FLOATING SOUND GALLERY

Vienna

A C O U S M O N I U M 2 0 2 4

M a y 0 8 - first day

International festival of multichannel electroacoustic music
curated by Anton Iakhontov (Patrick K.-H.), Armando Balice and Alisa Beck | a co-production of the Floating Sound Gallery Vienna, Alcôme and echoraum

Entry
^{per day —
EUR 10 / EUR 7 (reduced) | all three days — EUR 24 / EUR 18 (reduced)}

^{Doors open at 18.30 Uhr
Performances start at 19.00}

︎echoraum
Sechshauser Straße 66
1150 Wien

About the Event

ACOUSMONIUM festival was launched by the Floating Sound Gallery as an annual platform for international artists in 2018 at the New Stage of Alexandrinsky Theater St.Petersburg. It offers a platform of the “loudspeakers orchestra”, proposed by Francois Bayle in 1974 as an environment for live concert situation of electronically made music, to communicate the works of experimental genres.

This year we enjoy the collaboration with a contemporary classic - Alcôme of France, who are not only bringing their program but also their loudspeakers system.

Programme
@echoraum

08 MAY

x Armando Balice

Concrete obscura (15’) 2024 / PREMIER
commissioned by Alcôme

Concrete aeterna (13’20) 2024
commissioned by Grand Chalon Conservatory of Music.

x Qingqing Teng

Collective Sleepwalking events (15’) 2024 / PREMIER
commissioned by Alcôme

Ghost Shouting, Ghost Screaming (13’) 2022

x Diane Daher

Mayday, Part II (short version 12’10) 2023

x Patrick K.-H.

Postard 11 (03’43) 2023 / PREMIERE
realized with the support of MA7
Yellow Rabbit (10’11) 2023-24
realized with the support of SKE / austromechana

x Martyna Kosecka

Ruba'i (8’05) 2020
Virya (17’) 2023-24

Concrete obscura , 15’, 2024 – PREMIERE
by Armando Balice

Concrete Obscura is the second installment of the "Concrete" series, aiming to engage with a raw material inspired by both the literal meaning of "concrete" as an architectural symbol of the modern era, and Pierre Schaeffer's concept of musique concrète in 1948. Concrete, widely used in construction since the latter half of the 20th century, gave rise to the brutalist movement, exploring simplistic and massive forms that convey both utopian and dystopian aesthetics.
Concrete Obscura may resonate with "La fièvre d’Urbicande" from the "Cités obscures" series, although it does not draw direct inspiration from it. The comic's narrative, blending realism and fantasy, portrays tensions between order and chaos within a totalitarian architectural cityscape disrupted by a geometric structure that emerges and vanishes, illustrating human and natural contradictions. Concrete Obscura aims to express these dualities through soundscapes, exploring contrasts such as mass-lightness, chaos-harmony, and organic-mechanical.

Concrete aeterna (13’20) 2024
by Armando Balice

commissioned by Grand Chalon Conservatory of Music.

Armando Balice is a Franco-Italian electroacoustic composer and improviser. He is the director and co-founder of the electroacoustic group Alcôme, as well as a professor of electroacoustic composition at the Grand Chalon Conservatory in Burgundy.

He draws inspiration from the abstract idea of Black and explores the poetic and cultural references associated with it, including painting, poetry, and various cultural elements. Armando Balice seeks to develop an intense and deep musicality, almost orchestral in nature, drawing influences from contemporary music with a more noise-oriented character, as well as from the extensive repertoire of acousmatic and classical music.

more about Armando Balice

Collective Sleepwalking events (15’) 2024 / PREMIERE
by Teng Qingqing

commissioned by Alcôme

"I saw the color of someone else's dream. It was a mix of black and white, like ink poured into white paint, stirred and swirling. A circle of black and a circle of white, like a vat of swirling black and white. And the sound of breathing was like the gasping of a man held by the devil until he dies..."

— Lianke YAN

This piece is inspired by a novel by Yan Lianke, titled Rixi, literally "The Death of the Sun." The story takes place in a village during the harvest season, in a scorching August: one night, the village is struck by an epidemic of sleepwalking. The villagers succumb one after another. Yan Lianke explained that the idea came to him from a childhood memory.

