Eccentric Listening
Frau Musica Nova
Ms Musica Nova and its Kinship Partners present "Eccentric Listening".
With FMN KINSHIP*, Ms Musica Nova has founded a digital network for international production platforms, festivals and friendly institutions to jointly strengthen their digital presence. With this in mind, Ms Musica Nova makes her “Eccentric Listening” format available to her FMN KINSHIP partners free of charge. In 2022, FMN is looking forward to Kinships with Hellerau – European Centre for the Arts Dresden, the Modulus Festival of Music on Main Vancouver and with Creative Arts and Industries of the University of Auckland.
*(Kinship = relationship)
Eccentric Listening
For “Eccentric Listening”, FMN invites international artists each year to put together 30 minutes of music, moderation and sounds. This year, they are AMET, Julia Robert and Nicole L’Huillier. The audio shows will be available free of charge from 20 to 27 November 2022.
Nicole L’Huillier is a transdisciplinary artist from Santiago de Chile currently based in Berlin. She was a PhD candidate and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, where she received her PhD in Arts & Media Sciences. She works at the intersection of music, art, architecture, science, fiction and technology. Using sound, vibration, resonance and multiple transductions, she explores superhuman performance, rituals of membranes and resonant architectures, and vibration and sound as building materials for spaces, collectivity, identity and agency.
Her work has been shown at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Transmediale, Bienal de Artes Mediales Santiago, Venice Architecture Biennale and Ars Electronica, among others.
Born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, Elsa M’Bala lives and works as a sound artist in Berlin. As AMET, she produces live podcasts that are conceived as a mixture of DJing and live radio shows in which field recordings are interwoven live with interviews.
Her sound is a reflection on race, cultural background, gender and spirituality. It questions how an artist’s musical output should sound based on her background and strives to bracket expectations in this regard. Elsa M’Bala’s works are based on heptatonic scales that break with the diatonicism of the Western canon and instead join a non-Western musical practice.
At first glance, Julia Robert’s work defies description and categorisation. It ranges from contemporary music for string quartet to transdisciplinary solo performances and a duo for viola/vocals and percussion/beatbox. She performs and composes in various groups, works with stage directors and directs her own company, Compagnie Leidesis. As diverse as their creations are, they are always united by the will to shake up the audience and offer new possibilities of listening. With a radical openness, the confrontation with the most diverse materials, new alliances and arrangements, Robert’s work is marked by constant transformation.
About Frau Musica Nova
Germany’s traditional festival of female composers was founded in 1997 and stands for the opening of the genre “contemporary music festival” to an open platform for encounters between the arts. FMN presents artists who use their language to evoke a confrontation with the present and the contemporary and explore various forms of experimental approaches to music and its interaction with media, performance and theatricality. The festival continuously expands the spectrum of transmedial productions and advocates overcoming the boundaries of genre and gender.
Ms Musica Nova 2022 is funded by the Cultural Office of the City of Cologne, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Kunststiftung NRW and the Rheinenergie Stiftung Kultur.
2022 Modulus Festival – Music on Main
School of Music – The University of Auckland
