Event: Crossfade: Sonic Somatics

On 18th May 2022, the Editorial Board organised an event at OT301 in collaboration with the Embodied Knowledge Bureau and aux).

These two student-led research platforms used the occasion to share their research around sound and listening practices, and embodied knowledge and cognition, with an audience. The programme included a listening session by aux); a conversation between the founders and participants of EKB where they shared some of the theoretical context and personal backdrop that drove their research; and a deep listening session and workshop with Liane and Micaela Turk, where the audience was led through breath and movement exercises to a soundtrack of deep techno.

Thank you to the members of EKB and aux) for making this event come to life:
Aimée Theriot Ramos
Constanza Castagnet
Margaux Koch
Alex Harris
Micaela Turk
Eleni Papadimitriou
Amalia Shem Tov
and Yotam Shibolet.

(photography by Hugo Faustino)

About the organisers and guests:

The Embodied Knowledge Bureau is a space for investigating, reclaiming, and engaging the body within artistic education. Our platform integrates movement and somatic workshops, discussions, lectures, deep listening events, and film screenings as ways of mending current disciplinary blind spots and barriers that often exist between academics, visual artists and movement practitioners.

aux) is an initiative that aims to collectively question vision-dependent frames of making and knowing. The platform offers a program that covers a spectrum of perspectives addressing sonic experiences and listening as forms of research and expression. aux) hosts events at the intersection of sound art, experimental music, and audio culture, supporting students to create and participate in concerts, listening sessions, workshops, and talks, among other activities.

Sonia Fernández Pan is a (in)dependent curator, writer, researcher, podcast-maker and one of the many anonymous bodies on the dance floor. Both her perception of dance culture and her way of dancing continue to shift constantly over the years. Her oscillating passion for techno is matched by many other musical genres, such as d'n'b, breakcore, dubstep or acid house, to name a few. She started her activity on the dance floor in 2003 at Barraca club (Valencia, ES) and continued dancing in many illegal free parties, many festivals and clubs like Octopus (Pontecesures, Spain), Razzmatazz and Apolo (Barcelona, Spain), Fabric (London, UK), Contact (Tokyo, Japan), Berghain, ://about blank, Tresor, OHM (Berlin, Germany) to mention those she still remembers. Her initial infatuation with dance culture was then followed by an attempt at a Ph.D. thesis, which she abandoned when feeling an ethical imbalance between her “intellectual self” and her “raver self”. Many years later, YOU GOT TO GET IN TO GET OUT would take place, a long-term co-curatorial research from and into techno for and with La Casa Encendida (Madrid). Between 2018 and 2022, this collective project included a radio podcast, a book of critical essays, an exhibition and a series of concerts to get to know (again) aesthetic, material and experiential crossovers between art and dance culture. From intimacy and words, she dances in the distance with Eva Rowson thanks to the different formats of the series "We don't stop, together", invited and hosted by Karmaklubb*. The last episode resulted in a podcast that features a spoken dance floor. She writes erratically for different media about dance culture and music. After 13 years in Barcelona, she moved to Berlin for musical reasons, among others.

Liane recently relocated to Amsterdam but was born in Jerusalem where she started playing as a resident DJ at the underground club Pergamon. Following this, she regularly played at clubs in Tel Aviv as well as several gigs in Europe. She mixes deep, dark and industrial techno using crashed kicks and breaks that create a distorted fog of noisy textures in an experimental-like atmosphere. In her sets, she seeks to cultivate an emotional exploration on the edge of darkness which evolve in a rolling flow that shatters and reforms. In her artistic practice she deals with coping through sound and club culture. She explores the power within vibration and its ability to affect the collective, the body, and the mind.

Tontonmukuna
Mukuna is a Swiss DJ and Producer, whose rhythmic approach to electronic music shapes his unique identity in today’s dance music scene. Raised in Basel, Switzerland, the swiss-Congolese artist gained a reputation as a key figure in the local scene trough his genre-bending style of DJing. Since being a kid and taking Senegalese drum lessons, the main essence of his music has been percussion. As he got into clubbing and electronic music, he quickly fell in love with it. He began exploring every corner of this newfound playground. Since nobody played and matched the kind of music he wanted to hear, he decided to give it a try himself. After a few gigs in smaller clubs of Basel, he was able to quickly establish himself as part of the local scene. This leads him to a residency at the also Basel based club Elysia. His DJ style is best described as a variety of polyrhythmic percussions, pounding beats and of never being shy to surprise the crowd. these aspects are also transferable to the style of his productions. In 2017 he also founded the Label Somatic Rituals together with his longtime collaborators Kombé, Mafou and the visual artists Dimitri Erhard, Flavio Karrer & Lukas Schläpfer. Somatic Rituals have been hosting a series of inclusive parties at Elysia Basel and other venues in the nationwide. In 2018 Mukuna, alongside Kombé and Mafou, released his first tape titled SORI001 on their new platform.