HOUSE Music is an accompanying sound performance format, presenting compositions and musical pieces largely by visual artists who work with sound as part of their artistic practice. A wide range of voice, instrumental or experimental sound work create audial dialogues.

Natalia Escobar

Thursday, March 21, 2024
Music for the Closing Night of SÉANCE

Natalia Escobar is a Colombian interdisciplinary artist and DJ based in Berlin. Escobar’s DJ sets offer an immersive experience, blending various genres and styles into captivating sonic narratives. Each set becomes a rich landscape of sound, intricately woven with storytelling and emotional resonance.

Escobar channels her musical output through her alter ego Poison Arrow and her multisensory project Pierce with Arrow, in collaboration with Troy Pierce, releasing on Dais Records and Pleasure District. Her latest endeavour, Koaxula, is a collaborative sound activation and performative project with artist Daniela Huerta. Drawing inspiration from fading cosmovisions and mythological female archetypes.

Lizzi Bougatsos

Saturday, 1 June, 2024
Solo Performance

As part of the exhibition program of SÉANCE, Lizzi Bougatsos performed a solo concert in the courtyard.

Lizzi Bougatsos is an artist and experimental musician based in New York City. She is the singer for the band Gang Gang Dance and performs frequently with her punk/noise band I.U.D. Selected performances include “Concert for Yoko Ono, Washington and the World” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and “I am Here, Where are you: On Vocal Performance” at the Bergen Kunstall in 2017. Her most recent  performance was at the Boursce de Commerce in Paris in October 2024. Bougatsos has collaborated with Kim Gordon, Rita Ackermann, Lonnie Holley, Stephen O’Malley, the Boredoms, Animal Collective, Yoshimi, among others.

For her performance with HOUSE, she focused on vocal experimentation and samples and of course, percussion.

Her 2023 solo exhibition “Idolize the Burn, an Ode to Performance,” at Tramps in New York City was highly acclaimed in reviews by Artforum, Frieze, Vogue, Marfa Journal, and The New York Times.

Charles Stankievech

Saturday, 25 May, 2024
The Glass Key at Sunset

As part of the exhibition program for SÉANCE, Charles Stankievech performed a sound piece during sunset.

Temporality and timelessness collide in a sonic composition by the artist Charles Stankievech. Marshalling both subterranean and cosmic noise, the work invites viewers to meditate on deep time, deep space, and deep listening. ‘The Glass Key’ comprises original electromagnetic recordings of the ionosphere, hydrophone recordings of both Arctic ice and Yucatán cenotes, and echoes within Lanzarote’s volcanic calderas. The work was originally a commission for James Turrell’s amphitheater Tree of Light, in the Yucatán.

Charles Stankievech is an artist redefining “fieldwork” at the convergence of geopolitics, deep ecologies, and sonic resonances. From the Arctic’s northernmost settlement to the depths of the Pacific Ocean, Stankievech’s practice uncovers the paradoxes of our existence on the planet by engaging with the imperceptible.

His work has been presented at institutions such as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; as well as several biennials from Venice to SITE Santa Fe. As a composer he mentored under World Soundscape founder R. Murrary Schafer during his graduate studies, then afterwards with Alvin Lucier at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts leading to the premiere of his work Radiance for Philip Glass’ MATA foundation at ISSUE Project Room, NYC.

FRANKIE

Friday, 17 May, 2024
Midnight concert

As part of SÉANCE, FRANKIE performed a live set consisting of cello loops and voice, that delicately treaded a knife edge between romanticized balladry and highly processed electronic production.

Franziska Aigner works at the intersection of music, performance, and philosophy.

Her solo project (cello and vocals) is performed under the name FRANKIE. Her solo records STYX (2022) and HEAVEN/HELL (2023) were released on the UK label Shadow World. She stars in the feature film City Child, directed by Austin Jack Lynch, to be released in 2024. Works have been shown at Kunstenfestivaldesarts/Brussels, Die Liste/Basel, Theatre de la Bastille/Paris,The Place/London, brut/Vienna, HAU/Berlin etc.

