LARGE OPEN SPACES – A two night mini-festival of experimental music, video and performances

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​​LARGE OPEN SPACES – A two night mini-festival of experimental music, video and performances at EAW-Hallen, Rennstr. 20, Esslingen.
A cooperation of Akademie Schloss Solitude and Villa Merkel, Esslingen

Friday, August 30, 2019, 7 PM

Zina Vaessen – Seeing figures on a white carpet
Seeing figures on a white carpet shows a group of performers sitting on a white carpet. While their bodies remain in stiff positions, their eyes wander freely through the room. The piece makes perceptible the process of seeing as a complex choreography between the viewer and the viewed.

Zina Vaessen lives and works between Freiburg and Basel. Her choreographic work examines questions of human perception and deals with the tilting movements between a symbolic reading and a phenomenological experience of stage events.

James Tenney (1934–2006) – In a large open space und For Ann (rising)
In a large open space is an exploration of the natural phenomenona of the harmonic series. The performers play sustained tones distributed throughout a large open space as indicated by the title, while the audience is free to move about throughout the immersive setting.

For Ann (rising) is archetypical of Tenney‘s aesthetic, exploring the relationship between sound and perception. Its genesis lies in what has now become known as a Shepard-tone, named for the great experimental psychologist R. N. Shepard, a pioneer of multi-dimensional scaling and an associate of Tenney’s while working as an artist at Bell Labs in the 1960’s.

James Tenney was an American pianist, composer and teacher and an early pioneer of computer-generated music, and of the application of information theory to the art of composition.

Luke Wilkins – Rotatatatatatatatatattatatatationen
Violin improvisation – an ode to the hall of the royal-Württemberg locomotive workshop – and live electronics.

Luke Wilkins is an author and musician and works with preference at the interface between language and sound. His debut novel Jeff was published in 2018.

SATURDAY, August 31, 2019, 7 PM

Robert Blatt – A few encounters
a few encounters is an exploration of both the volumetric qualities of space and one’s being in and through such space—sound as primary encounter with site and presence. The work is a system of open text notation, for both listeners and performers, to actualize multiple layers of activity that is responsive to oneself, each other and the environment, at its simplest level, a metaphor for community through situated listening and restrained, everyday sonic activation in continual unrest.

Robert Blatt creates work rooted in explorations of expanded sonic situations through varying frames and gradations of environment, notation, object, performance, text and tone.

Michael Winter – pedal, triangle machine, and (perhaps) coda (abstract)
pedal, triangle machine, and (perhaps) coda (abstract) in its most reduced form, is simply a sustained drone occasionally punctuated/interrupted by brief cacophonous bursts of triangles. The punctuations are intended to be ephemeral with respect to the entire scale of the piece. That is, fleeting, entering and exiting abruptly.

Michael Winter is a composer and performer. His work often explores simple processes where dynamic systems, situations, and settings are defined through minimal graphic- and text-based scores.

Special guests: Katherine Liberovsky and Phill Niblock
Live-Set: Live-video by Katherine Liberovsky followed by a long set of music and films by Phill Niblock with material from the series Movement of People Working.

Katherine Liberovsky is a video and media artist based in Montreal, Canada, and New York City. Working predominantly in experimental video since the late eighties, she has produced many single-channel videos, video installation works and video performances which have been presented around the world.

Phill Niblock is an artist whose fifty-year career spans minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. Since 1985, he has served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York.

Admission is free!

With the kind support of SV SparkassenVersicherung.