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Struck by electronic music and its associated cultures, Mafou has found the scene to be poorly represented. With childhood friends and labelmates Abdulmatik Abdi, Joao-Pedro, Dimitri Erhard and Flavio Karrer, "Somatic Rituals" was born in 2017. A multidisciplinary collective exploring boundaries, new media and club culture through programming, events, art and a label. Using their music as an educational but also political tool "Somatic Rituals" has set their focus on fostering healthy, creative and culturally rich, not least, socially connected communities. Tidiane Mafou's 2021 debut Ep, "Khezu" reflects a continuation in the development of the swiss-senegalese producer. Mafou delivers a bouquet of freshly twisted UK techno steppers with grim\\\\\\\\\\\

In the fall of 2021, Cie Across launched a transformation process designed to open the field to novel productions. After successful experiments in the production and diffusion of immersive music theater pieces, the Swiss transdisciplinary troupe based in Zurich, under the artistic direction of Georg Bleikolm, launches the development and design of KONTINUUM, a modular stage system and platform for the exploitation of hybrid performances in extended reality (XR).

THE ORIGIN OF LIVE is a narrative open-world format that depicts the emergence and development of the artistic practice of Cie Across as non-linear storytelling in the KONTINUUM. The troupe develops different narrative spaces, where creation myths, science fiction, and cosmology collide, where parallel worlds emerge between evolutionary theory and media theory, and where the role of zeitgeist and collective levels of consciousness are debated in shaping the multi-layered reality.

THE ORIGIN OF LIVE is also Bleikolms personal note on this hybrid production process and brings us back to the reality of this (bad-)trip. Along the road that wriggles between pits of collective collaboration and conflict, he takes us from one void space to another emphasizing a creative desert ponctuated by the sound of people breaking und burning in this hostile environment.

The piece is conceived as transmedia open-space and can be visited in real life or as augmented video stream online at https://raveur.com.

Fulmine is the liberation of liquids molecules and darker hopes, myth and contradiction of staged character in a soap opera trash composition. Slices of transformation and grinding sound of the self articulate, a cardinality change as finite possibilities calculation. Fulmine, is the solo project of Rebecca Solari (Amsterdam / CH), performer, artist and musician working around the fake creation of the myth with a turtle in a soup, a chewing-gum in the compost and a lightning in a swamp becoming wheels and train and water and explosions.

Credits: 
Fulmine: @fulminexorable
Pictures: Thalles Piaget (@thallespiaget ) 
Specialz effectz: Fulmine 
Textile pieces: Dominique Lanz (@nique_lnzzz )
Make up by Edmée Eggs (@edmeereine )

“trans—” meaning through, diagonally, across, beyond, over… The trans— performance combines scenarios from autobiographical reference taken from caner teker’s personal experience as a German Turk. Among those are the Istanbul barbers’ rituals, movement research on Zeybek and Horn, two forms of Turkish dance, and the playing of the “gaida” bagpipes. In the orange glow of the sodium vapour lamps, caner teker plows a diagonal path through rituals and somato-political self-destruction.

caner teker addresses body issues in the context of queerness and homosexuality from a post- migrant perspective in trans— and further performative works. The body as a means and as a medium is at the centre of teker’s artistic engagement to scrutinise heteronormative regimes of gaze and institutionalised power dynamics.

“Autobiographic material is invoked here as a toxic-semantic assemblage and must be worked through in order for it to be rearticulated as new material. In the choreographing of the divides in ascriptions of identity, body and the self, caner teker succeeds in her refusal to give in to a post-identity lapse towards branded listlessness.” Kat Mayer

credits:
concept, choreography, performance: caner teker
light: caner teker
music editing: Valerie Ace
music composition: caner teker
costume: Olivia Ballard
creative production: Sofie Luckhardt
dramaturgy: Lou Drago
A production by caner teker, co-produced by SNDO – School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam. VOLUME UP is funded by the Kunststiftung NRW.

Varuna, based in Basel, are co-founders of the music and research label "a walking contradiction" and part of the Amenthia crew. The trio’s recent releases on their home labels as well as Delsin and IDO define their own highly varied signature sound. The project finds its roots in club oriented music but equally harnesses from ambient and home listening excursions, always trying to find a gap to fill with new and unexplored sounds.

The term MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) is a term derived from the field of online text-based role-playing games. It refers to the communal investment in and social codification of a shared gamespace: the rules, tacit protocols, ethos, and other invented elements which allow it to be an effectively immersive space distinct from an "outside" world.
 
MUSH by Most Dismal Swamp explores the emerging long-tail of community-building, or "gangcrafting". It is interested in the arcane, encrypted cultures flourishing among the recesses of an online megalopolis and reinforced by offline organisation and social balkanization.
 