After studying at P.A.R.T.S., the school for choreography and dance in Brussels directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Franziska Aigner worked with Anne Imhof on the performances Deal, Rage, Angst and Faust (awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale 2017) and Natures Mortes, as well as performing for William Forsythe, Mette Ingvartsen, Alexandra Bachzetsis and others. In 2019 the music for Faust (by Anne Imhof, Billy Bultheel, Franziska Aigner and Eliza Douglas) was released on the Berlin label PAN. Aigner was also part of the Holly Herndon vocal ensemble, with whom she toured internationally.

Reece Cox

Thursday, March 21, 2024
A Red Mist, An Aura of Success and Accomplishment

In A Red Mist, Cox presented a new series of texts to musical accompaniment wherein the familiar and mundane lapsed into the absurd, horrific, and unreal. In each scene, cox explored how disorder is thinly veiled, even pervasive behind a veneer of boredom and plainness.

In his current art-making, Cox is exploring a means to produce original images by way of creating faux concerts as situational readymades. By combing silkscreen and painting techniques, he produces new artworks from otherwise quick and disposable online images he harvests from social media feeds.

Reece Cox is an artist and writer based in berlin. In his practice he works alone and collaboratively producing music, images, and texts. In the last year he has performed in Berlin and internationally. In 2018 he founded Info, a label and curatorial project focused on exhibiting and distributing exceptional sound works by contemporary artists.

Alexander Iezzi

Wednesday, February 28, 2024
email2god

email2god was a new music piece developed from within the structures of the walls of HOUSE.

Alexander Iezzi is a Berlin-based artist and musician. His practice surrounds the transformation of materials into scenes, figures, sound and moving images to meet the surreal. The work begins with auditory and visual environments where improvised experiments and performances can unfold, later to be transformed into artworks. 

email2god was made come computer-triggered architectural elements from house, with music and text. Standing at a door, writing an email, or standing before something you can feel but can't see... A wax bear seeps from the wallpaper, a protagonist–Iezzi often uses such collected imagery to question the typical perceptions of psychology, identity, sex and politics.

Together with the composer Billy Bultheel, Alexander Iezzi releases music under the pseudonym 33, as well as solo recording under the name Mary Posa.

Raed Yassin

Wednesday, February 21, 2024
CURIOUS CASES IN INTERESTING TIMES

CURIOUS CASES IN INTERESTING TIMES was an INSTRUMENT BASED PIECE to REPRESENT A UNIQUE ENDEAVOR IN THE REALM OF MUSICAL EXPRESSION. YASSIN SETS OUT TO SCULPT WITH SOUND, CRAFTING A RICH AUDITORY & VISUAL TAPESTRY THAT TRANSCENDed TRADITIONAL BOUNDARIES OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE.

CENTRAL TO YASSIN'S TECHNIQUE IS HIS UTILIZATION OF DIVERSE MATERIALS SUCH AS PAPER, METAL, PLASTIC, AND WOODEN STICKS TO PREPARE HIS INSTRUMENTS, WHICH INCLUDE THE DOUBLE BASS, ZITHER, & PERCUSSION. 

IN HIS EXPLORATION OF TEXTURE, VOLUME, DYNAMICS, SPACE, & SURFACES, YASSIN MANIPULATES SOUND IN A MANNER AKIN TO SCULPTING-SHAPING IT INTO INTRICATE FORMS THAT RESONATE WITH THE LISTENER ON BOTH A VISCERAL & INTELLECTUAL LEVEL. 

