From 27 April to 3 May 2015, Dresden will become a hotspot for advanced music and related arts as the ICAS – International Cities of Advanced Sound network reunites over 20 music and media art festivals into a Festival of Festivals. Assembling a mix of club concerts, outdoor interventions, a multi-day conference programme, a film series, lab formats, as well as an exhibition, the festival adopts the theme of “Tools for an Unknown Future” in an attempt to examine how to cope with increasing uncertainty in the field of culture using the tools that have been developed in our society thus far. In times with no illusions of utopia, the urge to find methods of self-empowerment – a safety net in the face of the unknown – is more urgently needed than ever before. The ICAS Festival takes shape as a unique rendezvous of over 20 independent cultural organisations within the intimate setting of Dresden, providing an exceptional opportunity for artists, professionals, and the public to meet independent arts initiatives from all over the world and to explore the strengths and challenges of multilateral collaboration on an international scale.
Organisations present at the festival will be:
Biennale Némo/ARCADI (Paris, FR) / Cimatics (Brussels, BE) / CTM Festival (Berlin, DE) / Cultures Electroni[K] (Rennes, FR) / CynetArt (Dresden, DE) / FutureEverything (Manchester, UK) / Insomnia (Tromsø, NO) / Les siestes électroniques (Toulouse, FR) / MeetFactory (Prague, CZ) / MoTA – Museum of Transitory Art (Ljubliana, SI) / Novas Frequências (Rio de Janeiro, BR) / ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst (Graz, AT) / RIAM (Marseilles, FR) / Rokolectiv (Bucharest, RO) / Schiev Festival (Brussels, BE) / Skaņu Mežs (Riga, LV) / SOCO (Montevideo, UY) / TodaysArt (The Hague, NL) / UH Festival (Budapest, HU) / Unsound (Kraków, PL) / with more to come As part of its exploration of the “Tools for an Unknown Future” theme, the festival will in part present the closure of the ECAS project, which united 9 European ICAS members in an intense 5-year trajectory of artistic collaboration and knowledge exchange. Several ECAS-commissioned works and supported artists as well as topics within the conference programme will thus reflect on the ECAS initiative as it reaches the end of its course.
As the ECAS project comes to a close, a brand-new multi-year initiative within the ICAS network will in turn suggest a different realm of possibilities for multilateral collaboration. SHAPE (Sound, Heterogeneous Art, and Performance in Europe) unites 16 organisations over 3 years in support of 144 artists through performance and educational opportunities as well as a large number of discussions and workshops within the daytime conference programme. Taking these two major ICAS network projects as starting points, the ICAS Festival will thus explore ways in which artists and cultural workers can cope with an increasingly uncertain future. Advanced sound and its strongly linked new cultural forms and technologies, and these are very perceptible examples for our society of how the human condition is changing. In showcasing these fields, the ICAS Festival aims to deliver low-threshold access such that the public may become better acquainted with the questions and challenges in the field of culture today, as well as to examine possible societal changes that may influence us beyond the impact of the harsh economic changes.
FIRST CONFIRMED ARTISTS AND PROJECTS
Taking place at venues Lab15, Altes Wettbüro, Hole of Fame, and the Thalia movie theatre, the ICAS Festival is headquartered at the Festspielhaus Hellerau. A true birthplace of the 20th century avant-garde, the location that served as an important centre for experimentation with new forms of community living as well as early modern theatre, dance, and performing arts from 1911 until the 1930’s, Hellerau regrouped important artists and thinkers, including visual artist Nancy Spero, choreographer Mary Wigman, eurythmics founder Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, architects Adolphe Appia and LeCorbusier, and composer Igor Stravinsky before being shut prior to WWII. Representing a mix of artists and projects supported by the ECAS and SHAPE initiatives, the first programme elements are:
Lorenzo Senni [IT] / Gábor Lázár [HU] / Mørk [NO] / Bocca al Lupo (Kathy Alberici with Federico Nitti) [INT] / Low Jack [FR] / HUMATIC – “MNM stage version” feat Mieko Suzuki [DE] / Alexander Dorn – Phantasialand [DE] / Random Logic & Izland [SI] With outdoor interventions: Teun Verkerk & Joris Hoogeboom – BUQS [NL] / Environmental Auditors [INT] And a film programme regrouping: “The Sound of Belgium” by Jozef Deville [BE] / “High on Hope” by Piers Sanderson [UK] / “Nine Futures: Sounds Fragmenting” [CA/UK] by Nathan Budzinski & Theo Cook
Within the festival’s music programme, Milan-based composer and multidisciplinary artist Lorenzo Senni exposes and investigates the rhetoric of dance music, particularly that of 1990s hard techno rave culture. Quantum Jelly, Senni’s 2012 debut LP on Editions Mego, and Superimpositions, his 2014 mini-album on Boomkat Editions, were lauded internationally for their “pointillistic trance” (in Senni’s words) and playful exploration of the emotional buildups and breakdowns of euphoric rave music.
