20_14 ASSEMBLY w. Francesca Buratelli, Nova Varnrable & Rune Kielsgaard(DK)

20_14 is a Copenhagen sublabel of Escho, which also serves as a platform for setting up events with favorites from around the world.

20_14 shows are about new meetings, framing contrasts and creating a special room for different perspectives in sound.

Both label and events are curated by drummer Rune Kielsgaard, who has been active in everything from improvisation to experimental music and alternative pop. For this concert at FOEG, Kielsgaard will perform alongside two other mainstays of the Copenhagen scene, Francesca Buratelli and Nova Varnrable.

Aura Satz(UK)

Aura Satz is a London-based visual artist whose work encompasses film, performance and sculpture. Satz’s trajectory orbits around two major topics. One involves the art and science of music, sound technology, vibration, and acoustics. The other involves social and political factors, especially issues of gender and the rediscovery of important contributions women have made to the development of technology.

At FOEG 2024, we will be screening two of Satz’ films:

Little Doorways To Paths Not Yet Taken (2016) - 7’33”

A brief yet intimate venture inside the home studio of Laurie Spiegel that offers insight into the US composer’s studio work and processes.

Making a Diagonal with Music (2019) - 10’20”

A short film about the Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an original pioneer of early musique concrète during the ‘50s and ‘60s.

The film screenings will be followed by a listening session of Satz’ audio piece Dial Tone Drone (2014) featuring Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel. 14’00’’

Big Blood(US)

Blending psychedelic folk, experimental rock, and an array of other influences, Big Blood’s music is both diverse and deeply personal. Known for their DIY ethos, they have self-released most of their recordings themselves, often with handmade packaging, while also collaborating with independent labels like Ba Da Bing Records and Feeding Tube.

Over the years, the band has built a dedicated international cult following and become a mainstay in New England’s underground music scene.

Deirdre Johanna Humphrys(IE)

Deirdre Johanna Humphrys is a trained visual artist and psychotherapist. Deirdre’s work comprises art and psychotherapeutic practices, which holds attention on conversation, its time-keeping and framing, and embodied activations of the nervous system, pivoting with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of study. Study, where collective performance, reading and making as well as more introverted moves strive to stay in the borders between form, genre and method.

A three-pronged queered art-heart is offered as a central motif flourishing through new works made for FOEG; flatworks named DRAWS, usually produced on paper, have been scaled up and transposed to Dvala bed sheets. These works can be found hanging out on the staircase, in the entrance at Kildevæld Kulturcenter.

evee(DK)

evee is an electronic musician who engages in the naive and childish in computer music, soft vocals, smooth synths and jumping, dancing sounds from her back pocket and beyond. Wo!

EVOL(ES/UK)

What if you could freeze hardcore techno? This is a special site-specific show that delves into the concept of time dilation, stretching, and slowness, as applied to the slimy sonic language of what Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp call acid mereotopology.

Through the use of weirdly frozen bass lines and synthetic stabs, the piece captures the listener in a temporal drift, evoking a sense of floating through an expansive void where time itself seems to stretch and bend. A psychedelic carousel of emerging microstructures and catatonic euphoria.

Faramarz Amirian(IR)

Faramarz Amirian, born in 1970 in Sarpol Zahab, Kermanshah Province, developed an early interest in playing the tanbur, encouraged by his family. In 1989, he began his musical career with the Kermanshah Sound and Culture Center and later formed the Dalaho band with his brother. He has won several awards for his tanbur playing and composed works such as “Cheshme Saravan.” He has contributed to spreading the art of tanbur through teaching and performances.

H E X(DK)

H E X is a free-form trance-noise duo from Copenhagen, Denmark. The music of H E X weaves the physicality of punk with the open-ended wastes of improvised noise. Instruments mutate and transform into a hivemind of intimate electronic madness and fiercely cascading pulses with a steady, beating heart for the cyclical and the occult. H E X consists of guitarist Lars Bech Pilgaard and drummer Anders Bach.

Lazaara Ilieva(US)

Lazaara is a visual artist whose relentlessly divergent works share a playful process of (re)negotiation between living and non-living agencies. At FOEG, her installations will keep eyes wandering along suspended curves and tentacular limbs that recall the continuous flows of reciprocity born in a culture of gratitude.

In Copenhagen, she has found a lovely group of humans with whom she organizes music events, appropriating spaces as momentary laboratories of material iterations and communal action. Outside of venues, her work often attempts to invite collaborations with nature as relational rehearsals of responsibility and care.

Mariam Rezaei(UK)

Mariam Rezaei is a composer, turntablist, and researcher redefining the role of the turntable in contemporary music. Fusing hip-hop, noise, and free improvisation, she transforms traditional DJing into a dynamic, experimental art form and the turntable into an expansive instrument.

Mariam Rezaei previously led experimental arts projects TOPH, TUSK FRINGE and TUSK NORTH, and she has performed internationally with orchestras and collaborated with artists like Joan La Barbara, Mette Rasmussen, Maria Chávez and many others.

Maria Nørholm Ramouk(MA/DK)

Focusing on her Moroccan-Amazigh heritage as a point of departure, Maria Nørholm Ramouk examines how resources affect the communities we identify with and how this is reflected in their internal social organization. Recurring subject-matters are loneliness, finding security in communities and repetition.

With personal, historical and cultural symbols, Ramouk invites us into a trustworthy textile landscape at FOEG 2024. The excerpt of the piece N9drou ngharsou chejra (We could plant a Tree) places a protective hand over the entering guests and encourages conversations about care, relational and human interactions, and impact. The work is installed in FOEG’s concert hall.

