In keeping with tradition, Skaņu Mežs will host a free-entry event for the White Night culture forum of 2019. This five-hour porgram will consist of genre-wise diverse performances. After a two-year break experimenting with other venues, Skaņu Mežs will return to its traditional choice for White Night events – St. Savior’s Anglican Church (Anglikāņu street 2). The event starts at 20:00. Admission is free.
The line up is: Joachim Nordwall, Systema Solaris, Glociks, Astrid Sonne, Maria W Horn, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Nina Garcia.
Based in Porto, Portugal, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha has been a pivotal figure in the Portuguese scene, both for exploratory music and performance. He founded SOOPA a music and art collective active in Porto since 1998 and directs the ensemble HHY & The Macumbas since its debut in 2009. He works as a sonic and scenic constructor, within the interception of sound, gesture, voice, stage and film, operating elements of pre-language, resonant choirs, cyclic percussion, cybernetic systems, unfathomable presence, pressure, haptic memory, allopoiesis, echo and intra-cranial-dub.
Joachim Nordwall (b. 1975) is based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a long background in the Swedish experimental music scene, starting out with recordings with the psych-drone duo Alvars Orkester as a teenager in 1988. His early interest in psychic tension created by sound is now as ever present in his music. His ”Soul Music” albums for Entr’acte shows his deep interest in circular rhythms, analogue synth loops and mind expanding experiments. Nordwall has also released his music on labels like Ash International and Hospital Productions. From 1999-2005 he was sweating with the avant punk rock trio Kid Commando and when that stopped he created the ritual drone rock group The Skull Defekts. Nordwall also runs iDEAL Recordings since 1998 and has been collaborating with artists like Aaron Dilloway, Mika Vainio, Mats Gustafsson, Leif Elggren, Gabi Losoncy, Mark Wastell and Christine Abdelour, and he is a busy organizer of festivals and concert nights in Sweden and abroad.
Maria W Horn is a composer hailing from the north of Sweden, based in Stockholm since 2011. Maria W Horn is interested in the manipulation of time and space through sonic extremes – oscillating between minimalist structures and piercing power electronics utilizing both digital and analog synthesis as well as acoustic instruments and audiovisual components.
Her work examines aspects of human perception – how audiovisuality and overload/loss of perceptual stimuli can conspire to transcend everyday life and invoke alternate mental states. She is a part of Sthlm Drone Society – an association working to promote slow and gradually evolving timbral music, and co-operates the label XKatedral.
Mariachi is Parisian guitarist Nina Garcia’ solo project, started in March 2015. Mariachi experiments between improvised and noise music. The setup is ultra minimal: 1 guitar, 1 pedal, 1 amp. Everything is focused on the gesture and the sound research of the instrument: its resonances, limits, expansions, impurities, all the audible parts of the guitar: to go with or against it, to contain it or to let it go, to support it or to hurt it. You’ll probably find: feedback, crackling, short circuits, impacts, harmonics, grindings noises, overflowings, notes and an almost perfect chord.
Her first LP was released in October 2018 on No Lagos Musique and Doubtful Sounds. Nina Garcia was born in 1990, she lives and works in Paris.
Astrid Sonne is a Copenhagen-based composer and viola player. With a background in classical music, she opens up an electronic space to channel different perceptions of sensory and emotional states of being through open, melodic compositions. Balancing contrasts is a reoccurring theme in Astrid Sonne’s work, where alternation between repetition and renewal is used as a mean of expression. Her compositions consist of everything from synthesizers to choir samples and viola sequences, exceeding genre definitions yet paying homage to sources of inspiration, be it a Danish choir tradition or various noise soundscapes. Furthermore, Astrid Sonne has engaged in creating commissioned works, varying from ‘Ephemeral’, a piece for choir electronics and viola presented at Berlin Atonal 2018, to site-specific compositions for the old ruins under the Danish Parliament and a stretch of the Copenhagen Metro.
Glociks (Gustavs Voldemārs Lociks) is a Latvian electronic musican based in Liepāja. Through his atmospheric yet dissonant music, he sonically explores and interprets such themes as fear of solipsism and melancholy/apathy as well as different aspects of cognitive dissonance. As of finishing his studies in Liepaja University (New Media Arts study programme), Gustavs also creates visual works, researching different digital tools to make, as he calls them, “digital artefacts” and often combines his sound and visual practices to create audio-visual experiences.
Systema Solaris brings together organist Jana Zariņa, composers Oļesja Kozlovska and Agita Reķe, and cellist Sarma Gabrēna. Through a collaborative process, the group creates an ambient atmosphere that combines classical harmonic techniques with non-traditional sounds. An ambient soundscape is generated based on NASA’s ‘Space sounds’ recordings, converting electromagnetic vibrations into sound through organ, cello, electronic instruments, as well as objects found in the nature and instruments constructed with them. This 40-minute cycle presents a musical continuum going from planet to planet, inviting the audience to conceive of how our solar system may sound. By analysing the recordings, the group has created a unique sound for each planet.
Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Astrid Sonne, Maria W Horn and Mariachi are artists of the Skaņu Mežs co-founded SHAPE platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, which is supported by the „Creative Europe” program of the European Union and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia.
The event is supported by Riga City council.
More info: baltanakts.lv, shapeplatform.eu
