Dystopia & Errant Sound

We are pleased to launch a two-part collaboration on our SAVVYZΛΛR airwaves with Dystopia Biennial, a sound art festival that has been happening in Berlin since 2018, organized by Errant Sound. This year's edition, directed by Nida Ghouse and Georg Klein, dives into sound art from across the Indian subcontinent and Europe.

22.09.2024

On the first Sunday, you will hear Laura Mello wrap up the first week of the festival with a mix of sounds, artist interviews, and recordings from the events including concerts and the "Sonic Futurisms" symposium. The artists featured in conversation, or in sound, include: Hemant Sreekumar, Alifiyah Imani, Zeerak Ahmed aka Slowspin and Sarathy Korwar.

The Dystopia Biennial happens until 29.09. at HAUNT/frontviews and at the Galiläa Church.

Errant Sound has been dedicated to experimental work in sound related arts, including installation, performance, fieldwork, voice, radio and spatial practices. Through exhibitions, presentations, events, residencies and workshops, Errant Sound emphasizes an engagement with process and dialogue, encouraging a dynamic and diverse approach to the sound arts.

Hemant Sreekumar is an Indian artist from Bangalore. He has a background in art history, fine arts and digital media. He creates performance art with synthetic audio using principles of emergence + also produces visual media including prints and light based works. His works respond to notions of decay, generative bias and loss of semantics.

Alifiyah Imani is a sound artist and writer working with sensory listening rituals through installation, electroacoustic music, and experimental radio. Locating sound as a lived and relational process, she explores the nuances of drones, harmonics, and overtone colourations. Her practice takes inspiration from her interest in the Rasa aesthetics of Bharatanatyam and the voice culture around Dhrupad music.

Vladimir Razhev is a sound engineer and multimedia artist, exploring the expressive interactions between technology and sound through creative coding and maker practices. He has a background in classical music and has extensive experience with live sound engineering and spatial sound technologies.

Zeerak Ahmed / SLOWSPIN is a US-based Pakistani artist. She produces voice-based sculptures, site-specific installations and uniquely fragile sound collages that explore notions of identity, memory and longing. Slowspin has a distinct sound practice grounded in Hindustaani classical vocal traditions, dream-folk, ambient and experimental electronic music. Poetry and melodies in her mother tongue(s)—Urdu, Farsi, Purbi and English—build new textural soundscapes.

Sarathy Korwar is a US-born, Indian-raised, London-based drummer, percussionist, composer and bandleader. He works predominantly in a jazz and Indo jazz field but also incorporates elements of hip-hop, and other fusions. Indo-futurist manifesto KALAK followed in November 2022 - Korwar’s third studio album. In rhythmic step with the past and the present, it sets out to describe a route forward. It celebrates a rich South Asian culture of music and literature, which resonates with spirituality and community, while envisaging a better future from those building blocks.

Tracklist
Akashvani – Recordings of Hemant Sreekumar´s concert at the Galiläa Church on 07.09.2024, based on his installation, to be seen at the Galiläa Church
~an entropy of one´s own~ – Recordings of Alifiyah Imani´s and Vladimir Rhazev´s installation to be seen at Errant Sound@Miss Read
Lilt and forget (Slowspin – TALISMAN)
Hamari (Slowspin – TALISMAN)
Apnay Mahal Ma (Audio from Zeerak Ahmed´s installation, to be seen at the Galiläa Church)
That Clocks Don’t Tell But Make Time (Sarathy Korwar – KALAK)
Utopia Is A Colonial Project (Sarathy Korwar – KALAK)

29.09.2024

On the second Sunday, we will learn about the thoughts behind Nida Ghouse's curatorial work in the exhibition Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn’t hear you, as well as the vision behind the Symposium „Sonic Futurisms“, curated by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. Visiting the HAUNT gallery with microphones and recording the presentations and talks by the invited scholars and artists Moushumi Bhowmik and Nikita Dhawan, we will try to listen to the listening act itself. Musically, this edition has the generous collaborations from Nakul Krishnamurthy and Jasmine Guffond.

SAVVYZΛΛR meets Dystopia #2:

Interviews with
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (curator of the Symposium Sonic Futurisms)
Nida Ghouse (artistic director and curator of the Dystopia Sound Art Biennial 2024)

Recordings from inside the installation by Suvani Suri at HAUNT/frontviews: Lossless Transmissions: The Errant Earplugs (2023)
Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher based in New Delhi. She works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, objects, installations, fictions, experimental workshops, and live interventions.

Excerpts from Moushumi Bhowmik´s presentation Unfinished, Unbegun, during the Sonic Futurisms Symposium.
Moushumi Bhowmik is an Indian singer-songwriter, writer and researcher based in Kolkata, she is known to perform Bengali folk songs, as well as her own compositions.

Nikita Dhawan has been recorded during her talk On the Materiality of Inaudibility, at HAUNT/frontviews on Sep 22nd 2024.
Nikita Dhawan is the chair of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden

Music
Jasmine Guffond: Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity is a poetic inversion of muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless workplace productivity.
Jasmine Guffond is an artist and composer working at the interface of social, political and technical infrastructures.

Nakul Krishnamurthy: "Anudhatthamudhatthassvaritham" from the album Tesserae
Nakul Krishnamurthy is an Indian artist who works with Indian Classical music and explores new ways of conceiving it at the intersection of Western Classical, experimental and electronic music traditions.