Blaues Rauschen Festival - Tag 5: Anomalien des Hörens

In the organizer's words:

Anomalies of listening

With SunJeong Hwang, Stephanie Castonguay and NKISI , this evening shifts the focus from the work to the process. Instead of a finished product, sound appears here as a movement between material, technology and memory - fragile, permeable, open. Electronic media are not treated as an abstract surface, but are exposed in their material and ecological conditionality. Disintegrating sound carriers, hacked devices, hybrid interfaces and archives of field recordings make audible and visible that every digital practice is based on concrete resources, decisions and power relations. Technology is not thought of as neutral, but as a carrier of history, selection and exclusion.

At the same time, the concert itself becomes an experimental set-up. Listening together as a processual event in space. Artifacts, disturbances and supposed errors become productive, as breaks in the system, as indications of what would otherwise remain hidden. Between noise, polyrhythmic structures, improvisational openness and sensitive signal processing, a dense network is created that forms in the moment and immediately withdraws again. An evening about the materiality of electronic sounds, about the archive as a contested memory and about listening as a conscious practice in a technologically shaped present, carried by two neighboring venues that have been shaping the music scene in Essen for years with independent, sophisticated programs.

SunJeong Hwang
Somatocene: Telluric Flesh

Listening together in concert as an intentionally prosocial act - a dynamic alignment of mind and body over time. Here we share, among other things, the reference to ourselves and the world around us. "Somatocene: Telluric Flesh" is a research-based sound performance that emerges from somatic movement and listening practices and understands the body as the primary site of perception, rhythm and negotiation. In a quiet, concentrated form, SunJeong Hwang unfolds a field of tension between analog, electric and digital sound. She feeds this with field recordings, analog sound sources and responsive signal processing. And the performance is explicitly conceived with the BLAUES RAUSCHEN Festival as the performance venue. Instead of controlling sound, the audience and artist listen to it: movement, material and environment enter into a continuous dialog in which an intimate sonority develops - attentive, tactile, present.

Stephanie Castonguay
soft_cuts

Electronic media often appear immaterial. In fact, they consist of resources, surfaces and mechanical processes. Stephanie Castonguay works precisely in this field of tension. For "soft_cuts", she has developed an unusual setup consisting of hacked record players that are enhanced with Playmobil elements and equipped with additional sound arms. Fragile organic vinyl records run on them, their material slowly disintegrating and breaking into pieces. The records are not simply played, but run through by touch. Running directions change, fragments shift, the durability of the materials remains uncertain. This process results in a network of odd rhythms, mechanical loops and improvised structures. At the same time, the apparatus itself becomes visible. Reflective surfaces, rotating arms and moving fragments create a visual score of mechanical movement on special screens.

NKISI
Anomaly Index

Can the recording of sound ever be neutral or is it always corrupted by pre-selection, technical limitations or racism? NKISI poses this fundamental question on her (intoxicating) cassette "Anomaly Index", which she released at the end of 2025 on the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes. The tape is merely the starting point for a series of live compositions based on a specially created sound archive. For the BLAUES RAUSCHEN festival, she is experimenting with this archive and embarking on a search for "paranormal audio and psychoacoustic recordings". Artifacts, recording errors, but also polyrhythmic drum syntheses and live miking create a dense fog of noise.