I am drawn to the "mythorealism" atmosphere in the novel and seek to explore the subtle boundary between half-dream and half-awake states through sound. By incorporating elements of traditional rituals, I aim to immerse the audience in a dreamscape. The sounds used in the piece will evoke a dream or a memory, perhaps concealing a collective dream or memory, and a microcosm of an era… …

中文简历:

« 我看到了别人梦中的颜色。那是黑色和白色的混合，就像墨水倒入白漆中一样，搅动着旋转。一个黑色的圆圈和一个白色的圆圈，就像一个黑白交错的漩涡。呼吸的声音像是一个被魔鬼抓住直到他死去的人的喘息声……"

这个项目的灵感来自闫廉科的小说，《日晏》，字面意思是“太阳之死”。故事发生在一个村庄，正值丰收季节，是一个炎热的八月：一夜之间，村庄陷入了患上夜游症的流行病。村民一个接一个地倒下。闫廉科解释说，这个想法是来自他的童年记忆。

我被小说中的“神话现实主义”氛围所吸引，试图通过声音探寻半梦半醒状态之间的微妙界限。我使用传统仪式的元素, 将观众带入到一个梦境中。作品中的声音将唤起一个梦境或一段记忆，背后隐藏着的或许是一个集体梦境或记忆，以及一个时代的微观世界。

Ghost Shouting, Ghost Screaming (13’) 2022
by Teng Qingqing

Qingqing Teng 滕晴晴 (China, born in 1990) is a composer based in France. She works in various fields of sound creation: acousmatic music, mixed music, improvised vocal performance, music for film, and dance.

Throughout her career, she has been interested in musical theater and has attempted to combine electroacoustic music and theater within her works and multimedia performances. She breaks away from traditional musical expression and chooses the most suitable means of sonic expression for the needs of dramaturgical development.

more about Teng Qingqing

Mayday, Part II (short version 12’10) 2023
by Diane Daher

Why are you crying?
It’s all good, so no worries, no worries.
You see, sometimes you can trust a person and then when things are down they forget about you.
Smile for me tomorrow.
Bye

Composer, harpist, and singer, Diane Daher navigates through a diverse musical universe encompassing contemporary, electroacoustic, improvised, popular and film music. Interested in creating parallel worlds and universes rooted in the richness of electroacoustic sounds, she explores multidisciplinarity, incorporating dance, theater, video and drawing in her project.

After studying philosophy, she published a duo for harp and violin titled "The Ten Tearful Souls of Charon" with Harposphère editions in 2014. That same year, she founded the Ciné-concert group, Ensemble Ménilmontant, dedicated to creating contemporary and electroacoustic film music for silent movies from the 1920s-30s.

more about Diane Daher

Postard 11 (03’43) 2023 / PREMIERE
by Patrick K.-H.

realized with the support of MA7

Yellow Rabbit (10’11) 2023-24
by Patrick K.-H.

realized with the support of SKE / austromechana

Patrick K,.-H, (aka Anton Iakhontov) – sound artist, video artist, composer. Has been active on the experimental scene since middle 1990s as improvisation guitarist, founder and composer of “Beligriush” orchestra and visual artist. He currently works as electroacoustic music composer, live-acousmatic performer, video artist and animation maker. His wide-range art experiences turns him more into interactive forms and reflects his belief that most of the laws as well as paradoxes of each single media can be mapped to other medias for producing a certain (un)expectable result.

more about Patrick K.-H.

Ruba'i (8’05) 2020
by Martyna Kosecka

is a type of short poem consisting of four lines, popular especially in classical Persian poetry. In this composition, I have used four different types of voices, reciting Rubaiyat by Persian poet Omar Khayyam, and transformed the original material into a certain musical odyssey of sounds. Although the meaning of the texts is very close to my heart, I do not approach the material of Khayyam's poetry strictly semantically; I want to treat it purely sonically and create a specific color narrative, a sort of experimental phrasing by manipulating the arrangement of the particles of the musical material, in a sense dreamed-up, imaginary and rewritten poetry verses. The very form of the piece also refers to the quatrain, with the usually contrasting third hemistich of rubaiyat, which in this composition is a kind of dreamlike suspension of the musical action.

Virya (17’) 2023-24
by Martyna Kosecka

is a radio poem inspired by the poem "Window" by the Persian feminist poet and film director Forugh Farrokhzad (1934-1967). Here, the text of the English translation (recited by the composer herself) meets the spirit of the original Persian words (recited by Hengameh Mofid), represented by the poet herself, and the two interpreters of her writings. The three share a window, analyse the world through parallel dimensions and dream “for a moment of awareness, and seeing, and silence”.
The work commemorates the 90th birth anniversary of the poet.
The composition was supported by the Statens Kunstnerstipend in Norway.

Martyna Kosecka’s music grows out of her interest in philosophy, physics, linguistics and the mythologies and fables of the world. She is a Polish composer, performer, conductor, curator and researcher in new music. In her projects she works with narratives, microtonality, symbolism and ritualism, by using multidisciplinary solutions. She emphasises the richness of transcultural relationships in art, drawing from the cultures of Iran, Poland and Norway, the countries she has connected through her life.

more about Martyna Kosecka

Supported by / Gefördert von
Stadt Wien Kultur, BMKÖS, SKE austromechana, echoraum, ALCÔME, Sacem and Copie Privée

petites formes

Special thanks to SONORA music