MUSH focuses on the encrypted internal exchanges of such a group: a k-hole katabasis into the consensual disassociation of opaque gestures, rituals, theories and artefacts that form an underground enclave. MUSH is the surveillance of a gancrafted night science; an airplane-mode mysticism; a "conlang" of survival and of improvised future-building, forming among reclaimed empty venues and digital dark forests.

Tobias Koch and Tapiwa Svosve are both invested with multidisciplinary sound practices and collaborative endeavors across performing arts, music and film. For Backslash they join forces for the first time and present a sonic conversation, an electroacoustic live work that explores sonic stirrings, vibratory energies and the relations between sound and space. Through its ability to disrupt and unsettle divisions between inside and outside, between one's skin and another's, sound can be heard to pull us into multiplicity, into collectivity.

Tobias Koch is a Basel and Berlin based composer and sound artist working across performance, visual arts, film, and music production. He performed his own work at the Leopold Museum Vienna, Istituto Svizzero Rome & Milano, Centre Culturelle Suisse, Ephemera Warsaw, CND Paris, and various theaters throughout Europe. He previously scored works presented at MoMA New York, documenta 14, Frieze Art Fair, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Volksbühne Berlin, and others. His sound design and music compositions were featured in several award winning feature films and documentaries.

Tapiwa Svosve is a Musician and Theorist. He is invested with multidisciplinary practices combining sound to theater, painting, and historical praxis and currently lives in Zurich. His latest solo record "A lung in a horn in a horn" was released on Czarnagora, a sonic result of a psychogeographic action which took place in Zurich's underground water system.
 

For all the time I bled. I've been wandering for very long, I also waited. I wish I could have left further, I wish I was born without a name. My wounds, my history, my projections, my dreams, my ghosts, my fantasies, my words. little flags. All of it hanging.

Johanne is an artist, performer and sex worker working on the shapes of memories. How they structure us, to the core, how they pretend, how they lie, how they disappear, how they carved out our bodies. 

Resident at Basel’s enviable establishment Elysia, Agonis has already been invited to share his vision on some of the most exalted stages in dance like The Labyrinth Festival in Japan or Organik Festival in Taiwan, where he played DJ sets and live sets. After releases on his own imprint Amenthia recordings, which he co-founded together with Garçon, Agonis has also released on international labels like Smoke Machine, Kynant and Traumgarten.

Weith is a Romanian musician and producer living in Geneva. Obsessed with synthesiser manuals and electronic music instruments, he has an eclectic discography with varying styles such as IDM, breakbeat, electro and brain-dance. His live-sets are a tribute to his ambient influences (drone, shoe gaze, post-rock and IDM). Atmospheric layers, modular drones, field recordings and saturated beats will guide the audience into his introspective and melancholic universe.

In Azimuth, audiovisual artist Sarah Badr channels a tension between organic and synthetic forms, digitally rendering pulsating alien objects and shimmering surfaces that change and transform in a responsive, symbiotic relationship with the tactile sounds she corrals into the intricate texture of her compositions. Resolutely synaesthetic, Azimuth oscillates between the recognisable and the impossible, a dichotomy that is suggested in the work’s title. An azimuth, in geometry, is an angular measurement in a spherical coordinate system commonly referenced in the field of immersive sound. When applied in astrology and used as a celestial coordinate, an azimuth is the horizontal direction of a star, or other astronomical object. In one sense the title, and the work, is functional, referring to a unit of measurement. But when applied to the world around us, it becomes ontological — a marker for locating an object in physical, or artificial, space.

“Azimuth is an immersive biomorphic model of the entangled orders of simulation. It is a reflection of a basic natural reality while masking basic reality — the idea of nature.”

"While I crawl into the unknown
I'm going hunting for mysteries
I'm going to prove the impossible really exists
This is really dangerous
But worth all the effort
Cover me"

Julia Häller aka Chewlie is mainly focusing on visual and sonic exploration. Her approach in music is primarily through rhythm & percussion which is very influenced by an organic aesthetic. Chewlie is in an ongoing research of sensuality.

Sha Ru are a band made up of Ma Sha and Rù, who live and work together between New York City and Berlin. They have previously released music via Infinite Machine, Pressure Dome, Progressive Future, Sorry Records, Shubzin and Kindergarten Records.

Timnah’s signature approach to earthy dance music has been tried, tested and approved by swinging hips all over Europe. Developing her style from age 17 onwards, when she started playing in squats and industrial spaces around Basel, she’s continuously making her mark with warm, reverberating techno cuts from across the spectrum. During her residencies at Hinterhof Bar and Elysia, Timnah‘s sets fluently cover (and transcend) shades of techno, experimental and ambient music, establishing her as a firm favourite amongst dancers and peers. Smooth mixing skills, strong emotional narratives and an intuitive understanding of dancefloor dynamics continue to define her style, seamlessly cruising through the small hours of the night.

