Chronotopia Part 1

Jessica Ekomane

00:00

Kolida Babo

00:00

xin

00:00

Sote presents Parallel Persia feat. Arash Bolouri & Pouya Damadi

00:00

Free entrance

In the first part of the evening, a series of live sets at the concert room of the Goethe-Institut explored new temporalities and topographies that arise from transversal exchanges across times, geographies, and cultures. Through the collapsing, folding, dissolving, colliding, and weaving together of various cultural lineages, and of the ancient and the yet to come, these artists speculate on time (and culture’s) non-linearity and seek points of contact between older music practises and contemporary speculative experimentalism.

Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote, is a driving force behind Tehran’s vibrant experimental music scene. The formidable electronic music composer and sound artist has shared his work via Warp, Sub Rosa, Opal Tapes, Morphine, and, most recently, Diagonal. Sote presented Parallel Persia, which deals with the illusion and creation of an artificial hyperreal culture manipulated and controlled by an imperious agency somewhere within all galaxies. Amongst destruction arises beauty, grace, and symmetry. Traditional Persian acoustic tropes performed by instrumentalists Arash Bolouri (santour) and Pouya Damadi (tar) struggle against and enter into dialogue with Sote’s digital processing and futuristic computer sound. Snapshots of an apocryphal Iran are presented via sonic schematics for a synthetic »Persian« experience.

Performing with a quadrophonic setup was Jessica Ekomane, whose recent track »Common Fate« delves into psychoacoustics, playing with the perception of rhythmic structures and counterpoint between noise and melody. Her work draws on older forms of music, adopting tuning systems that lie outside of the dominant Western canon and folding them into undulating polyrhythmic structures. Her trance-inducing computer music is at once static yet constantly shifting. Ekomane is host of Open Sources, a monthly show on Berlin’s Cashmere Radio. Taking listeners on journeys through diverse folk musics and contemporary experiments, the show presents an insight into her expansive sonic interests. 

Kolida Babo is a collaboration between Greek musicians Socratis Votskos and Harris P. Their eponymous debut album, woven out of live improv sessions, explores ancient Armenian music, the sounds of Greece’s Epirus and Thrace regions, abstract electronics, and free jazz. Their singular sonic palette traverses temporalities and localities: in Kolida Babo, the Armenian duduk meets a Moog synthesiser, braiding together seemingly separate traditions and sounds, the modern and the deep past, the local and the global.

xin has contributed to compilations on netlabels such as Genome 6.66Mbp, Intruder Alert, AN BA, and suspension. Their debut solo release, To Shock the Earth and Shake the Sky, came out on Subtext in 2018, and was made available solely via independent platforms. xin’s live set folds together various dance music strains, from the 90s to today, with a seemingly contradictory arrhythmic sensibility. Their performance drew from their then forthcoming LP Melts into Love, which mangles and strangles fragments of neurofunk, hardcore, and dubstep to produce alien, shapeshifting sounds.