Skaņu Mežs announces program for White Night event of 2024

Riga, Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival for adventurous music has participated in the White Night culture forum since its first iteration in Latvia. 

This year’s free-entry White Night concert by Skaņu Mežs will take place at St. Saviour’s Anglican Church (Anglikāņu street 2) on September 7, and it starts at 20:00.

As always, the program will present adventurous music from the perspectives of various genres, including neo-folk, free jazz, sound art and ambient music. 

The event is co-funded by Riga City Council, with additional support by the innovative music and interdisciplinary art platform SHAPE+, which is co-funded by the EU, and also Trust for Mutual Understanding. 

There will be six performances overall:

20:00 Paula Vītola

21:00 Khrystyna Kirik 

22:00 Stephen Gauci, Adam Lane, Kevin Shea

23:00 Clarissa Connelly

00:10 Nick Dunston

01:15 OGDL

Paula Vītola (Latvia)

Paula Vītola is an interdisciplinary artist based in Liepaja, Latvia. Trained in the fields of media and visual arts her artistic interests have shifted mostly towards sound art. In her artistic practice she is experimenting with natural and physical phenomena such as light, radio and electricity. The artist is creating prototypes, artworks and performances exploring signals and invisible energies, their materiality and relationships, as well as phenomena of human perception. It’s the belief of the artist that media and multi-sensory art can make one’s life longer by triggering their curiosity and awareness.

Vītola has developed a prototype for an audiovisual synthesizer that directly transforms stroboscopic light and moving shadows into a sound signal. The sounds are made in the visual output created by the instrument. During her performance Paula Vītola catches photons in space and turns them into various noises, tones, beats; she sculpts the sounds with hand movements in real time. The performance allows the audience to directly perceive signal materiality and the thresholds of our perception.

Paula Vītola is currently an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, co-funded by the EU.

Khrystyna Kirik (Ukraine)

Khrystyna Kirik is a sound artist in experimental improvisational music and performative art. In her work, she explores the sensory state of sound perception focusing on transformation of everyday sonority using electronic hardware, double bass and piano pre recorded samples, voice, field recordings, and DIY sounding objects. 

Kirik is currently an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, co-funded by the EU.

Stephen Gauci, Adam Lane, Kevin Shea (USA)

Stephen Gauci is recognized as one of the most strikingly original saxophonists on the New York City improvised music scene. Stricken by a childhood illness that has left him with a profound hearing loss, Gauci was drawn to the clear, deep, tone of the tenor saxophone. This was the first step in a lifelong relationship with, and investigation of tone, timbre, and especially.. voice. The nature of Gauci’s hearing loss is that outer sounds require of him the utmost level of concentration and focus. The flip side, however, is that inner sounds, and the inner voice, are magnified… crystal clear and singing. The intense outward focus developed as a result of Gauci’s hearing impairment has been turned inward like a laser to illuminate, and manifest, the inner voice.

By combining a disparate set of influences into a unique improvisational voice, bass player Adam Lane has become recognized as one of the most original creative voices in contemporary jazz. His 2006 recording “New Magical Kingdom”, was featured in the “Penguin Jazz Guide 1001 Best Records Ever Made”, and his recording “Ashcan Ranting” received a myriad of critical praise including four stars in Downbeat. Lane studied composition at Wesleyan University with Anthony Braxton, and at California Institute of the Arts with Wadada Leo Smith. In 1996 he received a Paternings Scholarship for study at the Darmstadt School for New Music where he studied double bass with Steffano Scodanibbio, and attended master classes in composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Kevin Shea is best known for his work with the band “Mostly Other People Do the Killing”, he has collaborated with numerous other avant-garde and jazz musicians and composers, including Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans and Alan Wilkinson. During the course of his twenty-plus year career, Shea has recorded on over eighty albums and has performed in more than forty countries. He has also performed with the “Armitage Gone!” dance company, and was lauded as New York City’s best drummer of 2012 by the Village Voice.

The trio’s performance is supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding. 

