A ROOM THAT ECHOES
The Audio Foundation presents a festival of immersive music, surround sound and deep listening. Through quadraphonic, octaphonic and dodecaphonic sound systems, portable speakers, massive analogue synthesiser arrays, multiple radios and more – the festival promises unique technological listening experiences from a lineup of extraordinary international and local performers and composers.
29 July – 1 August 2021
Festival homepage
OPENING NIGHT:
Suzanne Ciani (USA)
Flo Wilson – LIVE
Thembi Soddell (AUS)
Concepcion Huerta (MX)
JIM-S (MX) – LIVE
mHz (IRAN) – LIVE
Thursday 29 July @ The Audio Foundation, doors open 7pm
Presale tickets available from UTR
SUZANNE CIANI
Suzanne is a five-time Grammy award-nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist who has released over 20 solo albums including “Seven Waves,” and “The Velocity of Love,” along with a landmark quad LP “LIVE Quadraphonic,” which restarted her Buchla modular performances. Her work has been featured in films, games, and countless commercials as well.
She was inducted into the first class of Keyboard Magazine’s Hall of Fame alongside other synth luminaries, including Bob Moog, Don Buchla and Dave Smith and received the Moog Innovation Award. Most recently, she is the recipient of the Independent Icon Award from A2IM.
Suzanne’s piece is a live concert that she did in Geneva, Switzerland just before the pandemic started. It’s called “Improvisation on Four Sequences”. More info can also be found here.
mHz
mHz (aka. Mo H. Zareei) is an electronic musician, sound artist, and researcher. Using custom-built software and hardware, his experiments with sound range from electronic compositions to kinetic sound-sculptures and audiovisual installations. Regardless of the medium, Zareei’s work aims to highlight the beauty in the basics of sound and light production, and reductionist audiovisual elements that draw inspiration from physical and architectural principles.
Publishing his electronic music projects under the moniker mHz, Zareei’s albums have been released on LINE (US), Important Records (US), Leerraum (CH), and Kasuga Records (DE). His installation Rasping Music was the recipient of the first prize for sound art in the Sonic Arts Award 2015.
He holds a Bachelor of Science in physics from Shahid Beheshti University of Tehran, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and a PHD in Sonic Arts from Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa, where he is a lecturer in composition and sonic arts, and creative director at Aotearoa Audio Arts.
mHz will be performing the work ‘Same Room, Another Day’:
“Same Room, Another Day” is the outcome of two weeks of quarantine isolation in a hotel room in Auckland, New Zealand. The room was square-shaped, with a king-size bed in the middle. The bathroom, shower and a bath tub were located on the same side as the entrance door. On the opposite side, a black sofa and a small desk with a desk lamp on it leaned against the ceiling to floor windows that had framed an urban view: a construction site, surrounded by a number of residential and commercial buildings, and a moderately curvy street running through them.
During the week, construction workers in their high-vis vests worked from morning till late afternoon. Cars drove by all day. They stopped by the red light, and moved on when the light turned green. Night times were quieter, and the traffic lights would turn into the main actors of the urban frame. On rainy nights, their role would be accentuated by the reflections in the puddles on the street. It was almost wintertime. Some days it rained, some days it didn’t. But even when the sun wasn’t covered behind the clouds, you could easily tell that it was the winter sun. The light was distinctly different from that of Tehran’s late spring sun, one that I had just left.
FLO WILSON
Flo Wilson is a composer, performer and artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau/ Auckland, Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Her creative interests include computer music, embodied performance, spatial sound design and immersive installations. In particular she is curious about the relationships between people and technology; how technology can extend, reduce and manipulate our modes of being.
THEMBI SODDELL
Thembi Soddell (b. Bendigo, Australia 1980) is a sound and installation artist, electroacoustic composer, and practice-based researcher with an interest in psychology, perception, extreme emotion, and the subjectivity of experience. They work with the sampler, generating sounds from field recordings, instrument textures, played found objects, and synthesis to form surreal and ambiguous realisations of place and experience. These volatile, filmic sound worlds often exploit the dynamic extremes, toying with a listener’s sense of expectation and disquiet.
