In keeping with tradition, Skaņu Mežs will host a free-entry event for White Night culture forum 2018. This five-hour program will consist of genre-wise diverse performances. For the first time, the White Night event of Skaņu Mežs will happen at Fon Stricka Villa (Aristida Briāna street 9). The event starts at 21:00, September 8. Admission is free.
The line up is: Bérangère Maximin, Ewa Justka, Élg, Marta SmiLga and Jung An Tagen.
Ewa Justka is a Polish electronic acid-technoise artist (oh, how edgy), self taught instruments builder and electronics teacher based in London.
She is also interested in the notion of materiality of objects, vibrant, ontological systems (human bodies, electronic circuits, integrated circuits: varied range of micro and macro environments and relations between them) and an investigation of modes of quasi-direct perception through extreme light and sound actions, electronics, hardware hacking, breaking, deconstructing, wiring – or, to put it bluntly – designing synths and playing hard techno.
Ewa has performed and led workshops at festivals and venues like: Loop Festival, Sonic Acts, Supernormal Festival, Club Transmediale, STEIM, Colour out of Space, Unsound Festival, Norberg Festival, Insomnia Festial, Cafe Oto, and more.
Since 2004, Laurent Gérard also known as Èlg, has drawn concentric sound spirals made of musical pipes and entrails. He uses an arsenal of instruments and methods, constantly renewed and builds improbable bridges between concrete music and french song debris, between cryptic electronic tribal incantations and Russian doll dancing in Plutonia. When not in French, language is reduced to an alien babble of an old man, a child, a dusty revenant, an epileptic bard, a peaceful messenger…
The motifs and the contours of the sound reinvent themselves constantly like a living organism. Its a coil of prayers, an earth rocket, a parade we are following on a grand avenue..
Èlg is also half of the electronic duo Opera Mort (with Jo Tanz), and 33% of Orgue Agnes (with the members of Kaumwald, Sourdure and Premier Chasseur) and one a third of Reines d’Angleterre (with Jo Tanz and Ghédalia Tazartes). He is also part of the two headed clown monster Schultz and Elg, with sound poet Damien Schultz.
His albums have been released by labels such as Kraak, SS-Records, Lexi Disques, Fonal, Hundebiss Records, Alter, SDZ, Bo’Weavil, Nashazphone… His next opus, Vu du Dôme, will be out on Editions Gravats in March 2018.
Working out of her private studio since 2008, Bérangère Maximin has developed her own approach to sound art and electronic music, composing dense, immersive pieces with immediate impact. On four albums which have aroused international interest, she has revealed a taste for mixing disparate sounds together with a sense of detail, effusive, lyrical playings with the digital material and tight nuanced writing. Bérangère Maximin’s music engages the listener in consideration of space and textures. The sound ambivalence and its independence from its original source being at the centre of her work. The composer has got released on Tzadik’s Composer Series (USA), Sub Rosa’s Framework (BE) and Crammed Discs’ Made To Measure (BE). Lately she responded to the producer Craig Leon’s invitation to take part in the re-activation of his Atlas Realisations label (US/UK) with a fifth electroacoustic series named Frozen Refrains which came out on vinyl last Summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrRfHpvgy0s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCPyNzT-OGg
By using synthesis and sampling techniques, Jung An Tagen builds aleatoric arrays, repetitive figures & polyrhythmic moirés that speak equally to the body and to the mind. The grammar of this music is confounding, the language itself immediate, oscillating between modern composition and ritualistic techno, immersion and repulsion. In 2016, the Viennese artist found a local home at Editions Mego, a label with more than 20 years of expertise in this territory. In the past, Stefan Juster appeared with different monikers on labels such as NotNotFun, Blackest Rainbow, Orange Milk or his own imprints, and worked on artworks for different artists e.g. Kevin Drumm, and as an experimental video artist.
Marta SmiLga is a project of Liga Smirnova, a Riga based musician who lives for electronic music. Since early childhood, her main interests have been music and astronomy.
Her deep passion for sound synthesis and music using only ‘synthetical’ sound material was revealed and consolidated after she conducted in-depth research of electroacoustic music while studying musicology at the Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music and becoming a member of the Erica Synths team. This inspired her to both start making her own electronic music compositions in an experimental ambient genre and to perform live.
Bérangère Maximin, Ewa Justka, Élg and Jung An Tagen 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