Clarissa Connelly (Scotland, Denmark)

Born in Fife, Scotland, as a child Clarissa relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark, whose cultural landscape has continued to fuel her creativity. Over many years she’s explored the sacred sites, mythology, and music of Nordic culture, finding enduring inspiration in the Celtic tradition. While she’s maintained an active role in the thriving local music scene, a global audience has awakened to her sound. She first gained international attention with Tech Duinn (2018), an hypnotic EP named after a spiritual gateway in Celtic myth. For her most recent album, The Voyager (2021), Clarissa physically walked the Scandinavian landscape, channelling melodies from ancient pre-Christian sites. She also developed an app (Vandringen) which allowed others to virtually join-in and musically respond to these sites. The album received global acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Nordic Music Prize. Both more intimate and cosmic in scope than its predecessors, World of Work (her debut album for Warp) draws inspiration from visionary literature, dreams, and meditative walks. While The Voyager explored the sacred history of the Nordic landscape, World of Work explores the metaphysical landscape of the soul. The listener is invited on an inner journey that is by turns hushed and ecstatic.

Clarissa Connelly is currently an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, co-funded by the EU. Her performance is also supported by the Danish Cultural Institute.

Nick Dunston (USA, Germany)

Nick Dunston is an acoustic and electroacoustic composer, improviser, and multi-instrumentalist. Called an “indispensable player on the New York avant-garde” (New York Times), his performances have spanned a variety of venues and festivals across North America and Europe. His work explores notions of ancestral memory, materiality, embodiment, decolonization, and Afro-surrealism.

In addition to seven albums released under his name, as a composer Dunston has been commissioned by artists and organizations such as Wet Ink Ensemble, Bang on a Can, JACK Quartet, A L’ARME! Festival, Ex-Aequo, Bass Players for Black Composers, Tenth Intervention, Johnny Gandelsman, T R O M P O, Gaudeamus Festival, PULSE String Quartet, and Ekmeles. 

He released his improvising trio album Spider Season in 2022 in which Pitchfork Magazine noted “Even in a trio setting, Dunston’s curiosity creates a plethora of possibilities. No two songs of his ever sound alike.”  In 2023, Dunston’s album “Skultura” was named by “The Wire Magazine” as one of the 50 best recordings of 2023. 

At this event, Dunston will perform “banjer,“ an experimental electro-acoustic solo project that seeks to explore alternative approaches and contexts to the banjo. ‘Banjer’ reimagines the historically Afro-diasporic instrument by resonating it with live sound via audio transducers, and then using tools and techniques such as feedback, live sampling, and the human voice as a means of reclaiming and reembodying this widely misunderstood and nuanced instrument.

Nick Dunston is currently an artist of the SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art, co-funded by the EU.

His performance is also supported by Trust for Mutual Understanding. 

OGDL (Latvia, Turkey)

OGDL started as a musical collective with members from diverse backgrounds performing in constantly evolving constellations of players but gradually crystallised as a duo of Ozan Tezvaran and Gundega Graudina. They are based roughly in the midpoint between their cultures of Turkey and Latvia – in Linz, Austria. Here they look for further merging points of their practices, figuring out if opposites really attract. So far the answer is yes – Ozan’s flair for deconstructed club and visual communication and Gundega’s path as a classical guitarist turned experimental musician complement each other in surprising ways.

Drawing inspiration from postdigital lutherie, OGDL blends traditional musical instruments, digital technologies and things in between. Their concerts are a mixture of lullabies, screams, sad pop tunes with an oomph, tape loops, field recordings of closing doors, feedback and layered string textures, to name a few.

WORKSHOPS

Who: Stephen Gauci, Adam Lane, Kevin Shea
When:September 6, 12:00-14:00
Where: Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music (Krišjāņa Barona street 1), jazz class (room nr. 328)
Attendace: free of charge

All enthusiasts are welcome to attend; musicians are encouraged to take their instruments with them – they will be able to play with members of the trio.

Who: Khrystyna Kirik
When: September 8, 17:00
Where: Bar “Aleponija”, Ernesta Birznieka-Upīša 2
Attendance: free of charge
Focus: “Point of Sound”. Listening, sensory perception, sound exploration, body awareness, creative collaboration, improvisation.

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