MOREOVER, THE FUSION OF SOUND & VISUAL ELEMENTS WITHIN YASSIN'S PERFORMANCES SERVES TO FURTHER ENHANCE THE IMMERSIVE NATURE OF THE EXPERIENCE. BY INTEGRATING ELEMENTS OF VISUAL ARTISTRY ALONGSIDE HIS MUSICAL COMPOSITIONS, YASSIN CREATES A HOLISTIC ENVIRONMENT IN WHICH SIGHT & SOUND INTERTWINE, ENRICHING THE OVERALL SENSORY LANDSCAPE.
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RAED YASSIN, BORN IN 1979 IN BEIRUT & CURRENTLY BASED IN BERLIN & BEIRUT, IS A MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST INCORPORATING VIDEO, SOUND, PHOTOGRAPHY, TEXT, SCULPTURE, & PERFORMANCE. HE STANDS AS ONE OF THE PIVOTAL ORGANIZERS OF THE IRTIJAL FESTIVAL FOR EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC IN BEIRUT, A PLATFORM THAT HIGHLIGHTS GROUNDBREAKING WORKS BY ARTISTS FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE. YASSIN HAS ALSO RELEASED NUMEROUS SOLO MUSIC ALBUMS & HAS BEEN AN INTEGRAL PART OF MUSICAL GROUPS SUCH AS "A" TRIO AND PRAED. NOTABLY, IN 2009, HE ESTABLISHED HIS INDEPENDENT MUSIC LABEL, ANNIHAYA.

Stephanie Gudra

Thursday, February 15, 2024
A GUITAR SET OF EXPERIMENTAL and NOISE MUSIC

STEPHANIE GUDRA IS A VISUAL AND SOUND ARTIST.

IN HER PHOTOGRAPHIC and PAPER WORK, SHE OFTEN USES ANALOGUE MATERIAL and DISSECTS THE PROCESSES OF IMAGE MAKING TO (RE)CREATE ENIGMATIC and UNIQUE ABSTRACT COMPOSITIONS. A SIMILAR APPROACH CAN BE SEEN IN HER MUSIC PRODUCTION, WHICH TRAVERSES A MULTITUDE OF SOUNDS and TECHNIQUES, BETWEEN PLAYING MUSIC and THE MUSIC PLAYING ITSELF.

Nazanin Noori

Wednesday, February 7, 2024
THE OPPOSITION TO MOURNING DOES NOT EXIST

Nazanin Noori premiered her lecture performance THE OPPOSITION TO MOURNING DOES NOT EXIST at HOUSE. Noori’s work is a dramatic poem accompanied by a musical composition exploring notions of loss, humanism and grief.

Nazanin Noori’s interdisciplinary work includes sound art, live and lecture performance, installation, direction and text.

With a formal education in theater, film and media studies, Noori addresses the merging of sound, space, sculpture and post-dramatic poetry, focussing on atmospheric narratives. Her compositions are primarily in the Ambient Hardcore realm, branching out into Doom Electronics.

Barenboim–Said Akademie

Thursday, 11 January, 2024

As part of the program of the exhibition VERY FRIENDLY, The Barenboim–Said Akademie performed a classical concert.

Since 2015, talented young musicians from the Middle East, North Africa, and other countries have been studying at the Barenboim-Said Akademie–a new institution of higher music education in Berlin. Regular teaching activities began in 2016, comprising a stronger focus on humanities and musicology, than what is common practice in professional music education. The Barenboim-Said Akademie’s central idea is expressed in a spirit of inclusion and diversity: through playing and listening, students learn to accept differences, to engage in discussion with an open mind and heart, and to discover the humanistic guiding principles of enlightenment.

The Akademie, which shares its building with the Pierre Boulez Saal, is dedicated to the pedagogical spirit of Edward W. Said and Daniel Barenboim, which aims to overcome ideological trenches. With its unique and innovative academic offerings, the Akademie keeps a dialogue alive that stands up to the political upheaval of the contemporary world.

REPERTOIRE:

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)
String Quartet in D minor Op. 76 No. 2 Hob. III:76
I. Allegro
II. Andante o più tosto allegretto
III. Menuetto. Allegro ma non troppo. – Trio
IV. Vivace assai

Anton Webern (1883–1945)
from String Quartet Op. 28
II. Gemächlich

George Banos, violin
Semaan Wehbe, violin
Sara Umanskaya, viola
İdil Pulat, cello