TUNE Live 2022 - Haus der Kunst

Caterina Barbieri

Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer and musician, whose cascades of synthesizer melodies and rhythmic pulses seem to bend time and space around her. Approaching her practice as an intimate exchange between humans and technology, she generates complex sequences that trigger temporal and spatial hallucinations, often exploring trance and emotional focus.
A sense that music is an agent of creation, and composition a living organism, is felt deeply in her work, where structures emerge and dissolve. Her compositions are at once mechanical and alive, interwoven with organic sounds, such as the 18th century harpsichord and operatic vocals in her album Ecstatic Computation from 2019.

Galya Bisengalieva

Galya Bisengalieva is an award-winning Kazakh/ British violinist and composer. Her intimate bond with her instrument drives her to create beautiful and highly emotive compositions, centring unyielding drones as she weaves across genres like folk, ambient, classical, and electronic music. Bisengalieva is the leader of the London Contemporary Orchestra. As well as her own productions, you can find Bisengalieva’s solos and improvisations on numerous film soundtracks and TV productions, including Mica Levi’s Under the Skin and Thom Yorke’s Suspiria.

Beatrice Dillon

Beatrice Dillon is an artist and musician based in London. Originally trained in visual art, her work brings together interests in rhythm, spatial sound, process-based systems using synthetic and acoustic sound. Chosen as The Wire Magazine’s “Album of 2020”, her release Workaround (PAN) combines FM synthesis with analogue instrumentation and draws on influences including Afro-Caribbean rhythmic traditions and painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grid arrangements and colour.

JJJJJerome Ellis

JJJJJerome Ellis is a composer, producer, writer, and multi-instrumentalist, who through his diverse body of work explores relationships between Blackness, disabled speech, divinity, nature, sound, and time. With an improvisational and theatrical approach, he interweaves the saxophone, piano, synthesizer and sampler, layering melodies and rhythms, to powerfully elicit the healing potential of sound.

His release The Clearing (2021) is a rich work, blending spoken word with ambient and jazz textures, and experimental electronics. Through this he frames speech disfluency, stuttering in particular, as a space for possibility rather than a pathology, creating a powerful connection with music and its ability to open time.

Emiranda

With the project Emiranda, Emir Timur Tokdemir and Tove Agelii piece together tracks and mixes using pop structures, elements of house, techno, rap and fragments of spoken word. Having toured extensively with each of their solo projects, Emiranda is the result of a flattening and merging of the various urban environments and paradoxical clashes of bureaucracy, the corporate world, club and street culture they have encountered, making up a semi-fictive sonic cityscape.

As a solo artist, Emir Timur Tokdemir aka Mechatok, most recently realised a sound installation in Rome’s MACRO curated by Lorezo Senni, and a collaborative album with Swedish rapper Bladee, featuring remixes by Charli XCX, Evian Christ and more. He produced video-game soundtracks such as Defective Holiday (2020) and H.O.R.I.Z.O.N (2021), exhibited at Guggenheim.

After her debut solo album Blinks (2018) on Berlin’s PAN, Tove Agelii aka Toxe released the EP Split together with Crystallmess, she is running her FF sound radio residency on NTS in London, created a soundtrack for Burberry’s runway show, and wrote a composition for a still image film The Story of Leonara by Clemens Stumpf and Loic Vandam.

Okkyung Lee

Okkyung Lee is a cellist, composer, and improviser who moves freely between artistic disciplines, working as a solo artist as well as collaborator in a wide range of genres and fields. Her influences include noise, improvisation, jazz, western classical, and her native Korea’s traditional and popular music, all of which have contributed to her highly distinctive practice, driven by a fearless sense for experimentation. Over the years she has collaborated with artists Laurie Anderson, David Behrman, Arca, Jim O’Rourke and John Zorn to name a few. She has appeared on more than 30 albums, and recently released the hauntingly beautiful solo album 나를 (Na-Reul) (2021), and Teum (The Silvery Slit) in 2020, a richly textured and earthly sound environment.

Renowned for her improvisational work utilizing visceral extended techniques, Lee’s practice includes site-specific compositions, responding to diverse architecture, audiences, and surrounding objects, producing immersive experiences that challenge built-in hierarchies in traditional concert settings.

