Saturday 16th

Film Screening: Sonita

(2015 ‧ PG ‧ 1h 30m ‧ Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami)

17:00 - 18:30

After her family attempts to sell her into marriage, a young Afghan refugee in Iran channels her frustrations and seizes her destiny through music. Grabbing the mic, she spits fiery rhymes in the face of oppressive traditions.
Watch trailer.

19:00 - 19:45 The Heads and The Golds

The couple behind shared projects including The Hunter Gracchus and Singing Knives Records and individual projects such as Roman Nose, Blue Yodel and Papal Bull, Fiona Kennedy and Jon Marshall’s duo work draws on their professional and personal experiences of mental health as manifested in the individual and the family and set against contemporary depoliticised, pathologizing and commodified interventions, playing with disrupted sound localization and attempts to determine and categorise acousmatic and visualised sound sources.
http://singingknivesrecords.co.uk/

20:00 - 20:45 Ji Youn Kang

Ji Youn Kang plays with two customized bamboos and a kkwaenggwari, with analog devices that connect the instruments for further real-time processing. She uses the voltage flow between her body, a self-built generator, the bamboo sticks and an extra synth, until they become strongly linked together. The kkwaenggwari provides rhythmical ritual flow created by feedback system equipped hidden, and takes over the gesture from the bamboos, expanding its rhythmic worlds outwards, until the whole space becomes a part of the resonating body, singing and breathing together with the instruments’ stubborn struggling voices.

Ji Youn Kang is a Korean composer, performer and sound artist based in The Hague. Most of her music pieces have been composed based on the rites of Korean Shamanism, and many of them were written for Wave Field Synthesis System, exploring the relationship between musical and physical spaces. She is also active as a solo performer seeking for the ways to combine three different sound areas on stage; acoustic instruments, analog and digital sound with DIY analog synthesizers and live processing on laptop. Currently she is teaching at the Institute of Sonology in Koninklijk Conservatorium.
http://www.jiyounkang.com/

21:00 - 21:45 Mazen Kerbaj

Playing in solo has always been an important part of Mazen Kerbaj’s musical journey; it is in this bare-bones setup that he can experiment the most with his instrument, pushing it beyond any recognition. His use of various every-day objects (tubes, plastic bowls, balloons, aluminium foil…) to “prepare” the trumpet, and his unique playing techniques allow him to create raw soundscapes that sound sometimes like electronics (he himself describes his playing as “electronic music, played acoustically”), especially when he plays several continuous layers of sound at the same time on an instrument that is not designed for that.

Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics author, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. He also works on selective illustration and design projects and has taught at the American University of Beirut. Kerbaj is the author of 15 books translated into more than ten languages and his work has been shown in galleries, museums and art fairs around the world. Mazen Kerbaj is widely considered as one of the initiators and key players of the Lebanese free improvisation and experimental music scene. As a trumpet player, he pushes the boundaries of the instrument beyond recognition.
Photo credit: Micke Keysendal
https://mazenkerbaj.com/