tekhnē

This March, Skaņu Mežs announced an open call for sound artists, intended for residencies focusing on installations and performances as creative outcomes. The open call led to the selection of three artists who visited Riga for two weeks from late September to mid-October to create new works and perform at the Skaņu Mežs 2024 festival (4-5 October). They were German-Filipino sound and performance artist Tintin Patrone, harsh noise wall spearhead Vomir and Berlin-based sound artist and electronic musician Nick Klein.

All three artists created unique sound art installations for the Skaņu mežs festival during their residencies. Also, festival audience could enjoy special performances by the artists, during which the newly created works were also presented. Afterwards, sound art installations by Vomir and Tintin Patrone was exhibited at gallery "Smilga" (34A Eduarda Smiļģa street)

Nick Klein: “BONE SETTING”

Nick Klein is an artist working in sound and art and sometimes (begrudgingly) sound art with a lean towards the social potential in those modalities as they interact. Klein has recorded a large amount of music for tape, CD, digital file, and vinyl editions for music labels worldwide, as well as running his own amorphous label project PL (primitive languages, Psychic Liberation, etc). Concurrently, to the best of his ability, he has shown work in visual art contexts. Klein is uninterested in the prohibitive ideological tropes and circumstances that both sound and art contexts offer and focuses the intent of his work on trying to see what productive energy comes from the friction between the two. Klein likes loud volume, cooking, offline community building, records, bars, synthesizers, and comedy.

Klein is currently located in Berlin. Since its inception, Klein has operated a monthly radio show on Montez Press Radio and is spending 2023-2024 developing a monthly invitational program at the Volksbühne Roter Salon. Klein has collaborated in various capacities and media materializations with Wilted Woman, Audrey Chen, Das Ding, Hugo Esquinca, Jean-Louis Huhta, Erik Nystrand, Scant, Philip Maier, Makoto Oshiro, and many more.

Klein has performed and shown works in contexts and festivals like The Amant Foundation (USA), SARA’S (USA), MOMA PS1 (USA), De La Cruz Collection (USA), Volksbühne (DE), Empty Gallery (HK), Berghain (DE), Tresor (DE), Seendosi (SK), Cafe Sismo (CDMX), Cafe Oto (UK), Folkteatern (SE), Burning Fleshtival (USA), Herrensauna (DE), and Summer Scum (USA).

About the new work:

“Bone Setting” is an auditory sculptural installation developed for Skaņu Mežs festival 2024 within the sound art project tekhnē, supported by the EU program Creative Europe. All audio is derived from localized areas throughout the city of Riga as a basis for spatial and formal abstraction in sonic and environmental implementation. During the exhibition, processed field recordings taken during the festival residency are reconstituted in a generative manner, stretching time, place, and tonality and collaging spatial contexts into new realms of sonic experience.

Tintin Patrone: “PURE MINOR”

Christina Koehler, mainly working as Tintin Patrone, is a German-Filipino Sound and Performance artist. She is captivated by exploring interconnections among music, art, sound, and experimental forms of expression. Her creative works revolve around the visual aspects of music and how personal and societal connections are established with it.

By involving herself with robots and artificial intelligence in her artistic practice, Tintin Patrone challenges established notions of human subjectivity and physical presence. By integrating these technological elements, her objective is to go beyond outdated concepts of “human nature” and nurture fresh perspectives that continuously evolve alongside contemporary advancements in science and technology.

Incorporating non-human entities as participants becomes a purposeful endeavour for Tintin Patrone, who aims to disrupt conventional understandings of human subjectivity and embodiment. Her performances, installations, and plays are inspired by genres such as musical Concept Art, Fluxus, and experimental music.

Another profound source of inspiration that shapes Tintin Patrone’s artistic approach is the culture of associations and collectives. She frequently collaborates and engages with fellow artists and groups, creating an environment of mutual exploration.