Transitionless is the duo composed by the two co-founders of Cringecore, Crypto Soso and Anesthesia. In their b2b's, they focus on a sharp and varied selection, the motto at the beginning being "transitionless", without a defined style and fluctuating between various electronic music genres.

Between trance, breaks, electro, happy hardcore and fast bangers, each surprise cover is made with the best ingredients, some cringer than others. But this is only one of their facets and you can as well expect more experimental and eclectic sets, mixing the fruit of their two joint musical researches.

Patrick Tipler, known as Delay Grounds is a Bristol-based experimental sound artist, producer and composer. His music incorporates elements of abstract, sample-based percussion, experimental synthesis and techno.

Delay Grounds explains “Dance music has become a focal point for me creatively over the last few years and has pretty much taken over my life. A dance floor can serve as a temporary alternative version of reality, one where people are given the opportunity to let go. I want this to be reflected in the sound materials I used to produce my music -a platform for expression with a purity of purpose that is open for interpretation and is being refreshingly reinvented constantly.”

What do you see from where you are? Should you, or should I, move? And how? Are you afraid? Catol Teixeira’s choreographic work is composed of bodies, space and time, interacting in a dynamic enabling improvisation and encounter. The performance is built on the oscillation between presence and absence, on offering and denying one’s own body, and on the looks and movements of the audience. Even the artist does not know how it will develop or what shape it will take, because it adapts to how the public positions within the space.

La peau entre les doigts is a dance about intimacy, distance and separation. A dance dedicated to what is left behind, abandoned. It does not seek clarity or purity, it goes hand in hand with uncertainty, with the unknown, observing opposition and the surrender of the body to gravity. Catol dances, moving where there is a crack to be crossed, surrendering and resisting, in perpetual transition, without a destination.

Virginie Sistek aka Vivichipie is a storyteller who struggles with words. Even though she admires smooth talkers, she sometimes finds them irritating. Indeed, it feels so nice when a message reaches your soul, but not when it goes so deep that it takes up all the space.

Filled to the brim, you're just waiting to finish the digestion of those processed speeches. Contrariwise, Vivichipie looks for situations in which public speakers are deprived of their powers of persuasion. Playing with contradictions, she joyfully jeopardizes the mechanisms of eloquent speech and calls for disorder. But who the hell is her spin doctor?

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Ploy, the pseudonym of South London based artist Sam Smith, emerged onto the scene in 2016 with his debut release, ‘Sala One Five’ on the renowned Hessle Audio label. This was expertly followed up by a slew of EP’s finding residence on Batu’s Timedance imprint, the faction who collectively carved out a unique sound in a shockingly short space of time, grounded in UK bassbin principles yet pushing that prism in wild, crooked new ways that have become something of a signature aesthetic. A constant urge to push boundaries led him to his debut album on the renowned L.I.E.S. Records, a home for the raw and grittiness that shows in his most personal work. The raving reviews and end of year lists show the world catching on to his unique skillset as a producer. His own label Deaf Test expertly explores his spectrum of sounds with a playful approach whilst keeping room for experimentation and collaboration.

In order to achieve a certain state of consciousness, people often voluntarily flood themselves with intense perceptual stimuli. What effect do this pure sensory impressions have on our body and mind if we do not distort them through the judgment of our thoughts? The guided audiovisual installation "escapism" is a radical exploration of this sensory overload and its mind-expanding potential in a transhumanistic sense.

Warning: this installation contains fast flashing lights. It may cause discomfort and trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.

Pressure on the stomach, a tightness around the chest, a tugging in the forehead — it is impossible to think clearly: A mental state of emergency affecting the physique. HORMONSCHUB perform music somewhere between the rosy sweetness of kitschy sound design and the raw brutality of shattering beats. By exploring both domains without restraint, they create an almost unbearable tension that brings you to your knees and at the same time awakens a deep longing. What for, though?

Xzavier Stone is an artist, producer, DJ & vocalist from Zurich, Switzerland. Known for his bold yet playful work, he has released on Fractal Fantasy, his own imprint XZA, and YAWREDDY?!, a joint platform with frequent collaborator Modulaw.

Over the years, Stone has become recognizable by his subtle and deft spins on rap and R&B music and his penchant for playfulness and experimentation. This has seen him fashion a genre-defying, personal and innovative sound which he both creates and fully inhabits. Threading severe electronic music and sound design with harmony and an off-kilter sensuality, Stone offers up a mystery and tease that glints through the manifold positions his music touches.

