Studio LABOUR present a programme of contemporary electronic music, inspired by the works of Iannis Xenakis, including electronic works by the composer himself.
For the occasion of the opening of the Iannis Xenakis exhibitions at EMΣT | National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens, Studio LABOUR present a musical program that highlights the continuing legacy of Iannis Xenakis in contemporary electronic music. Situated on the Museum’s rooftop terrace overlooking Athens, the evening begins at dusk with a selection of electronic works by Xenakis, diffused by Xenakian scholar Sergio Luque. The programme then continues with sonic artists dealing directly with Xenakian themes, such as stochastic synthesis and sieve theory, developing into a festive evening with leading sonic adventurers, thus highlighting the continuing contemporariness of the composer today.
Studio LABOUR is an operation by Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander, the Berlin based duo LABOUR who create works based on sound. In November 2022, they co-curated the centenary celebration of Xenakis’ work at Kraftwerk Berlin together with Berlin Atonal.
Line Up
20.00
Sergio Luque diffuses electronic works by Iannis Xenakis:
Diamorphoses | Concret PH | Mycenae Alpha | GENDY3
21.05
Sergio Luque presents his own composition based on stochastic synthesis titled Daisy
21.20
LABOUR present a duo adaptation of their piece, sungazing (2022)
21.50
Rashad Becker
22.35
JASSS b2b Juliana Huxtable
INFORMATION
Diamorphoses (1957) is the first tape piece by Xenakis, created while he was at Groupe de Recherches de Musique Concréte (GRM) in Paris. In this compositional exploration of density – with the dialectical title translating to “continuity-discontinuity” or “two aspects of being” – sustained sounds juxtapose discontinuous ones: Xenakis used glissandi, bells and low frequency sounds such as jets, trains and an earthquake to create a layered and complex tape composition, using probabilities to calculate the attacks of individual sounds. (James Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music, 2004).
Concret PH (1958) This miniature jewel of electroacoustic music by Xenakis is a study of density that uses tape manipulation techniques to create an ongoing and subtly-evolving texture made from recordings of burning charcoal. At its premiere, this short piece was projected over 425 loudspeakers at the entrance to the Philips Pavilion before Varèse’s Poème électronique. Xenakis designed the Pavillion while working with Le Corbusier. Concret PH is diffused by Sergio Luque at EMST.
Mycenae Alpha (1978) was created exclusively with the UPIC system, a graphical tool for the composition of music developed by Xenakis and his team at CEMAMu in Paris. This noisy and dense electroacoustic composition was first presented at the Mycenae Acropolis in Greece. The music, diffused at EMΣT by Sergio Luque, is harsh in nature, “matching the landscape and myths that permeated the atmosphere of the Acropolis” (James Harley, Xenakis: His Life in Music, 2004).
GENDY3 (1991) by Iannis Xenakis was created using the GENDY and PARAG programs, written by the composer on a personal computer in the BASIC programming language. With these programs, he was able to synthesize sonic waveforms based on stochastic functions and create macro-compositional structures using stochastic methods similar to the ones he implemented in the ST program (1962) for instrumental composition. The sounds tend to be more unified and less noisy than in his previous pieces with an emphasis on more sustained sounds. GENDY3 is diffused by Sergio Luque at EMST.
BIOGRAPHIES
LABOUR is the Berlin-based duo of Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander who create works based on sound. Collaborating as a duo since 2013, they founded LABOUR in 2018 with their work, next time, die consciously (بیگانگی). Coming from music yet thriving in a mixture of scenes, they have recently presented their own work all over the world, including at Martin Gropius Bau, Kraftwerk Berlin, Sharjah Biennial, Art Basel, Julia Stoschek Collection Berlin, Grand National Theatre Dakar and Berghain.
They regularly collaborate on works for theatre, performance, video and fashion; are fellows of Villa Aurora Los Angeles; have a monthly radio show on NTS; and are long-term residents of Callie’s shared sound studio in Berlin, which they helped build-up since 2018.
In 2022 they curated the X100 Festival together with Berlin Atonal, which celebrated the enduring legacy of Iannis Xenakis over three nights, and have a project in Dakar, Senegal which engages the sabar drumming tradition with a focus on immaterial cultural heritage and musical exchange between electronic music and traditional percussion, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
They also previously ran an experimental music venue in Berlin called N.K. Projekt from 2008-2015 which hosted more than 450 concerts and workshops, with a mission statement of public engagement with the avant-garde.
Farahnaz Hatam, born in Tehran in 1967, is a sound artist, composer and specialist-DJ with a background in molecular biology, working primarily with SuperCollider, a digital sound synthesis programming environment. She lives and works in Berlin.
