Hearing abnormalities

With SunJeong Hwang, Stephanie Castonguay and NKISI, this evening shifts the focus from the work to the process. Instead of appearing as a finished product, sound here emerges as a movement between material, technology and memory – fragile, permeable, open.

Electronic media are not treated as an abstract surface, but are exposed in their material and ecological conditionality. Decaying sound carriers, hacked equipment, hybrid interfaces and archives of field recordings make it both audible and visible that every digital practice is based on concrete resources, decisions and power relations. Technology is not conceived as neutral, but as a carrier of history, selection and exclusion.

At the same time, the concert itself becomes an experimental arrangement. Joint listening as a processual event in space. Artefacts, disturbances and supposed errors become productive, as breaks in the system, as references to what otherwise remains hidden. Between noise, polyrhythmic structures, improvisational openness and sensitive signal processing, a dense network emerges that forms in the moment and immediately disappears again.

An evening about the materiality of electronic sounds, about the archive as a contested repository, and about listening as a conscious practice in a technologically shaped present, carried by two neighbouring venues (Rabbit Hole Theater & Neue Musik Zentrale) that have been shaping the music scene in Essen for years with their independent, sophisticated programmes.