Gábor Lázár, a Hungarian computer music composer and innovator, will deliver his mercilessly dry, algorithm-determined sonic structures. His early works were rleased as a split tape with Russell Haswell in 2013, and his first album, ILS, was released on Lorenzo Senni’s imprint Presto!?. A commission by Boomkat’s label, The Death Of Rave, resulted in EP16 in late 2014, and the same label will release a double LP collaboration with Mark Fell this year.
As Bocca Al Lupo, the British experimental, classically-trained violinist and synthesizer ace Kathy Alberici performs her evocative analogue sonic portraits, which interweave string and synth textures around grainy industrial skeletons. Alberici has attracted attention as a member of the psychedelic kraut-doom outfit, Drum Eyes, and also for her collaboration with Mouse on Mars member Jan St. Werner for his electronic opera, Miscontinuum.
28-year-old Philippe Hallais has made a name for himself internationally as Low Jack. His “house music from hell” fuses sexy grooves with industrial metallicism and revels in its own forays into and narrow escapes from tenacious, beatless wormholes. He has released his music on L.I.E.S., In Paradisum, Delsin, and The Trilogy Tapes.
Miha Klemenčič and Gregor Zemljič have been active as Random Logic & Izland since the nineties and are regarded as pioneers of Slovene contemporary electronic music and ambient techno. Their debut album, Numrebs, was a stylistic cornerstone and helped to determine their signature mathematical theory- and algorithm-informed approach. In 2014 they released π , their 4 first album in over a decade. The album takes the shape of one continuous track and thereby addresses questions about duration and time.
Norway- based pianist and composer Mørk (Norwegian for “dark”) makes cinematic, mechanical, minimalist, noisy post-rock. Telling gripping stories using his mechanical piano, his musical influences range from Esbjørn Svensson Trio, Nils Petter Molvær and Motorpsycho to Deep Purple, Kraftwerk and Americana.
MNM is a triple-channel audiovisual system designed as a part of HUMATIC aka Christian Graupner’s H.RP (Humatic Re-Performing) series. The system’s body is a stack of speakers and buttons and its golden arms a shout-out to the traditional Japanese mojo figure, Maneki Neko. In the stage version of MNM, the operator controls sounds and visuals on a triptych screen by becoming physically involved with the media catapult, and synchronizes vinyl records and digital music devices to the activity on the screen. The audience follows the 'humatic' recreation of a unique, post-techno soundtrack.
Finding a home on Dresden’s Uncanny Valley label, Alexander Dorn is influenced by all manner of electronic sounds. His Phantasialand installation takes found images as a starting point and integrates both Dorn and the audience as real elements within these pictures, resulting in a final product beyond a simple moment captured on camera.
The festival’s outdoor interventions include BUQS by Teun Verkerk & Joris Hoogeboom, a project commissioned by ECAS enabling the city dweller to playfully interact with sounds that occur in the local environment. Distributed over Dresden’s Alaun Street, the BUQS, small electronic life forms that live all over the city and invite interaction and relocation, convert public space into a soundscape that invites active exploration, experimentation and reconfiguration. Further inviting a playful interface with the city, the Environmental Auditors project reunites a small musical ensemble in Dresden’s Garden City Hellerau district, joining instrumental sounds with ambient environmental noises in improvisational sessions focusing on the site-specific auditory experience.
The festival also hosts a film programme presenting various examinations of club culture in Europe. “The Sound Of Belgium” by Jozef Deville explores the history of dance music in “the battleground of Europe,” and Piers Sanderson’s “High on Hope” tells the story of acid house’s arrival in Thatcher’s recession-hit, 1980’s Britain. Notably, the programme will premiere “Nine Futures: Sounds Fragmenting” by Nathan Budzinski & Theo Cook, an ECAS-commissioned documentary film that charts the European project’s 9 festivals in their collaborative efforts to support ever-emerging sounds on the continent.
Stay tuned as we reveal a second wave of programming at the end of March!
FESTIVAL PASSES, TICKETS, AND ACCREDITATION
A limited number of festival passports, priced at 40 euro, are available online via the ICAS
Festival website. Tickets to individual events will be made available in April.
Press accreditation is also now open. Journalists and media interested in covering the festival are
invited to fill in the online application form available via the festival website.
PRESS CONTACT
International Press
Taïca Replansky – taica@diskberlin.de
+49 (0) 30 4404 1852
German Press
Johanna Martinez – pr@t-m-a.de
+49 (0) 351 889 6665