Colin Hacklander, born in Minneapolis in 1986, is an avant-garde composer and percussionist with a background in post-tonal theory and electronic music. He lives and works in Berlin.
SERGIO LUQUE
Composer of vocal, instrumental and electroacoustic music, and a researcher in computer music. He lives in Madrid where he directs and teaches in the Master in Electroacoustic Composition and New Media programme at the Centro Superior Katarina Gurska and curates the new music festival VANG at the Cybele Palace. He is a guest lecturer at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.
He has a PhD in Musical Composition from the University of Birmingham. During his PhD, he worked on the development of Iannis Xenakis’s stochastic synthesis and of the BEASTmulch software (a tool for the presentation of electroacoustic music over multichannel systems). In 2006, he received a Master’s Degree with Distinction in Sonology, with specialiσation in Composition, from the Institute of Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague. In 2004, he received a Master’s Degree in Composition from the Conservatory of Rotterdam.
His compositions have been performed in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Japan and Australia.
He has given lectures and workshops on algorithmic composition, sound synthesis, stochastic synthesis and SuperCollider in numerous universities and institutions across the world. He has received grants and prizes from the Society of Authors and Publishers (Spain), the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom), the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (Mexico), the Schönberg Ensemble (Netherlands) and the Centre Acanthes (France).
RASHAD BECKER
Rashad Becker is a composer and musician residing in Berlin. His compositions are multilayered narratives populated by an ensemble of sonic entities, some smug, some shy, some agitators, others ready to surrender. Often there’s a tragic-comical touch, like a cartoon version of what could be a requiem from a dream (or just as much a fertility dance from another dimension).
Recent works include the cycle Traditional Music Of Notional Species released across two volumes on PAN, and a multi-part work called Based On A True Story that derives scores from historical occurrences in a sort of ‘sonic staging’. He has been commissioned by New York-based ensemble Alarm Will Sound, Berlin string ensemble Kaleidoskop and leading German theatre company Berliner Ensemble.
Rashad is mainly active as a solo artist but finds himself in a series of permanent collaborations alongside Eli Keszler, Moritz von Oswald and as a member of the formation Moleglove. Other and more sporadic collaborators have been Okkyung Lee, Andre Vida, Ashley Paul, and Valerio Tricoli.
JULIANA HUXTABLE
Shock Value / New York
Using the structures of music as mediums in her multi-media universe, Juliana Huxtable is a DJ and musician singular in her approach. Where her visual art and poetry navigate the complexification of desire in a life increasingly mediated by technology, her music utilizes the sounds of technology itself to construct parallel realities to be inhabited and embodied in rhythm and harmonic tableaux.
Her sets skillfully deploy the notion of sampling, and re-blogging as DJ strategies, ecstatically mixing an array of influences that frolic at the boundary of genre- intuition and experimentation. At once an assertion of freedom and an ode to the evolutionary structure of electronic music subcultures, she aspires to the sublime in what can often only be described as witchcraft behind the decks; seance from the stage.
JASSS
Silvia Jiménez Alvarez aka JASSS is a Berlin-based sound artist, producer and DJ born and raised in Asturias in northern Spain. Jiménez started Djing and has been part of the electronic scene in Spain since her early twenties. Her first 12-inches appeared in 2016: Caja Negra on Anunnaki Cartel and then Mother via Alessandro Adriani’s Mannequin label. By then she was a resident DJ at Mannequin’s regular nights at OHM and later Berghain’s Säule, where she honed a voice as a selector that smoothly traverses tempos and eras. Her debut full-length album, 2017’s Weightless, launched her relentless global touring schedule. Weightless demonstrated her visceral approach to avant-garde composition which she underscored by developing a live set titled STEAM alongside visual artist Theresa Baumgartner in 2018.
Ever since the LP’s release on the revered experimental label iDEAL, she’s made regular appearances at clubs like Berghain, Amsterdam’s De School and Bassiani in Tbilisi and performed at festivals like MUTEK Montreal, Sónar and Primavera. She’s supplemented her work as a DJ and live musician by serving as an artist-in-residence at EMS in Stockholm (2017), Galeria Zé dos Bois in Lisbon (2018) and the 2019 edition of the Berlin-Rom Express, a recording artist residency at Villa Massimo curated by Carsten Nicolai (AKA Alva Noto).
2020 brings the first JASSS solo record since 2018: a show-stopping, apocalyptic and dramatic submission to the esteemed Whities catalogue titled “Turbo Olé”/”We Solve This Talking.”
