Borderline Festival 2023 | 3rd Day

For the twelfth consecutive year, the festival that redefines the experimental electronic music of today and tomorrow will close its curtains with live sets by xato, Arshia Haq and Yara Mekawei, claire rousay, Aho Ssan, Sofia Jernberg, Rainer Kohlberger, and Jung An Tagen, with a submersion in tonal explorations.

Sofia Jernberg

Born in Ethiopia and raised in Vietnam and Sweden, Sofia Jernberg is an exceptional singer/voice artist and composer. She studied jazz and composition in Sweden and lives and works in Stockholm. Her work focuses on unconventional techniques and sounds such as non-verbal vocalization, split tones, toneless singing, and distortion.

“Freedom to Move” is a project exploring the relationship between freedom and the boundaries of musical genres in relation to the contemporary classical music field with the aim to stretch them. The human voice is the most personal instrument. Of all musicians, singers are therefore probably the most connected to their heritage. Thus, “Freedom to Move” wishes to bring together all these voices from five cities around Europe.

Singers: Alkmini Basakarou, Anna Linardou, Konstantinos Angelopoulos, Marissa Bili, Ody Icon
Musicians: Nicky Kokolli (saxophone), George Pappas (oud)

Xato

“xato” is the moniker of multimedia artist and musician Ioannis Nafpliotis (b. 2000), based in Athens, Greece. With a diverse palette of sounds, he debuted in 2020 with “State of Dismay,” an ambient/drone EP released on Himera’s boutique collective GoodbyeForever. Recently, he released on LA-based label TAR and SKG-based label Magdalena’s Apathy. His work involves sound synthesis and manipulative resampling from personal sound design sessions and field recordings, fusing club and avant-garde elements. xato is the owner of the avant-garde label evo-natura and electronic collective xyx.

Arshia Haq & Yara Mekawei

Arshia Fatima Haq (born in Hyderabad, India) works across film, visual art, performance, and sound. She works through counter-archives and speculative narratives, and is currently exploring themes of embodiment, mysticism, indigenous and localized knowledge, particularly within the Islamic Sufi context. She is the founder of Discostan, a collaborative decolonial project and record label working with cultural production from South and West Asia and North Africa. She hosts and produces monthly radio shows on NTS. Her projects have been presented nationally and internationally at museums, galleries, nightclubs, and in the streets.
A prolific artist and scholar, Yara Mekawei’s sonic bricolages draw inspiration from the dynamic flow of urban centers and the key infrastructure of cities. Interested in the philosophy of architecture, social history, and philosophical literature, Mekawei implemented the optical transaction from the musical conversation and transferred the sound waves to visual forms. Her work is based on sound as an essential tool of vision and the philosophy of her compositions is shaped by sophisticated practices that convey messages of the conceptual dimension to the public.

“Sama': The Divine Listening Room” is a performance in the form of an aural call and response between Arshia Fatima Haq and various collaborators; for the iteration in Athens Haq will be joined by sound artist Yara Mekawei along with visuals designed by Anum Awan and Amy Alexander. The piece unfolds as a sonic sculpture that reimagines a vast transnational archive of devotional music and sanctified space within the diaspora. The listeners are invited to join in sama', the act of hearing the divine through deep listening and meditation common in Sufi dargahs or shrines. “Sama’: The Divine Listening Room” is an ongoing series of installations by Arshia Fatima Haq since 2015.

Claire Rousay

claire rousay is based in San Antonio, Texas. She uses field recordings of lighters and typewriters, voice fragments, and classical instrumentation to evoke emotion and memory.

Aho Ssan

“Aho Ssan” is the artist name of Paris-based Niamké Désiré. After studying graphic design and cinema, he began to compose electronic music and create his own digital instruments. Shortly thereafter he went on to win the France Television prize for his soundtrack to the film of Ingha Mago in 2015 and has worked on several projects related to IRCAM.

Jung An Tagen & Rainer Kohlberger

Jung An Tagen (Stefan Juster) is a Vienna-based artist, composer, and musician. By using synthesis and sampling techniques, he builds aleatoric arrays, repetitive figures, and polyrhythmic moirés that speak equally to the body and to the mind.
Rainer Kohlberger (b. 1982 in Linz, Austria) is a visual artist and (media) designer based in Berlin. In 2013, Kohlberger received the Crossing Europe Local Artist Award for his film “humming, fast and slow”—an interference between the analogue and the digital.

“Sama’: The Divine Listening Room” by Arshia Haq & Yara Mekawei and “Freedom to Move” by Sofia Jernberg take place in the framework of “Sounds Now” project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.