Musical Utopias #7 | 9-11 Jan 2025
We launch 2025 with Musical Utopias – The Dream Edition, a three-day festival showcasing bold, interdisciplinary works. This year’s programme blends noise with stillness, creating sonic landscapes that evoke the tranquility of nature, the power of friendship, and the urgency of protest.
From the haunting beauty of a silent lake to vivid aural recollections, the festival features artists who explore the delicate threshold between rest and wakefulness. Their works offer moments of deep reflection and introspection, balanced by bursts of visceral energy and sonic rebellion. Whether you’re drawn to moments of profound stillness or revel in the unsettling hum of noise, Musical Utopias is an invitation to dream, and to listen with new ears to works that provoke thought and inspire action.
Musical Utopias The Dream Edition features: Mariam Rezaei, Elaine Mitchener, Sarah Hennies, Jonathon Bonny, Karen Wilems, Eliane Radigue & Carol Robinson, Sara Vrugt, Andrew Hamilton & Cecilia Arditto.
Programme
9 Jan 2025, 20.15 – Memory Box & Moving Eastman
Memory Box – Ensemble Klang, Sarah Hennies, Eliane Radigue & Carol Robinson
Moving Eastman – Elaine Mitchener & Dam van Huynh
10 Jan 2025, 20.15 – YOU CHOOSE YOU LOSE
Ensemble Klang, Amba Klapwijk, Gijs van der Heijden (world premiere)
YOU CHOOSE YOU LOOSE – Jonathan Bonny (world premiere)
11 Jan 2025, 19.30 – Friends & Monsters
The Dearest Dream – Ensemble Academy of Koninklijk Conservatorium (Cecilia Arditto, Robin Fiedler & Antek Cholewinski)
Friendly Piece – Andrew Hamilton & Ensemble Klang
Without Papers – Karen Willems & Ensemble Klang
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (TSORPM)– Mariam Rezaei & Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
9 Jan 2025 – Elaine Mitchener, Sarah Hennies, Éliane Radigue, Carol Robinson & Ensemble Klang
The opening night of Musical Utopias revolves around musical memory. The two sets conjure vivid aural recollections to contrasting effect. Ensemble Klang perform works of stillness and immersive minimalism by Sarah Hennies, Eliane Radigue and Carol Robinson. While Elaine Mitchener’s energy and physicality are let loose in a new solo dance and sonic performance inspired by the intersectional life of the Black American composer Julius Eastman.
Elaine Mitchener ©Djuric
20.15 Memory Box – Ensemble Klang, Sarah Hennies, Eliane Radigue & Carol Robinson
Sarah Hennies’s works are celebrated for their “intimate musical vision” (New York Times) that have embraced themes of identity, love and psychoacoustics, while Eliane Radigue, a pioneer of analog synth music, and now in her 10th decade, remains one of the greatest living composers. Themes of water and personal musical associations thread through this set of works that share a quiet intensity, and deep contemplation.
21.45 Moving Eastman – Elaine Mitchener & Dam van Huynh
Moving Eastman is a new dance and sonic performance, that takes inspiration from the intersectional life of the Black American composer Julius Eastman. Using Eastman’s artistic legacy and life story as points of departure, the work is a response to Mitsuye Yamada’s quote ‘invisibility is not a natural state for anyone’, igniting a much-needed discussion on who controls the narrative in recording history and who possesses the authority to tell these stories.
'But now music is only one of my attributes. I could be a Dancer, Choreographer, Painter, or any other kind of artist if I so wished.'- Julius Eastman
The performance is led by Elaine Mitchener, a British movement and vocal artist with Afro-Caribbean heritage, with original concept and choreography by Vietnamese-American director Dam Van Huynh. Mitchener is a new Associate Maker with Ensemble Klang from 2025.
Eastman, who died in 1990 aged just 49, is now acknowledged as a key figure in late 20th century American music, but during his lifetime he was marginalised due to his race, sexuality and aesthetic. A black, gay, contemporary music composer, he lived every aspect of his identity to its fullest. His uncompromising attitude represented a total assault on the status quo. He would not be reined in. He walked the talk.
10 Jan 2025 – Jonathan Bonny, Amba Klapwijk & Gijs van der Heijden, Ensemble Klang (world premieres)
An evening of brand new works by some of the leading young makers working in the Netherlands.
