Musical Utopias #6 | 11-13 Jan 2024

Musical Utopias is Ensemble Klang and the Korzo’s annual festival that brings together music-makers and artists from multiple disciplines all striving to build new worlds. It is an invitation to share in a hopeful journey into the unknown, a journey that looks optimistically to the future.

This year the performances revolve around the theme of losing control. Works in which control has been relaxed or relinquished in order to uncover new and unexpected environments. Which new worlds, atmospheres and structures can you discover if you dare to take a step back, to lean out completely? The works explore the effect of standing still and pressing pause, to discover newly uncovered avenues that open up before us.

This year’s festival features, among others: Oceanic, Sofia Jernberg, Alexander Hawkins, Stephanie Pan, Ela Orleans, Spheric Totemic, Maya Verlaak, and Jesse Broekman.

Programme

11 Jan 2024 – The Art of Doing Nothing (Stephanie Pan, Ela Orleans, Ensemble Klang)
20.15   The Art of Doing Nothing – Stephanie Pan & Ensemble Klang
22.15   Night Voyager – Ela Orleans

12 Jan 2024 – Cracked Glaze (Sofia Jernberg, Alexander Hawkins, Spheric Totemic, Jesse Broekman & Ensemble Klang)
20.15   will it be like this for a long time, you asked – Jesse Broekman & Ensemble Klang
21.00   Cracked Glaze – Spheric Totemic (Alexander Hawkins, Matthew Wright, Neil Charles, Mandhira de Saram & Stephen Davis) & Ensemble Klang & Sofia Jernberg
22.15   Sofia Jernberg & Alexander Hawkins

13 Jan 2024 – The Thrill of Losing Control (Oceanic, Maya Verlaak & Ensemble Klang)
20.15   Conditions – Maya Verlaak, Ensemble Klang
21.15    Re-solarization – Tatsuru Arai
22.15   Oceanic & Ensemble Klang

11 Jan – Stephanie Pan, Ela Orleans & Ensemble Klang

20.15   The Art of Doing Nothing (2024) – Stephanie Pan (for voice & ensemble) – World Premiere

Stephanie Pan and Ensemble Klang open the festival with The Art of Doing Nothing, a feminist manifesto about listening to yourself and the world around you. About standing still. About not always swimming against the current, but sometimes just letting yourself be carried on the waves. And then make conscious choices. Saving power to explode with power.

The Art of Doing Nothing celebrates soft ‘feminine’ qualities such as intuition, doubt and vulnerability. It invites you to let go and embrace the magical space of not knowing.

Together with Ensemble Klang, Stephanie Pan takes you on a sonic journey through rich landscapes, pounding and gritty beats, distilled silence, and lush dramatic song.

22.00   Night Voyager – Ela Orleans

Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin and violin, footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission is repurposed to retell the narrative of Night Thoughts, a nine-poem cycle written by Edward Young in the 1740s. Night Voyager marries visuals from the NASA archives, capturing fearful but optimistic astronauts and their anxious loved ones left at home, with Young’s meditation on death – and speaks, too, of the possibility of cultural forgetting, as in Young’s poem, now scarcely remembered but called in its time “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced”.

12 Jan – Sofia Jernberg, Alexander Hawkins, Spheric Totemic, Jesse Broekman & Ensemble Klang

Sofia Jernberg & Alexander Hawkins first performed together in October 2016, under the name Musho – an Amharic word meaning ‘Sad Song’. Their initial programme focussed on a shared affinity for Ethiopian music, with both musicians having history with elder statesmen from that country: Jernberg with Hailu Mergia, and Hawkins with Mulatu Astatke. Since this time, however, their repertoire has expanded to include explorations of songs from many other traditions, including Swedish and Armenian, alongside a small number of original compositions.

Jernberg’s work frequently takes her to the outer edges of vocal technique, including performances in contexts ranging from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire to Mats Gustafsson’s Fire! Orchestra. She is also widely commissioned as a composer. Alexander Hawkins has been described as ‘unlike anything else in modern creative music’, and alongside his profile as a bandleader and composer, is a frequent collaborator with musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Nicole Mitchell, and Tomeka Reid.

Jesse Broekman‘s new work will it be like this for a long time, you asked, for Ensemble Klang, toys with the unpredictable nature of feedback to create a gradually unfolding sound world, combining vast harmonic fields with intricate rhythmic structures. It’s a world in which overtones rub against each other while at the same time evoke echoes of tonality.

From the UK, Spheric Totemic collaborate with Ensemble Klang to create a musical constellation of riffs and rhythms. The music hangs suspended in the air, splinters and fragments that have lost their roots. Together, the two groups create a world simultaneously at the point of collapse and also ecstasy, where new and unexpected musical relationships are continually unearthed. Spheric Totemic fuse influences from DJ Premier, Konono No.1 and the UK free improv scene, and include the musicians Alexander Hawkins, Matthew Wright, Neil Charles, Mandhira de Saram & Stephen Davis.

13 Jan – Oceanic, Tatsuru Arai, Maya Verlaak, Ensemble Klang

20.15   Conditions (2023) – Maya Verlaak (for Ensemble Klang)

Maya Verlaak’s new work Conditions places the six performers of Ensemble Klang in an unstable environment. The musicians shape the conditions of the virtual space, performing in reaction to its ever-changing dimensions.

21.15  Re-solarization – Tatsuru Arai

Japanese composer/sound-graphic programmer/creator of Gesamtkunstwerk Tatsuru Arai creates work that depict the fundamental physical nature of the universe in the form of perceptional experiences. In Re-solarization, an audio visual solo performance, we see nature appear distorted by technology – as the work progresses we’re left questioning where the border between nature and the digital work sits. In the flowers we see in cities, there are traces of human and cosmic history in the background. In the video we see A.I. transforming these flowers, allowing them to lossom and bloom, and then disintegrate and flake away. Similarly in the audio, musical styles from the past to the present are generated and distorted using techniques including A.I. to create what the Arai calls Hyper-Serial-Music.

Going out with a bang, Job Oberman (Oceanic) & Ensemble Klang join forces once again to close out the festival. As an associate maker with Klang in 2021-22, DJ and producer Job Oberman created the multimedia work A Sonically Open City, which was called ‘a delightful chaos [of] avant-garde techno’. Following the success of his latest album Choral Feeling he returns to work with Ensemble Klang once more to build an evening-length work exploring the sonically-immersive and ecstatic elements of club culture.

Oceanic‘s latest album Choral Feeling:

Tickets

11 Jan 2024 – The Art of Doing Nothing (Stephanie Pan, Ela Orleans, Ensemble Klang)
20.15   The Art of Doing Nothing – Stephanie Pan & Ensemble Klang
22.15   Night Voyager – Ela Orleans
Tickets

12 Jan 2024 – Cracked Glaze (Sofia Jernberg, Alexander Hawkins, Spheric Totemic, Jesse Broekman & Ensemble Klang)
20.15   will it be like this for a long time, you asked – Jesse Broekman & Ensemble Klang
21.00   Cracked Glaze – Spheric Totemic (Alexander Hawkins, Matthew Wright, Neil Charles, Mandhira de Saram & Stephen Davis) & Ensemble Klang & Sofia Jernberg
22.15   Sofia Jernberg & Alexander Hawkins
Tickets

13 Jan 2024 – The Thrill of Losing Control (Oceanic, Maya Verlaak & Ensemble Klang)
20.15   Conditions – Maya Verlaak, Ensemble Klang
21.15    Oceanic & Ensemble Klang
Tickets