In keeping with tradition, Skaņu Mežs will return to the Anglican Church for White Night 2016. This six-hour porgram will consist of genre-wise diverse performances.
Kablam
DJ and producer Kablam (aka Kajsa Blom) was born by the Swedish west coast and moved to Berlin in 2012. She started her career as a DJ, as one of the residents of Berlin’s Janus party alongside co-residents Lotic and M.E.S.H.
Blom’s style, in keeping with her Janus peers, experiments with the radical possibilities of music, of what a club environment is or can be and of what a dance floor looks and feels like. As a DJ, she manipulates digital tracks, taking advantage of the advanced possibilities offered by CDJs. She likes to play and mix contrasting genres, finding imaginative points of entry and combinations between them, using the parameters of space rather than time to structure the music. Her debut EP Furiosa was published in 2016.
Audio:
https://soundcloud.com/janusberlin/kablam-furiosa-janus005
Spatial
Spatial is an electronic musician and multimedia artist from London exploring low frequency vibration with physical intervention through DJ sets & live performance and via recorded media. He equally examines the structural occupation and perception of opti-sonic transmissions through home coded audiovisual installations and the emergent behaviour of chaotic systems by simple rule-based repetition through generative design.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ye6ymhtoJc
Susanna Gartmayer studied painting and printmaking and is self trained in bass clarinet and composition. 2015 saw the release of Gartmayer’s debut solo recording, AOUIE. In this album, mouth cavity shapes and vowel sounds, necessary for multiphonic wind instrument playing and the shift of overtones were the starting point for a multidimensional journey into the bass clarinet’s sound. Gartmayer’s live show, based on this album, is played without amplification. She exhibits the same attention to detail – the setup for each tune is slightly different, taking into account the way the audience is sitting as well as venue acoustics and the playing position she wishes to adopt.
Audio:
https://soundcloud.com/godrec/god-29-susanna-gartmayer-aouie-bass-clarinet-solos-excerpt
Hyperaktivist
It was in 2009 when Hyperaktivist started to work on setting the groundwork for her DJ career. Ana Laura Rincón blended hyperactivity with activism, developing electronic music culture in her native Venezuela – a country with few record stores and few electronic music industry affiliations. Following completion of a degree in Mass Media, Rincón relocated to Berlin in early 2012, where she is currently producing her own music and just finished a degree in sound engineering. Her sets are powerful, deep, and stylistically fluid, without subscribing to just one particular sound or genre.
Audio:
Selvhenter have honed a truly unique sound – an uncompromising, boundless energetic one that blends the aesthetics of experimental rock, the sophistication of improvised free jazz and the aggressiveness of punk, noise and metal, all performed with passion and humor, sometimes even as music fit for dancing. The all-female outfit Selvhenter is part of the bustling and sprawling Copenhagen underground. In a controlled eruption of drums and distorted trombone, violin and alto saxophone they kick against rationalism of the welfare society – and show us that passion doesn’t have to be sung, but can flourish as collective instrumental cramps.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAsGUQ_WuV8
Martial Canterel is a minimal wave/synth project by Sean McBride from New York. Martial Canterel records and performs using only vintage analogue synthesizers and sequencers, producing a highly-crafted, complex, and idiosyncratic form of electronic music that is simultaneously romantically melancholic and affirmatively aggressive. Inspired both by the first wave of relatively unknown minimal electronic bands in Northern Europe (a musical genre also often referred to as ‘minimal synth‘) and the seminal industrial noise bands such as Throbbing Gristle, SPK and Cabaret Voltaire, Martial Canterel presents a new optimistic paradigm for electronic music in which the analogue synthesizer functions anew as a folk instrument of humanist resistance to a virtual ‘soft synth‘, iPod, and iTunes saturated world of ‘click and drag‘ dematerialized abstraction.
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHUf3OACxQs
The event is organized with the support of the Riga City council. Spatial, KABLAM, Susanna Gartmayer and Hyperaktivist 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.
The performance by Selvhenter launches Skaņu Mežs’ project “Nordic Women in Experimental Music,” supported by Kulturkontakt Nord.
The goal of the project is to reflect the strong presence of Nordic women in the field of experimental music, which has traditionally been dominated by male musicians.
Selvhenter also perform with the kind support of the Danish Cultural Institute, and the concert of Martial Canterel is supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding.
Further events of this series will happen in 2017.
Time plan:
21.00 Spatial
22.00 KABLAM
23.00 Selvhenter
0.00 Martial Canterel
0.45 Susanna Gartmayer
1.30 Hyperaktivist
