The 19th edition of the SIMULTAN Festival is set to unfold between 3-6 October 2024, in Timișoara, continuing its exploration of the relationship between art, technology and society, through different artistic methods and practices.
The four day program presents video art, installations and live events where some of the themes and methods are: stylistic eclecticism, the relationship between man and automation, recycling or ecological themes, improvisational music in alternative or obsolete technical conditions, digital lyricism, fusion of acoustic and electronic instruments, expanded cinema.
As the festival continues to deepen its inquiry into the relationship between technology and humanity, Desire for the Useless serves as a contemplative theme.
In a world where simulations often replace reality, the line between useful and useless becomes blurred. Uselessness reveals the constructed nature of perceptions, prompting us to reconsider what we consider real or valuable. […]
The desire for the useless is not about pursuing uselessness. Rather, it’s about finding meaning in the seemingly impractical through creativity, critical thinking, and insight. Think of desire as energy, not a void. When desire is free from the constraints of utility, it becomes a force that drives us towards new ideas and expressions, showing us that the useless has its own productivity.
True to its exploratory nature, the festival will once again be hosted at the MX (Corneliu Miklosi Museum and the former tram factory workshops), a venue that has become synonymous with the event in recent years.
The 19 edition’s live program features artists who are actively engaged in the field of sonic art and the experimental music scene, as follows:
Alexander Iezzi, Billy Bultheel and Ivan Cheng performing 33, explores the fusion of machine gun techno, experimental pop, bone-chilling industrial tones, and baroque voices.
Their approach exemplifies a dynamic, evolving constellation of collaborations that transcend traditional musical boundaries, from experimentalists to classically trained performers. Beyond the studio, 33’s live performances, often held in non-traditional spaces, take on a performative and installation nature, engaging audiences in a multisensory experience that pushes the limits of conventional music.
Alessandra Eramo is a sound artist, vocalist and composer, her art delves into the latent acoustic territories of the voice and explores noise as a socio-political matter.
With her collage of hypnotic soundscapes and voices, she pushes beyond sound into deeper layers of poetic expression. Beat-boxing, tongue clicking, screeching, hissing: Eramo explores trance states in singing through the use of expanded vocal techniques, non-verbal vocalizing, crude noise, melodies, fragmented words, and unknown languages, interweaving a dynamic use of field recordings, feedback, sampler and tapes.
Feldermelder (Manuel Oberholzer) is a polymathic creative whose artistry spans composition, sound design, installation and code. He is also one of the co-founders of -OUS Records.
Crafting ex nihilo, the essence of Feldermelder’s innovative new live performance encapsulates the essence of creation itself. Emulating the dynamic forces of nature through the mediums of physicality, fluidity, and vibration, the experience unfolds as a spectral journey.
Vocalist/ violinist/ composer Diana Miron acknowledges a strong connection to Romanian Hyperspectralism, as she is since 2015 part of the Hyperion International Ensemble founded by composers Ana-Maria Avram and Iancu Dumitrescu.
She will present Organisma Sonora, a participatory choral sound performance that challenges our perception and understanding of the choir as an organism in motion, offering new musical meanings through extended vocal expressions.
Franck Vigroux’s uniqueness comes from his artistic approach that integrates new media and performance arts, designing transdisciplinary audiovisual concerts. Collaborating with visual artist Antoine Schmitt, heir of kinetic art and cybernetic art, nourished by metaphysical science-fiction, through his objects and installations, he endlessly interrogates the dynamic interactions between human nature and the nature of reality.
They will perform ATOTAL, an audio-visual show aiming to reconstruct in order to better deconstruct the processes of imposition of the will by repetition and absolute synchronism, to propose an opening on a perhaps saving decoincidence.
Maria W Horn is a composer whose work explores the inherent spectral properties of sound. Her compositions employ a varied instrumentation ranging from analog synthesizers to choir, string instruments, pipe organ and various chamber music formats. Synthetic sound is often paired with acoustic instruments in order to extend the instruments timbral capacities with precise control of timbre, tuning and texture. Maria combines spectralist techniques and site specific source material in order to explore the inherent memories of a building, object or geographical area. She is co-founder of Swedish record label XKatedral.
Micleusanu M. is a multidisciplinary artist, experimenting with sound and image, writer and producer of radio programs and short films. In his practice composing is rather an investigation or sonic research, looking for new approaches and territories through deconstruction, hybrid synthesis and nonlinear methods.
His new audio-visual project, Liminal Garden, offers a conceptual exploration of the existential substratum, aiming to “decode the encrypted and hidden meanings” of the human condition. The project delves into the complex processes of adaptation to the evolving dynamics of computation, technology, and ecology.
Long term collaborators Hanno Leichtmann & Valerio Tricoli will perform their latest album Cinnte Le Dia, feeding on the combination of real-time alchemical improvisation and careful post processing, giving a cinematic impact of a jagged whole, built by intersecting irregular rhythms, leaden synths, loops and the sinister tone radiated by Tricoli’s Revox B77.
Leichtmann is a sound artist and curator of experimental music events and festivals who, in the last years, has been working primarily on sound archives to develop complex sound installations.
Tricoli is a composer, performer, creator of sound installations and improviser, master of the reel-to-reel tape recorder. His art primarily addresses issues such as the reality and virtuality of sound, the various forms of its reproduction, and the problems of memory associated with the aforementioned themes.
Magda Drozd is an artist and sound curator. Utilizing a diverse array of influences and techniques, she creates distinctive and alluring soundscapes combining an electroacoustic approach to field recordings with violin drones, orchestral passages, choral melodies, fragile voices, noise, and various instrumentations that delve into intuitive and speculative perceptions of the world through sound.
She will perform pieces from her last EP Viscera, on which pulsating, sensual textures, diverse synthetic and organic timbres, strongly manipulated driving violin sounds, noise and field recordings are omnipresent elements.
Roberto Maqueda identifies himself as an heterodox artist interested in avant-garde creation connected to electronic worlds and digital art; as well as new forms of communication and their implementation in the sound scene of our time. His main projects in the last years have been reConvert or y-band.
He will present AIR, a performative installation which combines amplified instruments and solenoid valve modules, creating analog drum-machines. The piece aims not to make ordinary use of the specific language of percussion instruments, but rather to destroy their sound, deconstruct it, and process it, utilizing the resulting sound analysis and translating it into a visual form.
The experimental improv duo Bass Clef Poetry of Tony Elieh and Andrei Cucu was born out of a chance encounter. The two have focused on letting their musical intuition manifest in the recording sessions, out of which the ten songs are born. They weave their sound makers together, be they objects, bass guitar, spoken word or electronics.
Elieh is one of the pioneers of rock and experimental music in Lebanon. A founding member of the first post-rock group of post-war Lebanon. Cucu is a multimedia artist and sound designer trying the boundaries between sound/image/text/space/nature.
In a friendly cooperation with Beta Biennale, this year’s live program includes a special staging of Rebecca Salvadori’s Messengers, a multifaceted film-in-the-making unfolding across multiple dimensions. A hybrid film experience that is simultaneously a self-portrait, a portrait of a group of artists, of different music scenes, of a city in a specific moment of time.
The complete program and further participants will be announced soon, including the video screenings and exhibition, resulting from the international open call.
SIMULTAN 2024 is Co-funded by The Administration of the National Cultural Fund / AFCN.
Funded by the Municipality of Timișoara through the Center for Projects.
Event organised in partnership with the Municipality of Timișoara through the Center for Projects.
With the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
Partners: Beta, Marginal, Semi Silent
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cover photo Andreea Săsăran