CTM 2026 Radio Lab concert: Emiddio Vasquez
As part of the Radio Lab commission, Emiddio Vasquez presents »21s,« a live improvised audiovisual performance that reanimates the psychogeography of Ayia Napa, Cyprus, once lauded as the epicenter of UK Garage. Pulverized breakbeats, asymmetrical resonance, bat recordings, VLF whistlers and gestural interference crack open the nexus of club culture and militarism which oozes out AI-slop and early noughties paraphernalia from Ayia Napa’s club alley. Set up originally to entertain military staff in nearby British military bases, the performance revisits the alley as part of an ongoing multiyear investigation that treats the mythologies of UKG found in vinyls, the history of pirate radio and the club culture surrounding it as legitimate renditions of cultural hegemony.
The performance pushes against narratives of historical continuity and tests them sonically against the continuity of radio fields, through improvisation, sourced footage, recordings and parafictional breakbeats. Drawing from the »tuned circuit« found in radios whose resonance reinforces frequencies that filter out noise in the atmosphere, the visual component of the performance treats AI-slop as an analogous property in contemporary data transmission, whose algorithmic resonance is subject to the hallucinatory aesthetics found in early adversarial aesthetics and computer vision. Turned on its head, its delusional tendency manifests the hegemonic fantasies currently shaping AI culture.
For this performance Emiddio Vasquez is joined by local drummer Stelios Antoniou, whose drumkit is extended with sensors, triggering audiovisual events that collide scales of magnitude, dissolve language and push the thresholds of perception.
The work is commissioned by the CTM Radio Lab which is a project by Deutschlandfunk Kultur – Hörspiel / Klangkunst and CTM Festival in collaboration with Goethe-Institut, ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst, Ö1 Kunstradio, and tekhnē.
The performance was followed by a concert by Tohal Kyna and Sara Persico.
More information and tickets via the CTM website.