Lolina

Lolina is an electronic and digital musician, also known for her past projects as Inga Copeland and as a member of the band Hype Williams. Copeland’s first solo album Because I’m Worth It was self-released in 2014. As Lolina, she released the full-length video album Live in Paris, followed by The Smoke.

Her live performances evolved through experiments with DJ equipment, developing a cut up style exemplified on her releases Live in Geneva and Who is experimental music? On her album Fast Fashion, she used CDJ players as a live sampling tool allowing her to move between composition and improvisation.

Kali Malone

Kali Malone (b. 1994) is an American-Swedish composer and musician based in Stockholm. Her compositions implement specific tuning systems in minimalist structure for pipe organ, choir, chamber music ensembles and electroacoustic formats. Kali Malone’s music is rich with harmonic texture through synthetic and acoustic instrumentation that is played in repetitive and extended durations. The music emits distinct emotive and dynamic tones, which create a particular deep focus.

Stephen O’Malley

Stephen O’Malley is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist from Seattle, Washington, and one of the most influential drone avant-gardists of the last decades. He has conceptualised and participated in numerous drone-metal, death/doom, and experimental bands, including Sunn O))), Burning Witch, Khanate and KTL. He is also known for an extensive list of collaborators in both music and art, including Merzbow, and Keiji Haino, and theatre specialist Gisèle Vienne, sculptor Banks Violette, performance artist Nico Vascellari and filmmaker Alexis Destoop.

Lucy Railton

Berlin/London-based cellist Lucy Railton has been an active performer, music producer and composer for over a decade, releasing albums on Modern Love, Editions Mego – GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff) and Takuroku. Having emerged from a long-term engagement with classical and contemporary music, these recent works exist between modern instrumentalism, electroacoustic composition, improvisation and expressive musique concrète. Her work often focuses on the sonic potential of her instrument and how it serves her experiments in electronic music production and installation work.

Wolfgang Voigt

The creative body of Wolfgang Voigt has always been characterized by complexity, boundlessness, and unpredictability. The negation of the bounds of genre, style, and taste has been and still is today a crucial element of his body of work, just like the uptake / quotation and processing of external contents through universal sampling. Having been socialised in the pop culture of the 1970s and 80s, Wolfgang Voigt has since been creating his very own art-music cosmos influenced by glam rock and jazz, new wave and folk music, pop art, and digital expressionism.

TUNE is a series of short sound residencies at Haus der Kunst where artists are invited to present different strands of their work in the form of live performances of solo works and collaborations, screenings, and installations. It brings a special focus to artists working primarily in sound, and the opportunity for audiences to dive deeply into their worlds and practices.

In 2022 the presentation of sound works continues in conversation with the exhibitions in the museum, with a focus on sound’s texture, form and modes of performance. The invited artists move across genres, eras, and influences. Their practices are intensely focused, whether on microtonal composition or on exploring and expanding the sonic possibilities of a single instrument. Works look at the finer details of how sound constructs and decomposes time, with structures that emerge and dissolve, and drift between clarity and opacity. The programme looks at the nature of making and performing sound, whether through collages and narrative driven works, walls of sound, tight composition, and improvisation.

Some of the artists appearing in the TUNE programme are also part of Echoes — a new live exhibition format Haus der Kunst presents in March 2022. Where in TUNE an artist working primarily with sound is invited to present two or more performances, like a solo exhibition for musicians, Echoes concept works more like a group show for artists working in sound, time-based media and performance. Adbullah Miniawy, William Basinski and Christelle Oyiri all perform several works presenting TUNE within Echoes.

Live Programme 2022

28. & 29.1. Wolfgang Voigt
11. & 12.2. Beatrice Dillon
29. & 30.4. Stephen O'Malley, Kali Malone and Lucy Railton
20. & 21.5. Galya Bisengalieva
10. &11.6. Lolina
22. & 23.7. JJJJJerome Ellis
23. & 24.9. Emiranda (Emir Timur Tokdemir and Tove Agelii)
28. & 29.10. Caterina Barbieri
25. & 26.11. Okkyung Lee