Zsolt Sőrés Ahad / Ash Fure / Robert Machiri

For Zsolt Sőrés electro-acoustic and/or free improvised music performance is a compositional method for creating and controlling complex musical processes in real time, using unstable acoustic systems to organically combine electro-acoustic soundscapes. And for Ahad sound art and experimental music are a prima materia whose theory and practice both require an anthropocentric repositioning of the creator and the medium. The intervention aims to unite this seemingly bipolar artistic modelling path – the intuitive one of praxis and the tonal ontology of metaphysics – in sum rule. The super-sensitive intuitive music and the sonic turn, a new way of looking at the world’s deepest processes, the workings of the quantum field and the principle of the anthropic cosmos, move towards the symbolic-analogical creation of ever more subtle alternative sonic realities.

Both a total installation and a site for live performance, ANIMAL: for body and sound offers up an underworld of sound. The project features full-bodied sonic machines that function like a sensory circuit workout: you press, you lift, you lean, you lie, you exercise your animal capacity to sense. Ash Fure performs live on a custom gym rig at designated showtimes throughout the run, and a squad of elite listeners works the circuit with the crowd, like an underground resistance in training.

My DJ set can be described as re-imagining a mixtape in a performative form. To evoke the energy of a pungwe, a Pan-African tradition of placing music within the advent of our mornings, our futurity. Adapted from the Shona word for a wake, a vigil, Pungwe is a contemporary art project that runs at the centre of my practice. It underpins soundings of music and other sonicities as social discourses around Africa.

Robert Machiri