CONCEPCION HUERTA
Keen documentarian of the experimental scene in Mexico for more than five years, Concepción Huerta has extended her creative practice of visual media towards sound design. With a constant activity in the noise, improvisation and audiovisual collaboration circuit, she creates aural textures of narrative background with ambient and noise as pillars. Concepción has an EP “Cueva de Cristales” (2018) for Vorágine, an album for Static Discos, Personal Territories (2019), an EP with Fliae.latam “Lost Time” (2020), an imminent album in collaboration with Mabe Fratti, and an upcoming release with the Amor Muere ensemble and an extensive list of collaborations that include artists such as Fernando Vigueras, CNDSD, Mabe Fratti, Camille Mandoki, Gibrana Cervantes, RSNNC, José Orozco M, Rodrigo Ambríz, Camilo Ángeles.
Concepción Huerta will be presenting the piece “Journey to Betelgeuse”
“In this piece I wanted the sonic evolution to be conducted in a very organic way through a narrative that could be evoked sonically. I started from an imaginary idea, how would one hear the star Betelgeuse travel? Even though it is an idea impossible to be realized in reality, let alone in 20 minutes, I wanted to make the narrative exercise of constructing it from the imagination. In technical matters, I wanted the way of specializing to generate a bit of strangeness, as if we were inhabiting a space full of uncertainty, a new space for us. Using mostly moog slim phatty synthesizer oscillations, samples and concrete sounds, all starting from the sound design made in Ableton Live.”
JIMMY SOLÓRZANO
Jimmy Solórzano is an electronic musician and sound artist from Guadalajara, México. He holds a Bachelor of Audio Engineering from SAE Institute in Mexico City, and has been active as a recording engineer and music producer since 2015. Throughout 2020 Jimmy has worked as the in-house technician at the Audio Foundation, as well as developing bespoke electronic musical devices and workshops for the Musical Electronics Library. His principal creative focuses are performative and generative electronic music and his recent work has explored creative means of incorporating natural sounds into installation and performance contexts, as well as the development of different forms of psychoacoustic expression.
FULL FESTIVAL PROGRAMME:
OPENING NIGHT
Thursday 29 July @ Audio Foundation, 7pm
Suzanne Ciani (USA)
Flo Wilson – LIVE
Thembi Soddell (AUS)
Concepcion Huerta (MX)
JIM-S (MX) – LIVE
mHz (IRAN) – LIVE
THERE NOT HERE
Thursday 29 – Saturday 31 July @ Audio Foundation, 12pm – 7.30pm
There Not Here – Tash Van Schaardenburg, Jimmy Solōrzano, Sam Longmore field recordings installation
NIGHT TWO
Friday 30 July @ Audio Foundation, 7pm
Jōse Orozco Mora (MX)
Natasha Anderson (AUS)
Sergio Merce (ARG)
Judith Hamman (AUS)
Jo Burzynska
Malcolm Riddoch – LIVE
Clinton Watkins – LIVE
AFTERNOON SESSION
Saturday 31 July @ Audio Foundation, 2-6pm
Musical Electronics Library Performance
John Kim
Phil Dadson – Radiophonic work with Sam Longmore / Torben Tilly / Rachel Shearer / Flo Wilson
Johnny Chang performs Michael Pisaro (USA)
NIGHT THREE
Saturday 31 July @ Audio Foundation, 8PM
Warren Maxwell sound installation activated by Malcolm Riddoch Al Fraser
Clovis McEvoy
Mabe Fratti (GUA)
Richard Francis (live)
Anthony Pateras (AUS)
Thomas Arbor
Kraus (live)
FINAL DAY
Sunday 1 August @ Old Folks Association (Gundry Street), 2-6pm
The Observatory Project
Bluetooth Orchestra – Kristian Larsen
Colin Woods, Andrew McMillan
Malcolm Riddoch Organgy