Brutus | 20/09 | Conflux Festival

Berlin-based electronic musician and cellist Chloe Lula presents Oneiris, a live A/V show made in collaboration with visual artist Tim Novikov, a lighting designer and architect who has collaborated with artists like Bendik Giske and Caterina Barbieri. Oneiris, a full-length album out in November on Subtext Recordings, is composed of ambient electronics and hazy, live improvised cello. A play on the word “oneiric,” the album is a reference to dream states and an exploration of what exists beyond the periphery of the conscious mind and memory, nodding to minimalists and contemporary classical artists like Philip Glass, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Yair Elazar Glotman in its mood and texture. Novikov brings a tactile sense of place, real and imagined, to the piece as it gently unfolds, creating an all-encompassing experience unlike any he has executed before. a Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces. MA is a sound and light performance by visual artist and performer Maxime Houot. A luminous, mechanical and futuristic choreography activated by a resonant, hypnotic composition, a ballet of controlled yet unpredictable spotlights. With this monumental kinetic work, the artist invests the space in a singular way, offering a unique and subjective sensory experience: "Why not imagine MY representation. MY representation of a place, at a given moment. An arbitrary representation. Without this representation, there's nothing. A void. MY is my interface with the void. I act on it by perceiving it. MA allows everyone to live momentarily in a timeless space, to form their own idea of the luminous world in which they are immersed, and to analyze its stimuli in an individual and personal way. Piano / Forte is a sound sculpture that explores the acoustic richness of the piano harp. In this performance, two pianos stripped of the keys and supporting parts, swing in the air like pendulums. The oscillating motion of the swinging pianos causes the strings to resonate and express the piano’s body. During Conflux Piano / Forte will be accompanied by the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy and electronics, performed by multi-instrumentalist Jimi Hellinga. Inside the pianos, an accelerometer was installed to measure the variations in 3-axis positions, and translate the motion into sound frequencies via a custom made software. These frequencies are sent back into the pianos via electromagnets (transducers) attached to the harps. Instead of being hammered by keys, the sound is generated by vibrating directly on the piano’s body, adding to the multitude of resonances and reverberations.