Soundscapes in the Garden 1

Loraine James

00:00

Blackhaine

00:00

Sold out

During the last week of August 2025, the music series Soundscapes in the Garden at Neue Nationalgalerie will feature three evenings of ambitious, site-specific live concerts by five internationally admired and respected musicians. Coinciding with Lange Nacht der Museen on Saturday, August 30th, there will also be a day of special, musical tributes to the fog sculpture by the iconic Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya (*1933), which has been on view in the sculpture garden throughout the summer.

Soundscapes in the Garden introduces a new dimension to the music programming that Neue Nationalgalerie has presented in and around its iconic sculpture garden since its early years – beginning with the »Jazz in the Garden« showcases in the 1970s and 1980s, which featured greats like Alice Contrane and Keith Jarrett, and continuing with the more broadly defined mandate of »Sound in the Garden« since the reopening in 2022.

The clarity and precision of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, together with the ephemeral poetry of Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture, serve as parallel inspirations for understanding to conceive of music as a spatial art form—something that may be experienced while wandering among the garden’s plants and sculptures just as fully as in the focused immobilization enforced by conventional concert halls. At the Neue Nationalgalerie, the spatiality and site-specificity of all live concerts is based on an immersive d&b Soundscape audio system, which will be specially installed in the garden for the duration of the series. Soundscapes in  the Garden encourages audiences to understand openness and closure not only as major themes in the architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie, but also as categories for experiencing sound and music.

This performance features Loraine James, an electronic producer and composer whose sound draws from a life steeped in musical variety. Growing up on Enfield’s Alma Estate in North London, she absorbed her mother’s eclectic taste of heavy metal to calypso, alongside her own teenage immersion in emo, pop, and math rock. Teaching herself production with a laptop and MIDI keyboard, she began blending R&B, drill, pop, and IDM into an unmistakable signature. 

Joining her is Blackhaine, a British artist whose practice fuses drill, noise, choreography, and theatrical installation into a form that’s both physical and volatile. Emerging in 2020, his performances are informed by northern English life and a stark, uncompromising politics. On stage, movement and voice collide in an exhausting ritual of repetition, improvisation, and intensity - sometimes leaving him bruised or bloodied - as he dismantles his own catalogue and reconstructs it in shifting combinations of noise, punk, ambient, avant dance, and spoken word. 

Soundscapes in the Garden is made possible by the FREUNDE der Nationalgalerie e.V. and is curated by Gregor Quack (Volkswagen Group Fellow) in collaboration with Tessa Nijdam and CTM Festival. 

The project received generous support from its main sponsor audibene GmbH.

Live performances and sound installations are powered by d&b audiotechnik.

Supported by BRLO Craft Beer, Afri-Cola, viniculture, Chateau Royale, and Rheinsberger Preussenquelle.