture on location, and in evaluating the results. Certain subjects will be proposed, such as the notion of “phonogeny” as a parallel to “photogeny”, and the influence of this concept on one’s approach to recording and mixing, and how we might determine an aesthetic criterion for the balance between sounds or sound and space.
The workshop will include a performance activity that will place the participants in control of the recording, with a specific focus on the art of dynamic and creative mixing as a voice in itself. For this, the participants are invited to bring a single sound object, instrument or text with which to contribute.
Prior knowledge of recording is beneficial, but not necessary in this regard, having an interest in sound as a creative medium is all one might need to make the most out of this opportunity.
Maximum of 12 participants, prior knowledge welcome but not requested, bring your recording device if you have one.

4/5/19: 11:00—17:00 (at AU QUAI) | Jonathan Frigeri : Induction into dream (radio workshop)
What could radio be, other than a propagator of information? In this workshop, radio is conceived as a creative tool, a medium, by which to enter into the dream zone. Radio is the liminal space between “here” and “there” and it has the power to reach our subconscious. The exploration of the electromagnetic fields and radio phenomena has a subversive potential to destabilise certain processes of a mass-media system. In referring to Gaston Bachelard (the right to dream), Walter Benjamin, and Gregory Whitehead, the workshop will be started by an introduction, and will lead to a series of practical exercises, with an attempt to transpose those dream states into a short piece of radio.
Maximum of 10 participants, basic knowledge of sound-recording/editing/mixing required. Please bring computer and headphones, and if possible a portable recorder (otherwise provided by Q-O2).

Symposium

Lila Athanasiadou - From the Mechanism of Speech to the Mechanism of Meaning
In the introduction to his Midtown 120 Blues album, Terre Thaemlitz unpacks the embedded context from which house music emerged, arguing that it cannot be intuited from contemporary methods of the production and dissemination of the genre. After a short examination of his methodology, Lila Athenassiado will introduce the situatedness of sonic experiences as produced, perceived and consumed by bodies. Departing from Alexander Graham Bell’s spatial exploration of the vocal cavities and through Sarah Ahmed’s queering of the normative understanding of perception, Athenassiado first foregrounds the material condition of sonic situations. then introduces the figure of Helen Keller, problematizing the given-ness of perception, before concluding her talk with a discussion of Keller’s role in the development of philosophy and in the work of poets, architects and visual artists Arakawa and Gins. Through her ability to construct images without seeing and soundscapes without hearing, Keller improvised the perception and consumption of sound as an embodied way of holding the world in place.

Annette Vande Gorne - Writing Acousmatic Music on Fixed Media
This reflection on techniques for electroacoustic, fixed-media composition is the tangible result of more than 25 years of experience teaching the subject at the Belgian Royal Conservatories in Liege, Brussels and finally in Mons. Just as studying the techniques of harmony, counterpoint, and fugue serves as preparation for studying classical composition in European conservatories, the techniques presented here are useful for composers embarking on more experimental paths. Born from sound recording on fixed media – disc, magnetic tape, computer memory – Pierre Schaeffer remarkably foresaw many of the implications of this new repertory. His work is the true musical revolution of the twentieth century. François Bayle defined a further repercussion with his term acousmatic music, focusing on blind listening. Other schema linked to fixed-media composition followed: the creation of objectively organised and formalised events according to their interactions was replaced by approaches for guiding listening and communicating with the realm of the imagination.

Aki Onda - On José Maceda
José Maceda (1917–2004) was a Filipino composer and ethnomusicologist who rigorously documented South East Asian musical practice through extensive fieldwork. Drawing on this archive of primary musical material, Maceda combined Filipino musicality with a knowledge European avant-garde composition and created one-of-a-kind works that fuse cutting-edge compositional techniques such as spatialization, attention to timbre, and use of radios and cassettes for sound diffusion.
In this talk, Aki Onda will discuss Maceda’s practice, re-mapping and re-contextualizing his legacy within the current global experimental music scene.

Xabier Erkizia - The Sound of an Ox-cart: Aesthetics and amnesia of a thousand-year-old noise.
The idea of collectivity is one of the most important conditions when carrying out any exercise in sonic archaeology. Noise, always foreign by definition, tends to become sound if there is a community that wishes it, even if this desire limits the meanings that each form of sounding conveys. Therefore, all collectivity supposes a political reading of our sound environment, a revision of our political reality through the sounds, an unstable reality that changes parallel to the sociopolitical changes that surround it. The sound of bullock carts or oxcarts is probably one of the oldest non-strictly musical sounds of the history of humanity, but above all, it speaks of a long and persistent social wound.

