Q-O2 news :: Reality

Whether our announced Indian summer in the last newsletter was a mirage? We wouldn’t know. Reality is, however, that solidly filled weeks are approaching in our very own sound attic, and elsewhere: residency presentations by Ikbal Lubys & Aii Wijayanti Anik and guests and Emile Van Helleputte, SuperCollider workshops by Giulia Rae, a lab session in the framework of the Echoes of dissent series, and an artist talk and listening session by Darsha Hewitt organised together with our neighbours of iMAL. 

To conclude, we would also like to highlight again our open call for the annual showcase of emerging sound artists in Belgium. 9 more days to apply!
 

The aim of Aii and Ikbal’s residency has been the exploration of DIY practices, both on a musical and organisational level.
In the first part of the presentation, the artists will report on encounters with various DIY organisations in Brussels, with whom they exchanged views on organisational structures, consumption patterns, environmental issues and much more, and which they were able to compare with their experiences in their home country of Indonesia and their own organisation Ethnictro.
This research was complemented by working with a group of Manama students from the Ghent Conservatory. An Indonesian practice of interpreting dreams using numbers in a “dream dictionary” was used to activate the musical creativity, and to “archive” the dreams by means of recording. These instant compositions will be performed live during the second part of the presentation by Rodrigo Evangelista, Helena Ruiz Sanchez, Inaki Marcos Buena, Hui Chi Li, Edoardo Parente, Julen Latorre Urbaneta and Liese Lotte Bekaert.  Event in the framework of tekhnē, funded by the European Union.
[More info here]

For this presentation, Emile Van Helleputte will share some of the results of his research on objects used for the post-production of sound in cinema, so called foley objects. There is often a discrepancy between the objects that we see on screen and the objects used for the production of sound effects. By confronting the sound effects with the objects themselves, he will examine the various relations that can be evoked between them.
[More info here]

What could it mean to practice politics by performing music? How could musical improvisation – as a process of collectively searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them – reconfigure our sense of the world? How can we experience and understand music not simply as what presents itself in the context of sound-phenomena-organized-in-time-and-exchanged-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing – in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language?
These and other questions will be explored over two days through the practice of X- Ray Hex Tet – an ongoing collaboration between: Billy Steiger (celeste and violin) – Crystabel Riley (drums) – Edward George (words and music) – Pat Thomas (piano and electronics) – Paul Abbott (drums and synthetic sounds) – Seymour Wright (alto saxophone (actual and potential)). Event in collaboration with Courtisane and In Vitro.
[More info here]

SuperCollider is a free and open-source coding environment, first released in 1996 and now maintained and developed by an active community of code enthusiasts. It provides a framework for various sound research fields, from live coding to sound synthesis, from neural networks to interactive media design.
The participants will be guided through the main architecture and the basics of the language, until developing a basic system for sound synthesis and live sequencing. You will leave this workshop with an instrument that you can continue designing on your own. No prior experience is required, this workshop is for complete beginners, with special encouragement to FLINTA* people to [removed];Event in the framework of tekhnē, funded by the European Union.
[Register for 26 October/more info]

STUK, Q-O2 and Musica present an annual showcase of emerging sound artists in Belgium. The showcase shines a light on the diversity of the Belgian sound art landscape, and gives a boost to an upcoming generation of makers. We are looking for recent, existing sound work in any format: performance, installation, soundwalk, radio piece, intervention or other innovative formats. The deadline for the application is 15 October, the selected works will be presented in STUK on Thursday 8 May 2025.
[more info]

HIFI to LOFI Continuum: Media Archeology and the ‘Political Ecology’ of Music is an artist talk, conversation and listening session that takes a (metaphorical) dive into an old dumpster to uncover the material politic of Music (and sound) and its predominant role within throw-away culture. The event traces out aspects of music’s material entanglements with humans and ecology by exploring the artist’s archive of experimental ‘how-to’ videos and her media archeological takes on the technology she finds in the garbage.
While eating popcorn and testing out a demo or two we will look into the artistic research findings of High Fidelity Wasteland, the artist’s sound centric trilogy that experiments with the material waste left over from generations of decomposing sound reproduction [removed];HIFI to LOFI Continuum culminates in a field trip to the iMAL exhibition The End and the Beginning for a listening session within High Fidelity Wasteland II: Protoplastic Groove — is an immersive sound installation consisting of a modified 1950s era record player that devolves the audible timescale of music from the past.
Limited to 20 participants; first comes first served, English spoken, in collaboration with iMAL
[More info here]