Resynthesising the Traditional at Transgressive Memory Festival

Upon invitation of Körber-Stiftung, CTM Festival has curated an evening threading elements of its long-term project Resynthesising the Traditional, which aims to explore how musicians can critically engage with traditions and heritage while confronting conservative views of culture as something resistant to transformative practices.

This evening brings together works that oeuvre along the gaps – in distortion, uncertainty, and narratives omitted within idealised versions of the past. Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerk explore the ancient Greco-Roman aulos that epitomises an exalted and unraveled state; Dania’s speculative research sonically reanimates Mesopotamian museum artefacts to imagine a soundscape of southern Iraq without colonial interference; Stefan Fraunberger’s long-term research on Transylvania’s relic pipe organs highlights material processes that have stretched beyond the instruments’ convoluted histories and nature-culture battlefields. Here, idealised versions of the past are distorted into unstable hallucinations.

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