Alice Kemp (b.1972, UK) explores an idiosyncratic praxis involving experimental music, audio composition, public/private performance, installation, drawing, writing, lo-fi video, and object making. Her work is informed by subtle states of trance, dream, and disturbance. She has presented live art internationally, and released audio/musical works through independent labels such as Fragment Factory (DE), Harbinger Sound (UK), Erratum (FR), Tochnit Aleph (DK), the Helen Scarsdale Agency (USA), Dead Mind records (NL), and Coherent States (GR). Kemp is a Schimpfluch affiliate and a human ex-voto, living and working in Devon, England.
Arnaud Rivière practises free improvisation, playing solo, in groups and through collaborations, since the late 90’s. He has performed with musicians such as Roger Turner, Matin Tétreault, Erik M, John Boyle & Aya Onishi (Bayal and Nihilist Spasm Band), Alexandre Bellenger, Jean-Philippe Gross, Pascal Battus, Miho, Sophie Agnel, Thomas Bonvalet (L’Ocelle Mare), Julien Desprez, Anla Courtis (Reynols), Adam Bohman, Mario De Vega, Joke Lanz, Aaron Moore & Daniel Padden & Lawrence Coleman (Volcano The Bear), Gert-Jan Prins, Ignaz Schick, Mario Gabola, Clayton Thomas, Olivier DiPlacido, DJ Sniff, Mat Pogo, Jérôme Noetinger or Erik D’Orion, Since 2011, he participates to Onceim, an orchestra of 30 musicians based in Paris working between large free improvisation and interpretation of pieces especially written for the orchestra by inner-members or composers as Eliane Radigue, Stephen O’Maley, Peter Ablinger, John Tilbury, etc)
Audrey Chen is a 2nd generation Chinese/Taiwanese-American musician who was born into a family of material scientists, doctors and engineers, outside of Chicago in 1976. Parting ways with the family convention, she turned to the cello at age 8 and voice at 11. After years of classical and conservatory training in both instruments, with a resulting specialization in early and new music, she parted ways again in 2003 to begin new negotiations with sound in order to discover a more individually honest aesthetic.
Brett Wagg is a Berlin-based artist and musician, primarily working in the fields of Noise, Ambient, and Industrial music. The sole operator of the Total Black label (founded in Montreal in 2012), eventually growing into the Sentimental Youth brick-and-mortar record store in Berlin. He has been working in the DIY music community in North America and Europe for close to 20 years. Organizing and curating events since 2005, he has become increasingly interested in the importance of the existence of physical spaces for underground community building, and in-person interaction and exchanges between audience and artist.
Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness cavorts with restless, glitched out heaviness. Her creative momentum comprises a range of collaborations and an endless nomadism.
Davide Tidoni is an artist working from the boundaries of physical, perceptual, and affective dimensions of sound. His work addresses questions regarding interactions with acoustic space, interdependence, and impermanence. His practice also includes interests in the use of sound in counter-cultures and social contexts of struggle. He published The Sound of Normalisation (2018), a field research on the ultras group Brescia 1911, and Where Do You Draw the Line Between Art and Politics (2021), a series of interviews with individuals active at the intersection of art and politics.
Daniel Löwenbrück (b.1974) is a German performance artist, composer of tape-music, (sometimes) visual-artist & curator.
As a performance artist and composer of tape-music he performed internationally since the late 90’s as part of the Schimpfluch-Gruppe (with Rudolf Eb.er, Dave Phillips, Joke Lanz), as a duo with singer and performance artist Doreen Kutzke, as part of Ohne (with Tom Smith, Dave Phillips, Reto Mäder), with Swedish conceptual artist Leif Elggren, with Brazilian video- and sound-artist Marcellvs L. as Stallgewitter, and solo as Raionbashi and under his own name. He performed in New York, Sao Paulo, Bordeaux, Paris, Moscow, Minsk, London, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Chiang Mai, Tokyo, Osaka, Rotterdam, Vienna etc.
Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi’s flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed DUMA (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. Modus Operandi, and a collaboration with Brazilian metal band Deafbricks.
Edka Jarząb is practicing deep listening as a starting point for sound activism. She is interested in voice as a bridge between the public and private sphere; listening, singing, and improvisation as a practice of social resistance. Edka uses extended voice techniques, radio waves, field recording and electronics creating an audiosphere for her personal and collaborative performance works. She co-creates the Warsaw-based community Radio Kapitał and is the author of radio plays and interventions. From 2020 to 2021 she was a resident of the experimental studio WORM in Rotterdam; permanent collaborator of the interdisciplinary platform Q-O2 based in Brussels.
Ioana Vreme Moser (b. 1994) is a Romanian sound artist engaged with hardware electronics, speculative research, and tactile experimentation. In her practice, she uses rough electronic processes to obtain different materialities of sound. She places electronic components and control voltages in different situations of interaction with her body, organic materials, lost and found items, and environmental stimuli. From these collisions, synthesized sounds emerge to carry personal narrations and observations on the history of electronics, their production chains, wastelands, and entanglements in the natural world.
Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations. She creates situations where the sound acts as a transformative element for the space and the audience. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.
JUNKO has performed with Hijokaiden as a vocalist since 1982 (Chutter, 2014). She has appeared on all official Hijokaidan records since its beginning. She is known for her powerful, relentless voice, and confrontational voice (Chutter, 2014). The uniqueness of her voice has recently gained increasing Western attention, and Junko has been involved in a number of recent collaborations with musicians from outside the Japanese noise scene.
Mark Fell is a multidisciplinary artist based in Rotherham (UK). His practice draws upon electronic music subcultures, experimental film, contemporary philosophy and radical politics. Over the past 30 years Fell’s output has grown into a significant body of work – from early electronic sound works and recorded pieces, to installation, critical texts, curatorial projects, educational systems and choreographic performances.
Martin Howse (b.1969, UK) is occupied with an investigation of the links between the earth (geophysical phenomena), software and the human psyche (psychogeophysics) through the construction of experimental situations (performance, laboratories, walks, and workshops), material art works and texts. From 1998 to 2005 Howse was director of ap, a software performance group working with electronic waste, pioneering an early approach to digital glitch. From 2007 to 2009 he hosted a regular workshop, micro-residency and salon series in Berlin. Howse has worked and collaborated on acclaimed projects and practices such as The Crystal World, Psychogeophysics, Earthboot, Sketches towards an Earth Computer and Dissolutions. For the last ten years he has initiated numerous open-laboratory style projects and performed, published, lectured and exhibited worldwide. He is equally the creator of the ERD modular synthesizer series.
Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practice, writing and pedagogy, he explores performative forms of estrangement as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), Shanghai Biennial, No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow), Sonic Protest (Paris) and lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Institute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VIII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College. In 2017, he completed a Ph.D. at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier.
Nick Klein is an artist working in sound and art and sometimes (begrudgingly) sound art with a lean towards the social potential in those modalities as they interact. Klein has recorded a large amount of music for tape, CD, digital file, and vinyl editions for music labels around the world, as well as running his own amorphous label project PL (primitive languages, Psychic Liberation, etc). Concurrently, to the best of his ability, he has shown work in visual art contexts. Klein is uninterested in the prohibitive ideological tropes and circumstances that both contexts offer, and focuses the intent of his work on trying to see what productive energy comes from the friction between the two. Klein likes loud volume, cooking, offline community building, records, bars, synthesizers, and comedy.
Klein is currently located in Berlin. Klein has operated a monthly radio show on Montez Press Radio since its inception and is spending 2023-2024 developing a monthly invitational program at the Volksbühne Roter Salon. Klein has collaborated in various capacities and medial materializations with Wilted Woman, Audrey Chen, Das Ding, Hugo Esquinca, Jean Louis Huhta, Erik Nystrand, Scant, and many more. Klein has performed and shown works in contexts and festivals like The Amant Foundation (USA), SARA’S (USA), MOMA PS1 (USA), De La Cruz Collection (USA), Volksbühne (DE), Empty Gallery (HK), Berghain (DE), Tresor (DE), Seendosi (SK), Cafe Sismo (CDMX), Cafe Oto (UK), Folkteatern (SE), Burning Fleshtival (USA), Herrensauna (DE), and Summer Scum (USA).
Oren Ambarchi’s works are hesitant and tense extended songforms located in the cracks between several schools: modern electronics and processing; laminal improvisation and minimalism; hushed, pensive songwriting; the deceptive simplicity and temporal suspensions of composers such as Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier; and the physicality of rock music, slowed down and stripped back to its bare bones, abstracted and replaced with pure signal. From the late 90’s his experiments in guitar abstraction and extended technique have led to a more personal and unique sound-world incorporating a broader palette of instruments and sensibilities. On releases such as Grapes From The Estate and In The Pendulum’s Embrace, Ambarchi employed glass harmonica, strings, bells, piano, drums and percussion, creating fragile textures as light as air which tenuously coexist with the deep, wall-shaking bass tones derived from his guitar.
Oswald Berthold is a founder of farmersmanual (1995), a renowned pan-european electronic disturbance conglomerate; co-owner with Florian Hecker of fals.ch (1998), a pioneering online music label, and the musical artists cd_slopper (1999). In 2001 Berthold received an honorary mention in digital musics at the Ars Electronica festival with the project “pxp”.
Working increasingly on real-time data-driven generative music in the early 2000s he started specializing in AI and robotics, and went on to earn an MSc. in computer science (2012) and a Ph.D in developmental robotics (2020), both from Humboldt-University of Berlin. As a post-doc project he co-founded the Berlin-based robotics startup Jetpack Cognition Lab in 2019 with fellow roboticist Matthias Kubisch, where they invented and started marketing “flatcat”, a one-of-a-kind bio-inspired AI-pet robot for private users (your next robot is a pet).