About the new work:

“PURE MINOR” is a sound installation project inspired by the traditional Swiss “Alpsegen,” reinterpreted with electronic sounds and processed vocals. The particular installation is conceived within the sound art project tekhnē, supported by the EU program Creative Europe. The project explores the intersections of sound, ritual, and technology, focusing on how protective rituals using sound can be adapted for contemporary urban settings.

The “Alpsegen” is a kind of request to God, Christ, the Mother of God, the Trinity, and individual saints, which varies depending on the version of the text, in which the protection of the Alp and everything that belongs to it is implored from the possible dangers of the coming night; musically, the “Alpsegen” is a recitation made up of lines and sections of lines. As a rule, it is the head dairyman of an Alpine community who calls the “Alpsegen” loudly over his Alp every evening at or after nightfall; he likes to stand on a nearby hill and, to increase the volume, uses his hands held in front of his mouth or, even more frequently, the so-called “Folle”, i.e. the milk funnel, which, when held upside down in front of the mouth, is used as a kind of megaphone. This creates an imaginary protective space around the Alpine farm that lasts all night. The protection extends as far as the sound of the prayer call or “Alpsegen” reaches.

Using wooden megaphones as central acoustic devices for the installation, the project aims to combine tradition and new technologies, deconstruct pastoral ideals, and investigate the friction between rural voice-based rituals and contemporary urban soundscapes.

Using a trombone as her main instrument and modulation devices, she meticulously crafts soundscapes with sustained tones, inviting listeners into contemplative atmospheres.

Vomir: “Proclamation of the Bruitist Wall”

Romain Perrot (born 1973), better known by his stage name Vomir (French for “vomiting” or “regurgitate”), is a French noise music artist based in Paris. Since beginning his career in 1996, Vomir has appeared in over 300 releases, including singles, albums and collaborations with other noise artists. The majority of his albums were produced by his own independent label, Decimation Sociale. Vomir positions his approach to music as an “anti-” approach, with a radical and nihilist stance. He spearheads the harsh noise wall movement, an extreme subgenre of noise music which he describes as “no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse”.

About the new work:

“The individual no longer has an alternative but to completely refuse the promoted and preached contemporary life. The only still free behaviour is the noise and withdrawal, to never surrender to handling, socialization, and entertainment.

The Bruitist Wall does not promise to repeatedly provide direction and values with the lived existence. The opaque, dull, and continuous noise allows a total phenomenologic reduction, a means against the existential interpretation: disengaged in the pure and unaltered bestial appeasing.

The Bruitist Wall is pro-outsider, the voluntary outsider. It calls into question the institution of any relation, all that destroys occurs.

The Bruitist Wall is a social challenge. He challenges any concept of group, community, organization and admits the alternative of postmodern cloistering withdrawal from society. The refusal in the fold because any act even considered futurist, dada, situ or anarchist/straight edge is vain.

The actionism of disrepair cannot face the dilapidation, with factitious recovery, the prostitution of our derivative civilization. To observe contemptible outside should be only one last recall of the human nonsense before the époque protestor. Any thing and any being becomes without significance. The Bruitist Wall is the loss of conscience of time to live in the void and to let themselves run in the moment.

The Bruitist Wall is the physical loss of conscience.

The Bruitist Wall is the uninterrupted practice of mental noise.

The Bruitist Wall is the militant purity in the non-representation. Vigilant of the last sudden starts, let us adopt a new posture in withdrawal – neither tender, neither escape, nor bending – in order to be able to affirm “I never was there” in the desert created by the obliteration of our environment. To lose any hope is freedom.

In the insulation of the Bruitist Wall, cellular nothing, to become its shade – the impassive murderer of oneself – and thus to become a shade of the man, unknowable, impersonal.

In the Bruitist Wall, to worsen its being, to be held unaware of and ignorant of all; withdrawal requires the development of a pure indetermination which is forged in the lapse of memory of the emotional and intellectual constraining elements.

The Bruitist Wall, the darkness of spiritual martyrdom, is the union between the being and nothing, a lullaby without end.

The Bruitist Wall spreads its occult virtues, by hummings and the buzzes of its hermetic formulas, it disaggregates and calls with irrevocable disintegration.”