At the lab's core is the guiding metaphor of resynthesis – a processing method in computer music that analyzes sounds to extract their fundamental components. Through this lens, the lab aims to confront conservative views of culture as something frozen, solidified, and generally untouchable, thus resistant to any transformative practices.
The lab was hosted by Medina Bazarğali and Bilawa Respati. Fellows presented their practices to the public on 17 October 2025 and further insight into lab ideas and processes were shared at a roundtable on 23 October 2025.
Artistic Fellows
The organisers wish to thank the over 135 artists and practitioners who applied to the call for participants. Selected by the co-hosts Bilawa Respati and Medina Bazargali, with input from Stas Shärifullá, and the teams of CTM Festival, Korkut Triennale, and Goethe-Institut Kazakhstan, the six selected fellows bring together a range of experiences, knowledge, and musical aesthetics that relate to connection to »the traditional.«
Working under the artist name Archeprototype (KZ), Aina Zhekebatyr sees sound as a means of accessing nonverbal archives that live in the atmosphere, the body and its relationships to its surroundings. The researcher and composer places listening, as an act of relation, at the core of her practice, and is inspired by explorations of how the voice and sonic practices can activate connections with invisible matter. In this way, the wind as an invisible force is an especially potent unification of body, space, and time.
Airat Khaziev aka Şüräle (INT) sees tradition as a living, self-reproducing, and dynamic hyperobject that can foster connection. Growing up hiking the Ural mountains, he was surrounded by a psychoacoustic sound map of the wind, water, and echoing voices, which shaped an embodied curiosity for locality and non-anthropocentrism. Through synthesis, machine learning, field recordings, and traditional instruments, he looks for ways to deconstruct and find overlooked elements within traditions in order to reassemble them in ways that speak to the present.
Improvisation, place, and collage are constantly present in Bruno Trochmann's (BR) artistic practice. The tradition of the Brazilian fiddle, rabeca, invites artists to uniquely shape the form and materials of their craft, even within artistic lineages, thus resisting the instrument’s standardisation and effectively sidestepping notions of »pure« tradition through heterogeneity. Strongly relating his practice to his home environment and locality, Bruno wishes to explore the rabeca’s vibrations as constantly morphine howls set forth into the wind.
Jena Jang (KR/CZ), an audiovisual artist who has been exploring drone noise generated through the airflow of hairdryers, sees the wind as a kind of invisible score drawn in the sky. Their use of hairdryers challenges the conventional act of playing an instrument, teasing out sounds through contact mics, modulating the motor's vibration, or directly exposing their hard to the airflow while breaking into headbanging or screams – a euphoric feeling of being on top of a windy mountain anchored by the domesticity of their sound object.
»Resynthesis isn't just technique, it's resurrection« writes Rami Harrabi, alias VIRUS2020 (TN). He explores North African wind instruments such as the zokra, mezwed, gasba, along with other DIY wind instruments that are made from materials that decay/decompose. For Harrabi, when animal horns, goat skin, reeds, beeswax, and bones are shaped into instruments and played, life is breathed back into them. These instruments are not just objects, they are tied to rituals that heal, purify, induce trance, and channel collective memory. But these traditions are vanishing. Harrabi aims to project his ancestral practices into future landscapes.
XAKALELE (NL) is the moniker of Mara Lalihatu, a Dutch-Moluccan artist who through queerness aims to navigate between cultures and categories, and to remove the pressure to explain or translate identities. Experiencing tradition like identity – contested, constantly shifting, intertwining, and alive, they combine experimentation with hand-built Moluccan-Papuan instruments and electronics to explore memory, inheritance, and the ways identity is carried in the body, ultimately confronting the mess of belonging.
Theme: The Wind Howls
The lab’s thematic focus on aural traditions and the wind evokes the wide range of cultures in Central and North Asia, and beyond, where for generations sonic practices—whether instrumental music, spoken literature, or various forms of improvisation—have been central to shaping societies and worldviews. Most of these practices are easy to learn but difficult to master. They are accessible to nearly everyone, regardless of special training or social status, yet, in some cases, they require a lifelong commitment.
Aural traditions and sound are also intimately linked to the wind, a phenomenon that can be examined as both a powerful cultural symbol and a physical element. Understanding wind is fundamental to our understanding of acoustics. As the movement of air, it interacts with objects in the environment, causing vibrations that produce sound. In turn, sound travels through the air, setting off a chain reaction that carries its energy. This principle lies at the core of the design of many musical instruments, starting with the voice—the most primal and fundamental instrument of all—which can be amplified when spoken or sung into the wind, allowing it to carry the song. Woodwind and brass instruments rely on the performer’s breath to create wind, which makes them resonate, while all manner of organs, bagpipes, and hurdy-gurdys generate wind artificially, forcing it through pipes of varying lengths to produce sound, following the very same principle. Some instruments, when played by a skilled performer, can mimic the sound of wind, causing pieces of wood and skin to rumble like a hurricane or strings to howl like the buran on the winter steppe.
This lab edition is kindly supported by Goethe-Institut Kazakhstan.