Borderline Festival 2024 | 3rd Day

The festival closes its curtains with warped electronics, rhythmic dissolution, and avant-garde that blends alienation with intimacy, with live sets by aya, AMKA, Lamin Fofana, Trevor Mathison, JJJJJerome Ellis, and Costis Kontos.

Trevor Mathison’s concert is supported by the European Network “Sounds Now”, co-funded by the “Creative Europe” program of the European Union.

Costis Kontos

Costis Kontos is an electronic music composer and sound designer. For many years, he was engaged in research within the electroacoustic music scene in the UK, especially as a member/performer of BEAST (Birmingham Electroacoustic Sound Theatre). Since completing his PhD at the University of Birmingham, he has composed music for films, animation, theater, documentaries, and multimedia. With his personal work, he aims to compose musical works that cross genres through the agency of the electronic medium. Using concrete sounds, real and synthetic tonalities, textures, beats, and noise, he explores the expressiveness of sound through its countless modalities.

JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis (any pronoun) is a disabled animal, artist, and person who stutters. Through music, performance, writing, video, and photography, the artist asks what stuttering can teach us about justice. Concepts that organize the artist’s practice include unknowing, improvisation, inheritance, opacity, prayer, gap, contradiction, aporia, eternity, unpredictability, interruption, and silence. Ellis researches relationships among blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. The artist’s body of work includes contemplative soundscapes using saxophone, flute, dulcimer, electronics, and vocals; scores for plays and podcasts; albums combining spoken word with ambient and jazz textures; theatrical explorations involving live music and storytelling; and music-video-poems that seek to transfigure archival documents.

Trevor Mathison

Mathison was a founding member of the internationally renowned cine-cultural artist group, The Black Audio Film Collective (1982–1995), and was the collective’s composer, sound designer, and audio recordist. He has since worked in various modalities of sound art practices and performance art and was a founding member of the dub techno outfit Hallucinator (1993–2000), the artist collective Flow Motion (1993–2000), and Smoking Dogs Films (1995–present). He teamed up with fellow media artist Gary Stewart to establish the production and performance group Dubmorphology (2003–present).

Lamin Fofana

Lamin Fofana is an artist and musician currently located in New York. His music contrasts the reality of our world with what’s beyond and explores questions of movement, migration, alienation, and belonging. Fofana’s overlapping interests in history and the present and his practice of transmuting text into the affective medium of sound manifests in multisensory live performances and installations featuring original music compositions, field recordings, and archival material. His latest releases include “Here Lies Universality,” “Unsettling Scores,” and a trilogy of albums titled “Ballad Air & Fire,” “Shafts of Sunlight,” and “The Open Boat.” Recent exhibitions include JMW Turner with Lamin Fofana: “Dark Waters” (2022) at Tate Liverpool, England; “Preis der Nationalgalerie” (2021) at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; “a call to disorder” (2021) at Haus der Kunst, Munich; “WITNESS” (2017) at 57th Venice Biennale; and performances at Documenta 14 (2017), in Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece. In 2021, Fofana was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists and was nominated for the National Gallery Prize in Germany. He hosts a monthly radio show on NTS Radio, an online station based in London.

AMKA

AMKA consists of four musicians who have been playing all over Europe for 20 years. They meet in the Dudu Loft studio and create a unique dance sound on the borders of punk, kraut, noise, disco, jazz, and pop. The two founding members of AMKA, Dimitris Koulentianos (bass) and Dimitris Kalamaras (guitar), met at the Prince Claus Conservatoire. Back in Athens, they joined forces with improviser Chris Scott (vocals, guitar) and many talented drummers who shaped their sound, culminating in their second album, "On Patrol" (Pestus Studio Records, 2023). In 2024, AMKA will go on their first European tour in May and will take part in several festivals across Greece with Jason Wastor on drums.

aya

aya is actually a real person from the north of England. Her work is primarily concerned with the transfigurative power of experience and memory on the physical body. aya’s heavily anticipated debut LP, “im hole,” was released by Hyperdub in 2021. She has previously released music with Local Action, 2BReal, Tri Angle Records, Astral Plane Recordings, and Wisdom Teeth. She co-runs the label YCO with BFTT, a home things for all things Yes Come On. Aside from her philanthropic work as self-proclaimed First Lady of the Bootleg, aya is in her 3rd year of monthly radio residency with NTS, whom she loves with her whole heart.