MUTEK Collaboration Night

Ryoichi Kurokawa, France Jobin & Markus Heckmann, RAMZi, Flabbergast, Line Katcho

HYBRID Box Musik 2022/23

Launched in the year 2000, MUTEK is dedicating itself to the presentation of live electronic music and real-time audiovisual performance, making it one of the rare outlets in North America for such innovations. MUTEK has built a unique model over the years that has proven seductively exportable. Tentacles stretch across 4 continents, to 6 other cities as Tokyo, Barcelona or Buenos Aires now, with each satellite adapting the festival’s template of values of inclusion and accessibility as a means to inspire new ways of engaging with the richness of electronic and digital artistry.

After the cooperation between HYBRID and MUTEK was postponed at short notice in March 2020 and could only take place digitally in March 2021 with thousands of online guests, the first cooperation will finally be able to take place live at the Festspielhaus in Hellerau on 29 October 2022: with Ryoichi Kurokawa, France Jobin & Markus Heckmann, Line Katcho, Flabbergast and RAMZi, artists who have been associated with MUTEK for a long time will guarantee an extraordinary evening in the Great Hall of the Festpielhaus.

Programme

8 pm Subassemblies – Ryoichi Kurokawa

9.15 pm Entanglement – France Jobin & Markus Heckmann 

10 pm RAMZi + Line Katcho (visuals)

10.45 pmFlabbergast + Line Katcho (visuals)

Duration: 5 hrs.

 

Strong strobe effects and increased volume.

France Jobin‘s audio art, referred to as “sound-sculpture”, distinguishes itself by a minimalist approach to complex sound environments. Since the mid-1990s, she has crafted meticulous compositions at the intersection of analog and digital. Her installations follow a parallel route, integrating musical and visual elements inspired by the architecture of diverse locations. Jobin has produced numerous solo albums under various renowned labels and her concerts and installations have been presented in several cities around the world.

Born in Germany in 1977, Markus Heckmann studied Media-technology at the University of Ilmenau and the Bauhaus University in Weimar before obtaining in 2006 the position of Technical Director at Derivative, the maker of TouchDesigner, in Toronto. Heckmann’s personal works have always tended to combine the aesthetic aspects of generative computer graphics with the almost physical aspects of light. Apart from producing visuals and installations for artists like Carsten Nicolai or applications to control the KineticLights of WHITEvoid, he occasionally takes care of visual stimuli at techno events under the nickname Wüstenarchitekten.

Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa is a master of translating analogue representations into digital streams, dizzying images and emotions. The extraordinary precision of his sensitively synchronised fragmentary images placed side by side on our retinas tends to displace the persistence of blurred memory under the effect of limitless luminosity. The correspondence of sound and image is central to Kurokawa’s works. He considers both the acoustic and visual elements as different vectors of a singular work and insists that they must flow together to create a collision simultaneously.

Montréal-based Phoebé Guillemot is a music composer, sound designer, music curator, and visual artist. Her solo music project RAMZi, born in 2012, merges soundscapes, electronic, acoustic instruments and visual works. Over the release of 10 albums, RAMZi evolved as a fictional character, taking shape as an animal-spirit from the forest, guardian of a parallel ecosystem emerging from the interplay of nature and technology, nostalgia and futurism, and a musical fusion of genres.

Born out of a one-off collaboration in the context of a MUTEK_rec release, Flabbergast, Guillaume Coutu Dumont and Vincent Lemieux, has continued to develop thereafter. Focused for more that ten years on completely improvised live performance, the group has been focusing since 2014 on composition and increasing its releases. Flabbergast´s music draws its influences from the four corners of electronic music, but also from jazz, hip hop and contemporary music. The complementarity of the fields of expertise of each of the composers allows the spectrum of the group´s compositions to be broadened. Stylistically, no musical influence is prohibited.

Line Katcho is a Montréal composer and audiovisual artist primarily interested in sound and image as demonstrations of kinetic matter: gestures, forces, or motion – she distinguishes herself by her experimental approach and affinity for perceptual playfulness, as well as a profound talent with affect. She holds a master’s degree in Electroacoustic Composition from the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, and leans towards a mixing of styles, genres and applied methods.

With the kind support of the Quebec Government Office in Berlin.