17+18.11.2018 | Transcultures & City Sonic @ Ars Musica 2018

For this 2018 edition, Ars Musica explores these pathways that have transformed musical art over time. From violin making to unhinging spatialization, from unexpected environments to intoxicating potentialities, the festival program immerses the listener in a bath of innovation, opening windows to a future or a past that seemed to be the future in its time.Transcultures presents two installations at Les Brigittines as part of a great Marathon Inouï (where we also find performances of Mathias Delplanque, Luc Ex or Pierre Bastien with his “Quiet motors”. Inside, ‘Air’, in-situ installation (premiere) by collective VOID, that uses low sound frequencies that are inaudible to the human ear (which we admit as silence). Diffused in a tube, they propagate a movement of air through the wind instrument that begins to ring. This aerial orchestra generates a soundscape that constitutes an all-encompassing experience with organic and volatile sounds.

Outside the Chapel, ‘X-BELL X-1’ is a sound installation created by Raymond Delepierre (Be) for historical megaphones dating from the 1960s to the year 2010. By their forms similar to bells of call, bells of alarm, for events of life and deaths, they constitute an intrinsic collective memory. This device proposes the emergence of a posture of individual listening within a collective, by its power to extract the listener from its familiar environment. The sounds emitted isolate the place. The sonic field of action provides a clean and autonomous life to the space. The sound partition, tuned with the listening environment and its tonal environment, replaces the voices of the past that have crossed the wires, cables, this material and sounds the air of thousands of forgotten sound particles. The megaphones emit sounds similar to bells stripped of the sound of the attack of the beating when it meets the bell’s belly. A long and slow resonance is heard. As a result, a micro-tonal and non-intrusive composition is broadcast in multi-point through megaphonic diffusers. The multiplication of sources creates acoustic encounters in situ and is materialized by long and harmonious beats. Fragments of words evaporate from these sound cones. The name ‘X BELL X-1’ is the association of the name of the American plane BELL X-1, this aircraft was the first to cross the sound barrier during the Second World War, and mathematical (x) meaning an unknown.

Apart from these great sound installations, Transcultures is also complicit in several other Ars Musica 2018 events, including the installation Fading by composer / pianist Jean-Luc Fafchamps and visual artist Michel Lorand (at the ERG, from 1411 to 01.12) from the opera for soprano by Morton Feldman, ‘Neither’, the underwater concert that became historical – ‘Sonic Waters’ – by French electronic composer Michel Redolfion November 25th at the Brussels Baths, the Intanarumori evening (29.11 Espace Senghor) where the famous reconstructed Italian futuristic pioneers instruments will be part of the instrumentarium for compositions by Fabio Cifariello Cifardi, Fausto Romitelli, Egidija Medeksaite, Eric Bettens and Louis Andriessen played by Ensemble XXI.

Also recommending the creation of the American composer sampler David Shea (electronics, bowls – Sub Rosa) with pianist Jean-Philippe Collard-Neven preceded by a toy piano concert of the duet Pestova / Meyer (Balsamine on 12.11) or the concert of the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles (direction: Jean-Paul Dessy) with the guitarist Fred Frith (with the premiere of Frith’Something about this Landscape’) that the festival puts in the spotlight, in Bozar on 24.11. Ars Musica 2018 great programme features also master classes and reflection including a symposium on the relationship between music and architecture (14.11) and a lecture by Italian director Romeo Castelluci with American sound artist Scott Gibbons (21.11) to the Brussels Royal Academy of Fine Arts.