Son[i]a #209
EVOL

This new episode of Roc Jiménez de Cisneros' OBJECTHOOD series features conversations with Diego Falconi, Rick Dolphijn, Dave Phillips, and music by Kali Malone. A spiral-shaped trip about fire, burning, ashes, rituals, cooking, food, and jungles. Though it is also about everything that lies in between and beneath each and every one of those things. The invisible micropolitics of food in the military; the symbolic charge of ashes, solid remains of an intangible object – fire – which has shaped this planet for millions of years; the untold gender-related motifs behind the Aimara genocide; a circular, cyclical perception of time; or the role and relevance of ecosystems, even beyond the good old wildlife cliché – because, you know, “everything is an ecosystem, at the end of the day”. 

Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism. 

Artist, composer and researcher Edwin van der Heide expands musical composition and musical language in spatial, interactive, and interdisciplinary directions. His often site-specific, highly immersive installations don’t just take up space: they are a very deliberate inquiry into space itself and into its affordances as an artistic medium and material. Edwin’s pieces create space, modifying its actual and perceived boundaries. They make space present, apparent, and even tangible. In this podcast, we talk to Edwin about art in public space, air pressure, sounds under water, loudspeakers, networks, odd spatial experiences, and sonic phenomenology.

Jessica Ekomane is a sound artist and composer, and a lecturer in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Ekomane’s quadraphonic performances and installations approach algorithmic/computer music as a social practice that is grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics, and explores listening expectations and their societal roots. In this podcast, we talk about the freedom of play, eMule, pipe organs, the limitations and flexibility of Max/MSP, early non-Western sound synthesis, DIY research, quotas, minimalism, and her early love for Ligeti and Destiny's Child.

We unearth here the conclusions document of AVANT.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Goodiepal that we were unable to include the first time around.

Goodiepal plays a borrowed Casiotone VL-1 VL-Tone and we talk about art's failure to have real impact, the best place to hide stuff, contracts and hacks, double standards in Europe, creativity in sheer survival strategies, Climate refugees, genocides in the making, modern afro-futurism, Radical Computer Music and circuit bending.

Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore wrap up this series on generative and process music with a piece created specifically for the occasion: 'Two Discrete Generative Systems'.

Florian Hecker suggests an amalgamation of two seminal collections of psychoacoustic works, which demand from its audience a selective piecing-together of distinct units into an overall Gestalt, one that culminates in a chimerical auditory experience.

Sound artists and curators Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore talk about minimalism, complexity, abstraction and the processes and concepts behind their audiovisual works.

Exclusive music by Marcus Schmickler and EVOL.