TURNS: Screaming Minerals x Three Voices
Fri, February 14, 2025 7:00 pm CET
Sound artist Ioana Vreme Moser explores the voices of technological waste. Together with sound artist Max Eilbacher, Soprano Nina Guo lets Morton Feldman's Three Voices swell into a hypnotic sound pattern and circle around us in the cube.
In February, a new concert series entitled »TURNS: Sounding Cycles« kicks off at ZKM. With »TURNS«, the ZKM | Hertzlab creates resonance spaces that change our auditory perspectives: electro trash evolves into a choir, music meets gut sounds, and gamers become performers.
The series toys with our listening habits and opens up the relationship between artists and the audience. The audience space transforms into a stage where we encounter each other in a new way. International and local artists, including Nguyễn + Transitory, Nina Guo, and Ioana Vreme Moser, present performances, participatory installations, and fun strategies that move us, the listeners, to center stage.
You can look forward to evenings in the ZKM Sound Dome, where social issues, arts-based research, and musical expression mesh: circular economy meets microbiomes, and technological innovation meets organic resonance.
Each thematic cycle of TURNS — SOUNDING CYCLES (February–April 2025), SOUNDING OUT HEALTH (May–August 2025), and SOUNDING OUT CONNECTION (September–December 2025) — provides stimulating content that opens up transformative perspectives on sound.
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Concert I: Screaming Minerals
Ioana Vreme Moser
In the shape of a fatal divaesque character, Coquetta was fashioned from garbage finds and self-beautification obsessiveness. Following one of the earliest human rituals, the application of cosmetics, Coquetta evolves on luscious-looking, self-built electronic instruments. The physical appearance and the behaviour of the sounding circuitry are altered symbiotically with substances and control voltages.
The sounding apparatus composed of an amalgam of cosmetics and electronics is hand-crafted in the shape of an Ambulant Beauty Salon where a daily toilette routine of a step-by-step makeup procedure occurs.
The makeup application instruments (brushes, sponges, pads) and chemical substances (cremes and colour cosmetics) are transformed into sound-generating gizmos and applied rhythmically on the face in a crescendo. Moisturising, scrubbing, eyelash curling, eye-shadowing, powder-puffing, lipstick application, and other manoeuvres become portrayed by specific abrasive sounds.
Coquetta develops sardonically as the substances are applied abundantly on her face making her finally ‘beautiful’ and yet somehow, deformed.
Coquetta is Ioana Vreme Moser’s glamorous ultra-femme alter ego. A ballet dancer for nearly 10 years, raised on Opera stages in flamboyant dresses, she dreamt of becoming as beautiful as Barbie.
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Concert II: Three Voices
Nina Guo und Max Eilbacher
Morton Feldman’s Three Voices (1982) is a sonic hall-of-mirrors. Cluster chords, hypnotic repeating melodies, and fractured vocal lines are shared between three of the exact same voice, with one sung live and the other two pre-recorded. In combination with precisely imperfect musical loops, Three Voices is simultaneously uncanny and wholly familiar. Repetitions are never facsimiles; cycles seem to start anew yet something is always slightly different. Something has changed, and therein lies the music’s addicting entrancement. Nina Guo and Max Eilbachers interpretation of Three Voices takes this one step further by diffusing the two recorded voices, inviting a deeper listening sensitivity to the gradients of space.