The aulos is reimagined as a volatile, contested sound technology whose mythic legacy resonates with today’s fractured sonic landscape. The project also explores how spatial sound technologies can reshape musical structure and listening practices by embedding machine perception into real-time spatial dramaturgy.
Working through computers as compositional partners, Marcin Pietruszewski sculpts precise yet volatile architectures of tone, probing how synthetic form translates into physical vibration. His practice crosses through live performance, installation, and radio, threading formal electroacoustic tradition through the tangly fields of psychoacoustics, computational linguistics, and auditory design. Earning his PhD in Music and Computing from the Edinburgh College Of Art in 2023, he presented a sound installation at La Biennale Di Venezia the same year. Collaborations with Marcus Schmickler, Tristan Clutterbuck, Lauren Sarah Hayes, and Florian Hecker reveal a restless curiosity for how perception fractures and reforms under pressure, while projects with philosopher Chris Schambaugh, designer collective NORM, and the Laboria Cuboniks group extend his inquiry into the philosophical and visual dimensions of aural thought.
Lukas De Clerck's work centres on the aulos, the ancient Greco-Roman double pipe extinct for over a millennium, which he’s spent years reconstructing through obsessive reed-making and experimental design. His album, Telescopic Aulos of Atlas, is a contemporary reinvention of the instrument that turns historical speculation into sonic research, where microtonality, psychoacoustics, and shifting textures form a living vocabulary. This archaemusicological research was extended with an album on Stephen O’ Malley’s Ideologic Organ imprint. Heard at Rewire, Meakusma, Sonic Acts, and other European festivals, his performances have brought the aulos into the present tense, its breathless tones flickering between myth and experiment.
This commission is a co-production with Archipel, Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, nyMusikk, and Sonic Acts Biennale.