Since 2018 affective evaluation has been deeply investigating objects, concepts and issues related to intersubjectivity, focusing on how organisms can interact within given contexts, and seeking to show how this creates dynamic and living networks, changing over time. 

affective evaluation is a research group/corporation/institute with variable forms, proposing functional and fictional environments, performative situations. The group operates in the field of the arts. Since its creation, affective evaluation has infiltrated different contexts and places, creating an interpenetration of spaces and human networks. As a research group, affective evaluation organizes studies, collects data and integrates it into its archive. Everyone who participates in a study receives a reward.

Deviant noises from the rabble! XINDL is combining disciplines of improvisation, conceptual ideas of noise, clubbing and strange environmental sounds with processed impressions of Thai traditional folk instruments. Together, they fuse their individual rooted musical influences into a high-paced distorted live performance.

NX FUIMO by Tamara Alegre with Élie Autin, Marga Alfeirão, Cuba and Malik Nashad Sharpe.

NX FUIMO is a choreographic spell, a trajectory, a journey through thresholds of alienation and resistance with a powerful and intense soundtrack by Dinamarca, Talisto, Bonaventure and GOLCE. 

NX FUIMO is the second piece of a triptych initiated with FIEBRE (2018), which experiments with embodiment practices around the sexual organs, the idea of erotic union, the cohabitation of complex emotions and self-pleasure. 

in slang nos fuimos is an expression which announces that the departure has already started or that we have gone beyond. here, it is the result of a radical fictionalisation of bodies. imagine: one and the same channel connects all the vital functions related to the lower abdomen and the cloaca, the sexual organ from which the erotic force is drawn. provided with these body-fictions, the dances are embodied in individuality and meet synchrony in the group and become a purge, cleansing and space for mutual support. 

NX FUIMO opens a liminal space-time where connection and contamination triumphs through vibrations, wind and emotions. 

NX FUIMO is based on the importance of teamwork and mutual aid. it questions and disrupts structural patterns linked to the accessibility and visibility of the singular author. the work has also a strong inspiration and connection to Dancehall and aims to make different types of connections/ exchanges with that dance scene/culture. 

Julian Sartorius’ precise and multi-layered rhythmical patterns are keen excursions into the hidden tones of found objects and prepared instruments, bridging the gap between organic timbres and the vocabulary of (experimental) electronic music. Julian Sartorius has released numerous solo albums, creates audiovisual art works, collaborates with musicians, writers and artist and performs live in intimate venues and on festival stages.

Drummer, artist and percussionist Julian Sartorius forms sounds into previously unseen shapes.

Ahe has fantasised this whimsical, self-confident electronic music in mischievous complicity with her computer, moving somnambulistically safely, captain of the barge, from one place to another: between club and parlour, ship's belly and upper deck, hesitation and decision. When the fog rolls in, Casanora's quiet joy is apparent; when the storm comes, it's probably her doing. Experiencing Casanora live is a bit like being allowed to sink into the wild imagination of a good witch.

A high-velocity confrontation between Brainwaves’ Director of Intergalactic Colonial Affairs Estebahn, and Renens-based alien punk Yolek, whose bowl haircut can be spotted in the dirtiest caves and raves in the Swiss Romandie region. As well as an unhealthy obsession for machines and herbal medicines, Yolek’s character can be defined by a lack of understanding for human inter-personal relationships, a deep knowledge of the inner structures of trance and bass music as well as a passion for heavy low kicks.

LMB is the sonic outcome of a year-long battle between these two alien sociopaths, taking place somewhere off Saturn’s icy rings, surrounded by intergalactic pirate bases on low velocity asteroids.

Born and raised in Morocco, the recently Brussels-based OJOO GYAL has a wide-range approach to DJing, as evident from her Noods and Movement radio residencies. Her mixes vary from old-school dancehall to its contemporary mutations, heavy dub, bass, breaks, baile funk, and other radical twists of electronic music.

Lucky Shot is the first artistic collaboration between Jordan Selophane & Oz Oderbolz. 

The video captures a performative attempt at building sculptural entanglements through intimate contact and physical exploration. The choreography and scenography draw inspiration from mechanisms of objectification and consumerist aesthetics, exploring their influence on (vulnerable) bodies and the perception of beauty. Defying the normative forces of pop and celebrity culture, the piece summons the idea of a collective body as a queer vessel for emancipation through kinship and (self-)love.

What are the rituals that one performs when alone in their own room? Claire (or Megumi) Masset (she, 1996*) explores this question in finding a grey zone where sound, dance, installation and spoken word have no hierarchy. Her movement is inspired by the choreographic qualities of daily actions, and underlined by the use of slow motion or still poses, shown in a series of rituals. The performative situation which appears as a moving painting, zoning out of the present moment while hyperfocusing on ephemeral details, creates a space for contemplation, (self-)reflection or internal dialogue.