Photo: Trine Struwe

Nkisi(CD)

Nkisi is the pseudonym of Melika Ngombe Kolongo, whose activities as a producer, live musician, DJ and curator are channels for an on-going investigation into invisible forces, using sound.

Musically, this manifests in a captivating cross talk of African rhythms, uncompromising European hard dance tropes, foreboding synth melodies and a relentless, galvanising energy, as harnessed for her increasingly kinetic live performances.

Perila(DE)

Perila is a St. Petersburg-born, Berlin-based sound and visual artist, DJ, performer and poet exploring sensitive borderlines and depths of subtle matter.

Music as a healing and transformative agent; an invitation to open other layers of engagement with reality by means of deep listening, observation, presence and mutual dialogue with an audience. Her performances and DJ sets are dense and intense narratives drifting through a rich sonic palette immersing a listener into a personal and sensual trip, while delicate poetry and soft voices breathe with a sense of closeness, desire and release.

Richard Youngs(UK)

Richard Youngs is a musician based in Glasgow, Scotland with a career spanning more than 35 years, his work is an ongoing experiment in sound and song form, straddling the traditional and avant-garde, encompassing every genre and no genre.

Primarily recognised as a solo artist and writer of extended song, he is also an active collaborator working across experimental music, improvisation, folk, jungle, wrong ambient and disco.

Ron Schneiderman(US)

The founder of the original Festival of Endless Gratitude returns to open FOEG 2024, showcasing the Estey Field Organ Tone Archive with a demonstration that will set the tone for this year’s gathering.

Drawing from Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening traditions, the archive offers an internal psychological journey. Listening to the archive encourages a meditative state and deeper understanding as our individual minds create patterns of the sound. As Oliveros explained, hearing is involuntary, but listening requires awareness.

Seth Cluett presents Laurie Spiegel(US)

In two separate concerts composer Seth Cluett will present pieces from Spiegel’s two seminal releases and beyond.

Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare artists where a programmer’s technical savvy and a composer’s deep melodic intuition seamlessly merge. Though she is recognized as one of America's pioneering and most advanced computer composers, Spiegel's approach is deeply rooted in Bach as well as traditional and folk music. For Spiegel - also a lutenist and banjo player - the computer represents a new kind of folk instrument, which can supplement and extend human abilities.

Spiegel's music has - literally - traveled to the edge of our solar system, when her realization of Johannes Kepler's Harmonices Mundi, was chosen for the Sounds of Earth record aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977. Also a computer programmer, software designer and visual artist, she created the music composition software Music Mouse in 1986 as a way for even nonmusicians to create music in an intuitive way.

Seth Cluett is an artist and composer whose work ranges from photography and drawing to video, sound installation, concert music, and critical writing. His work has been presented internationally at venues such as The Whitney Museum, MoMA/PS1, Moving Image Art Fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, GRM, and STEIM.

CANCELLED - Shit & Shine(US)

Texas-based Craig Clouse, aka Shit and Shine, has been called a genius and a maverick by the Wire. And the Quietus says he’s “uninterested in the self-imposed restrictions of genre.”

With highly acclaimed releases on Editions Mego, Diagonal, Riot Season, and others, Shit And Shine have wasted no time clearing away the rubbish whilst cutting up their own path towards giddy bass-heavy shape-shifting dance mutations.

Silvia Tarozzi & Deborah Walker(IT)

Silvia Tarozzi and Deborah Walker share a friendship that evolved into a long-lasting artistic partnership, around improvisation and contemporary experimental creation (Éliane Radigue, Philip Corner, Pascale Criton), with a few forays into Italian new-wave (Offlaga Disco Pax).

With “Canti di guerra, di lavoro e d‘amore,” the duo blends folk music with their contemporary and improvised roots, reinterpreting songs from their youth in rural Emilia. These songs, often sung by female rice field workers, originate from the emancipation of working-class women and the partisan Resistance in WWII.

Sunun(UK)

Bristol’s Sunun has a luring command of dials and limbs and drum skins that’s as grounded as it’s mystical - these machines have ghosts in them. People who’ve seen her live have witnessed Sunun’s forest of wires and microphones feeding her 20 channel desk.

She dubs it old-world style, but the results are always forward - drawing from echoes of drum talk, reggae, grime and RnB to make a 22nd century chorus of thousands of years of human feedback.

Will Guthrie(AU)

Will Guthrie is an Australian drummer and percussionist living in France. He works in many different settings of music: live performance, improvisation and studio composition using various combinations of drums, percussion, objects, junk, amplification and electronics.

Alongside his electro-acoustic work, in the last decade, Guthrie has returned to the drums with a vengeance, developing a series of solo works marked by a radical single-mindedness, from relentless rhythmic workouts to earth-quaking explorations of the bass frequencies of gongs and other metal percussion instruments.

Xenia Xamanek(DK)

With their distinctive approach and eternal curiosity, the multidisciplinary artist Xenia Xamanek has created a personal and comprehensive sonic universe in constant transformation.

Xamanek’s musical productions, as well as their live performances embrace unpredictable sounds and genre-fluid expressions in songs and collages with threads of deconstructed reggaeton and eoperreo, art music, pop, and noise.

Zoomachia Group(IT)

Zoomachia Group is a music ensemble created by Francesco Cavaliere (Hundebiss, Marionette, NERO) together with Matteo Martino (Canti Magnetici) and Ramona Ponzini (A Silent Place, PFS Japan).

The group was founded in 2024 to rearrange, with multiple voices, gestures and visual elements, the ”Zoomachia Disc” music fable — a remarkable fable written by Cavaliere about a scribe ant, a prophet cricket and a mummified mantis.