He is currently a senior research scientist at AIMS API, a company providing AI based music search services to business customers. He keeps making and publishing music digitally and occasionally posts small text pieces on the internet.
Roc Jiménez de Cisneros (Barcelona, 1975) is an artist. In 1996, he founded the computer music project EVOL, which has been the core of much of his artistic output to date. His approach can be understood as an aesthetic exploration of algorithmic composition and a deconstruction of rave culture. His work has been released by international record companies such as Entr’acte, Mego, Presto!? and fals.ch, and on his own record label, ALKU, which he co-directs with Anna Ramos since 1997. Straddling psychedelia and academia, Jiménez de Cisneros has presented his work live and in installation form at galleries, museums and clubs in Europe, North America and Asia.
Rudolf Eb.er’s rites and artefacts are portals to the traumatic expanses and abysses of human existence. Regarded as psychopomp or art-brut shamanist, his trail of work leads deep down to – and through – the nethermost regions of the human psyche. Rudolf Eb.er’s research de-occults the psychic body through psycho-physical tests and trainings. He employs and combines abreactive and cleansing actionism with sonic rituals, psychoactive acoustics and close-up fieldrecordings of nature and decay, generating audio-environments into which he plants grotesque psycho-magic rituals and tantric exercises that trigger a nondual, higher awareness. Rudolf Eb.er aka Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck founded the Schimpfluch extreme and outsider artist collective in Zürich in 1987. Schimpfluch exponents are highly regarded for their unique and obscure aural and visual work; their confrontational, physically demanding performances and shock treatments remove the boundaries of the body and open up accesses to the collective unconscious.
Russell Haswell was born in Coventry, 1970. He started out as a paper boy, then an industrial cleaner at Peugeot/Talbot in Ryton-on-Dunsmore, before studying Fine Art at Coventry University. He has performed with a computer or modular synthesiser in 30 countries around the world, on 4 continents, as well as completing long term international residencies. He has presented projects extensively in venues and festivals including the Prix Ars Electronica, the Serpentine Pavilion, the Barbican, the V-A-C Foundation in Russia, MOFO Tasmania, the Office for Contemporary Art in Norway, ICC and CCA in Japan. In addition to his work in galleries, nightclubs and festivals he has also released a huge amount of records and CDs on labels including Editions Mego, Warp and Diagonal Records. Russell’s work is deeply inspired by various forms of extreme music ranging from Detroit Techno to Black Metal and he is perhaps most well known for creating highly innovative, often improvised, experimental, critical and abrasive works.
Víctor Mazón Gardoqui’s work questions perception, altered states and vulnerability through un/stable arrangements. His work materialises in three main fields: actions or site-specific performances through experimental processes, exhibitions as consequences of previous actions and collective work through collaborative groups and seminars in cultural and academic centres. Since 1999 he has been involved in experimental tactics of media agitation through actions, performances and seminars in public spaces and mass media interventions through the use of sound, light and custom electronics. His works have been performed and exhibited in museums, galleries, on billboards, urban screens and public TV/radio stations worldwide.
Woonjii is the founder of experimental collective Yisekai, has played at .Tag and VG+ at 宀club and is a veteran crate digger based in Hong Kong. Her techno and rare experimental collection, released after 00’s, craft out apocalyptic vibe for off-limit experience.
Woonjii spent the past years sorting rare collections released after 00’s of experimental and techno records acquired from a warehouse record store in Hong Kong which closed down in 2019. Shortly after her debut at 宀Club in 2022 and 宀Podcast MIX032, Woonjii received numerous positive reviews, she was then invited to play at .Tag and all-vinyl label VG+ at 宀club. Her selections often craft out an apocalyptic vibe for those seeking off-limit experience. Prior to diving into the world of DJing, Woonjii was already immersed in promoting and curating licensed music for retailers in APAC as sales and marketing in a company which is now part of Apple Music for Business. Her graduation thesis of MA in Arts and Cultural Enterprise at the Central Saint Martins suggested pathways for the sustainable development of the music industry.
Giada Dalla Bontà is an Italian researcher, curator, and writer focusing on the intersection between sound, politics, art, underground and experimental practices, with a particular emphasis to unofficial cultures in the late Soviet Union and in contemporary practices in Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Baltics. Throughout her career, she has worked with Lisson Gallery, Mondrian Foundation, HNI Rotterdam, Venice Biennale, and collaborated with independent art projects and experimental music labels. She has won several scholarships and grants, including Valand Academy – University of Göteborg in collaboration with Bard University and De Appel. She is currently based in Berlin and in Copenhagen, where she is a PhD fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies of Copenhagen University in association with the Sound Studies Lab.