SONIC TONIC ASSEMBLY
Peforma 23, New York 2023
(Performa Hub and Pioneer Works)
SONIC TONIC ASSEMBLY is organized and curated by Paul O’Neill, Artistic Director of PUBLICS, and Defne Ayas, Curator-at-Large at Performa. Sonic Wilderness is co-produced by Performa and PALO Art Productions, Helsinki.
Episode 1: Sonic Wilderness: AGF with Islaja, Lau Nau, Cucina Povera
Curated by PUBLICS, Performa and Pioneer Works co-present Sonic Wilderness with renowned Finland based artists AGF, Islaja, Lau Nau and Cucina Povera. This episode is co-produced by PALO Art Productions, Helsinki. Gathered in New York for the first time, this assembly performs together in a dedicated event as individual artists and as a collaborative group as part of an intense sonic experience. During the one-day performance, viewers listen to Antye Greie-Ripatti aka "AGF", Islaja, Lau Nau, and Cucina Povera who will each perform collectively as part of a durational relay of sonic movements, and responsive interconnections across and between each artist’s work based on a dialogical process and gather together to interpret and co-mingle with field recordings from Finland. In addition, each will present their latest works.
Through a discursive methodology of gathering, the assembly first takes in sound recording as part of a cooperative workshop where sampling and field research is brought to acoustic and digital sound making devices. Sonic Wilderness takes the particularities of the Finnish landscape and aural locatedness as their starting point, where concepts of wilderness, place-bound life recordings and lived spaces become the instruments and listening worlds. This assembly of sound artists based in Finland invites the audience in NYC to become aware of the myriad of human and non-human agencies and sonic reverberations in which we live, move and interact with. As our being with the world and others are changed by the continued ecocide, we are asked to reconsider the anthropocentric viewpoint of Landscape: "Are we still Nature?"
Episode 2: Sounding a Black Grammar: KMRU with Bhavisha Panchia + friends
Curated by PUBLICS and Bhavisha Panchia, Performa and Pioneer Works co-present Sounding a Black Grammar, a co-production with PALO Arts Production, Helsinki. In this episode, Kenyan sound artist KMRU will perform the premier of his new work Stupor alongside related sounds. Stupor is an album which meditates on spatial and temporal passages across cities and spaces. The album was commissioned as a score for an imaginary future festival by PUBLICS, co-published with record label OTHER POWER in Helsinki and co-produced by Performa as a vinyl release. In a conversation between KMRU and curator-writer Bhavisha Panchia, they will discuss the lead up to making Stupor, and point to the politics of movement and diaspora, including the relationship between abstraction and ambient music, listening and positionality.
Sounding a Black Grammar is a combined listening panel, exhibition, performance and discursive event. It convenes around black audio culture to expand and complicate forms, from minimalism, improvisation, and experimental music, to ambient and techno genres. Through spoken, musical and poetic articulations, Lamin Fofana, Tony Cokes, KMRU, and DeForrest Brown Jr. with Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams (HxH), navigate and negotiate the politics of what it means to be black in the world through different aural grammars and Black sonic formations that link Africa and its diaspora globally.
Moderated by curator and writer Bhavisha Panchia, the episode Sounding a Black Grammar will advance different registers of listening through discussions and playback sessions with HxH (Lester St. Louis and Chris Williams) and Lamin Fofana, a film screening with Tony Cokes, the launch of the album Stupor by KMRU, and a pop-up shop with talks, listening sessions, and new releases from Sonic Wilderness, including with AGF, Cucina Povera, Lau Nau and Islaja.