20.15 Ensemble Klang, Amba Klapwijk, Gijs van der Heijden
Ensemble Klang premiere two new works by Amba Klapwijk and Gijs van der Heijden, two of the leading lights among the next generation of Dutch composers. Amba Klapwijk is a composer who takes inspiration from landscapes, experiences in nature, poetry and the visual arts. In 2019, she was artist-in-residence at the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in America, a biological field station and nature preserve.
Gijs van der Heijden’s style is often strongly melodic, rhythmic and dynamic, but can also reach a timeless, unrelenting, meditative intensity. His work achieves a personal sound-world that embraces alternative tuning systems alongside diverse influences from experimental rock, to film and game soundtracks.
21.20 YOU CHOOSE YOU LOSE – Jonathan Bonny Solo Show [Rizoom]
In YOU CHOOSE YOU LOSE, Jonathan weighs the weight of choices. From mundane to life-defining: why on earth can choices be so hard anyway? In this overstimulated performance, he chooses to choose as little as possible himself and thus unleashes a multitude of options (ideas, instruments, musical genres…) on the audience.
Don’t miss this short but powerful solo!
Or do.
You choose.
Jonathan Bonny (he/they) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He trained as a classical percussionist at the conservatories of Ghent, Helsinki and The Hague. Today, he feels particularly at home in the interdisciplinary performing arts, where his love for pop and electronic (club) music is also given space. As a music and context maker, Jonathan works from (queer) activism on compositions with influences from the classical music tradition, pop and electronic music. In terms of content, Jonathan strives for a more socially just world. In his work, therefore, the most marginalised voices receive the most amplification.
11 Jan 2025 – Mariam Rezaei & Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Cecilia Arditto, Karen Willems, Andrew Hamilton, Ensemble Klang
“This final evening of the festival gathers together my absolute stand-out listening discoveries from the last 12 months. Three of the artists I encountered for the very first time, either by word-of-mouth recommendation or by sheer luck of stumbling in to a gig. With all of them, the experience of first contact was, for four very different reasons, truly thrilling. I can’t wait to share this evening of dreaming, of kindness, of discovery, and of raucous chaotic vitality!” – Pete Harden, artistic director of Ensemble Klang and curator of Musical Utopias
19.30 The Dearest Dream – Ensemble Academy of Koninklijk Conservatorium (Cecilia Arditto, Robin Fiedler & Antek Cholewinski) [25′]
Cecilia Arditto’s anti-concerto for percussion and ensemble is performed by the Ensemble Academy of the Koninklijk Conservatorium with Joey Marijs. Praised by The Guardian as “the most effective […] stylishly executed” it places found objects and everyday sounds in the starring role, from brooms, to electric fans and tin cans. The programme is completed by two new works by students from the composition department, Robin Fiedler and Antek Cholewinski.
20.15 Friendly Piece – Ensemble Klang (‘Friendly Piece’ Andrew Hamilton, ‘Without Papers’ Karen Willems)
Andrew Hamilton joins Ensemble Klang in an extended line-up for his deeply personal work Friendly Piece, presented with new lighting design by Associate Maker with Ensemble Klang Pavla Beranova.
Andrew on his work:
“The sound of a bird’s wings flapping in Monaghan, a sacred text that helped so much to get through dark times, memories of a childhood obsession with “The Sound of Music” and much more are cut up and thrown into a grid to allow all these elements to intermingle – simplistic answers to be destroyed. Can music be kind? I set that as an impossible question at the beginning of the process, it is good to have no idea what you are doing sometimes. It allows room for freedom and the expanded heart to seep in when your back is turned.”
21.15 Without Papers – Karen Willems
A brand new commissioned work by Belgian maker and performer Karen Willems, performed by herself and the trio from Ensemble Klang of Saskia Lankhoorn, Pete Harden and Michiel van Dijk.
22.15 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (TSORPM)– Mariam Rezaei & Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters [60′]
Mariam Rezaei (turntables), Mette Rasmussen (alto sax), Gabriele Mitelli (piccolo trumpet, electronics), Lukas Koenig (drums).
"...a monster party band, a raucous and rapacious bricolage of jazz history and arty ideas in a mad bundle of vital chaotic energy." - London Jazz News
Forged in the crucible of turntablist Mariam Rezaei’s November 2023 residency at London’s Café Oto, The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters is an incendiary new quartet. Their punk approach to free improvisation draws on elements of jazz, noise, hip-hop, techno and new music to create a thrilling sonic maelstrom that is beyond category or convention.