Pedro Oliveira - 1,977 Ways to Say “No”
In this talk, Pedro Oliveira inquires into the materiality of voice databases, their semantic and political value, and their continued existence as archives. Oliveira is interested in exploring and intervening in the deployment of what he calls “sonic biometrics” in the border and migration industries of Germany and the EU. State-sponsored campaigns often transfer biometric assessment from machines to citizens, encouraging peer-surveillance in train stations, airports, and public offices, all the way to police-enforced racial profiling and violence. These forms of racial profiling, concomitantly, are fed back into machine-learning processes which reproduce systemic biases and colonial assumptions in their decision-making processes. Such feedback loops show how sound is instrumentalised to act as a disciplinary mechanism, and how biometry is fundamentally a performative gesture, that is, how it seeks to pinpoint that which it has tasked itself with revealing. The presentation unfolds by following Oliveira’s current research project on “accent recognition technologies” as its main narrative thread.

David Toop - Instruments of Darkness : A performance in which speaking may take place
David Toop’s improvised performances grow from curiosity about resonance: how to let the soft invisible characteristics of a space and its harder boundaries resonate; how to let materials of all kinds resonate; how to let time resonate, so that durations and our sense of quick or slow are in a state of complex vibration; how to let memory resonate, so that the phantoms of sound and the void of silence penetrate into personal history. The materials Toop uses vary, some of them conventional musical instruments, some electronic, some acoustic, some autonomous, some abject or without any boundaries. All of them ask questions of what an instrument actually is, a conglomerate whose pieces only come together in the darkness of deflected sight.

Juliette Volcler - Sonic fences in public spaces
Sonic space is under construction. On this building site, there are no bulldozer alarms to be heard, and no pneumatic drills, but there are carefully worked silences, voices and sounds. There are no workers to meet, but there are designers, academics, advertisers, weapons manufacturers and composers. An aural geography slowly emerges, which can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the targets, the areas and the time of the day. When sound is used to shape public spaces and individual behaviours: a commented selection of sounds and videos from the emerging city.

Séverine Janssen - Brussels’ Sound
For almost two decades, BNA-BBOT has been creating a history of Brussels. A micro-history in the medium of sound, its writing is the voice. The voice as a micro-trace that cannot be reduced to keyboard strokes, to its visual presence. An undefined collection of voices and sounds surging up from times past, the BNA-BBOT sound archive forms an organic, polyphonic biography of the city. It speaks to how the city might have been, how it is, how it might someday be. This factory at work uses convictions, visions and practices. Séverine Janssen will discuss both methodological and political issues relating to the production of public sound data and will reveal a couple of processes BNA-BBOT has investigated.

Salomé Voegelin - Unstable Contacts: a political imaginary made from water and honey
Sound is always an unstable contact. It is an insecure and unsecured connection that when heard in its sonority rather than its semantic message or lexical referent presents the in-between: the fragile space between things that do not touch but generate an indivisible volume. This volume is not a measure of decibels but the capacity of sound’s invisible expanse and the demand of its forceful reciprocity. It is not outlined and bounded by walls, ceilings, floors and windows, “this” or “that”, but is the mobile and viscous encounter between things that does not keep a shape but grasps anyone who might listen. Thus it is the condition of listening, where my sound is part of other sounds and they are part of me: where we inter-are, objects and subjects as things, creating fluid approximations, converging towards each other and dissolving again.
This intervention invites a rethinking of politics, understood as the governance of interaction and living together, from a being according to listening as a being according to the in-between: performing the capacity of the world in the fluid and grasping capacity of sound.

Jennifer Walshe - workflow, notation
Jennifer Walshe will speak about layers in musical performance and notation, addressing a variety of possible approaches, both technical and aesthetic.

Beatriz Ferreyra - Identification of sound characteristics
A short presentation of an approach to identifying the characteristics of sounds by focussing on their internal and external morphology, as a basis for electroacoustic composition. The approach is based on the idea of a “Solfège de l’objet sonore“ by Pierre Schaeffer, that was developed within the GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales) in Paris in the 1960s. The aim was to develop a new vocabulary to describe and classify any sound, regardless of its origin. As a member of the group from 1963-1970, Beatriz Ferreyra, has been at the core of this change of perspective. With the help of her voice, she will introduce us to some elements of this vocabulary.

Manfred Werder - this very passage
Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature. But the human is nothing other than this very passage from pure language to discourse; and this transition, this instant, is history.
[Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History]
Manfred Werder will read from the ongoing work 20170 - a collection of found text that surveys 2800 years of discourse.