Tectonics Athens '21 | 3rd Day

“A Sound Map of the Danube”

a sound installation by Annea Lockwood

Annea Lockwood has been recording rivers since 1970, “not to document them, but rather for the special state of mind and body which the sounds of moving water create when one listens intently to the complex mesh of rhythms and pitches.” “A Sound Map of the Danube” traces the second longest European river's run from the Black Forest in Germany to its delta into the Black Sea. The recordings comprise sounds from the banks, from above and below the water, animals, insects, and interviews with people who live by the great river.

Free admission

Aura Satz, artist talk

Aura Satz in an open talk, along with the curator of this year’s festival, Anne Hilde Neset, about her lifelong artistic career.

Free admission | Reservation is required

“Eupepsia/Dyspepsia - An Archive of Appropriations”

Concept: Karin Harasser and Eva Reiter

The program develops the motifs of eupepsia/dyspepsia as metaphors for and practice of transatlantic relations. Taking an archive of European baroque music in Chiquitos/Bolivia as a starting point, “Eupepsia/Dyspepsia” sounds out modes of appropriation, silencing, and projection that were (and are still) in play in encounters between indigenous and European cultural practices. Music was used by the Jesuit missionaries as a means to convert and ‘civilize.’ This idea still resonates in contemporary cultural strategies. The European disruption of indigenous worlds was toxic and destructive; it produced resistance and hybridizations that were in turn articulated musically. The program therefore experiments with hybrids between baroque and contemporary music, European and New World compositions, text-sound collages that are not conceived as solutions or remedies but as stodgy sound objects to trouble the longue durée of cultural violence.

Ictus ensemble
Anna Mendelssohn: narrator and projections
Eva Reiter: viola da gamba, recorder and additional instruments, composition
Tom Pauwels: electric guitar and additional instruments
Tom de Cock: percussion and additional instruments
Alex Fostier: sound design
Angélica Castelló: composition
Fredy Vallejos: composition
Jorge Sánchez-Chiong: composition

The event is organized within the framework of the Sounds Now network, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.

Free admission | Reservation is required

Marina Rosenfeld + Marino Formenti: "aABCb", 2021

Rosenfeld’s new work for pianist Marino Formenti traces the lines established in a recent exhibition’s objects and drawings, remusicalizing pathways that were previously established as feedback channels and abstract circuits of exchange between sculpture, architecture and sound. Drawing on their collaborative approach to Rosenfeld’s earlier “Deathstar project” (Shelter Press, 2020), Formenti will offer two non-identical performances of “aABCb”, proceeding freely through a non-sequential score and the amplified volume of the Onassis Center’s gallery space.

Tickets 5 — 10 €

Grupi Lab polyphonic singing group

Grupi Lab is rooted on the tradition of Albanian isopolyphonic music. In 2019 Grupi Lab performed live at TUSK Festival in England, drawing the interest of experimental sound artists to this unique music genre. At Tectonic Athens 2021, Grupi Lab will present a music tradition that is familiar to the domestic audience; a complex, yet monolithic music; a genre which was key element of the first recordings produced by MMMΔ, the act that will take on Main Stage after Grupi Lab.

MMMΔ featuring ALEM

“L’âge de l’absolutisme”
Guest: Kalliopi Mitropoulou

ΜΜΜΔ featuring baroque keyboardist ALEM premiere the live version of recently released album, “L’âge de l’absolutisme,” an idiosyncratic take on three landmark late baroque masterpieces: Alessandro Marcello’s “Adagio” from Oboe Concerto D minor, Georg Friedrich Händel’s “Sarabande” from Keyboard Suite in D minor (Suite de pièce Vol. 2, No. 4), and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air” from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major. ΜΜΜΔ’s signature massive low end establishes a gigantesque basso continuo for ALEM’s keyboard extravaganzas to sit comfortably on. In ‘’L’âge de l’absolutisme” an enigmatic manifesto is shaped: sparse evidence of ΜΜΜΔ’s 12-year path from dissonance to harmony. With the help of ALEM’s virtuosic escapades the sound walks a tightrope between strict rule and freedom, majestic grandeur and modest means. Above all ‘’L’âge de l’absolutisme” is baroque music like you’ve never heard.

Tickets 5 — 10 €

Kostas Tzekos

The clarinetist of Ergon Ensemble and Athens State Orchestra will present an improvised set built live. Employing the bass clarinet sounds filtered and processed through loops, Kostas Tzekos will create a wall of sound with parallel sound levels, filling the space with the various textures of this beautifully colorful instrument.

Aura Satz + Mazen Kerbaj – “Preemptive Listening”

The performance will include a special screening of elements of “Preemptive Listening,” a long-term research project and feature film in development on the siren and emergency signals, with a live score by Mazen Kerbaj and voiceover by Aura Satz. Reimagining and recomposing the siren, the project posits the siren's loud glissando wail as a conditioned and learned signal, one that can be conceptually and musically rewired. For the first chapter of the project shot in 2018, Lebanese trumpet improviser Mazen Kerbaj composed a new siren sound using circular breathing, alongside the actor and activist Khalid Abdalla's account of the siren as the emblematic sound of resistance, oppression, and lost futures during the Arab Spring. Shot on 16mm, the film is literally driven by its soundtrack, as the voice becomes a beacon, activating emergency rotating lights. The film will be followed by recent hypnotic shots of international civil defense sirens, in Fukushima and across America, tracing the siren's war-weather continuum – relics from WW2 and the Cold War repurposed to communicate the threats of climate change – and ending at a siren cemetery.

Tickets 5 — 10 €