Rewire is proud to present Sonic Fiction, a new series of concerts and audiovisual performances in collaboration with Swiss new music platform Norient and Schauspielhaus Zürich.
Taking place at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, Sonic Fiction presents the most exciting acts of today’s pop music on the theatre stage. For the first edition on 21 April 2018, the dark avant-garde pop of Jenny Hval will collide with the experimental sound worlds of Ben Frost.
Exactly twenty years ago, the journalist and writer Kodwo Eshun set out to rethink the perception of music by finding a new language for music. In his influential book, ‘More Brilliant than the Sun – Adventures in Sonic Fiction’, he excavates the unacknowledged traditions of diasporic science fiction, by finding a «future shock» in music and sounds.
Today, traditional language remains just as limiting in its attempts to describe current sonic phenomena. More than ever, pop music is crossing borders, is audiovisual, powerful and aesthetically challenging. With this new series of concerts and audiovisual performances, Rewire and Norient aim to present the diversity of the current Sonic Fiction on the theatre stage in Zurich.
Norwegian artist, singer, composer and writer Jenny Hval has developed her distinct take on intimate, investigative sound over the course of six solo albums. Multidisciplinary and transgressive, her polyphonic artistry is seamlessly interwoven between musical, literary, visual and performative modes of expression. Incorporating elements of poetry, prose, performance art and film, and employing various forms of vocal delivery, Jenny Hval explores gender politics, sexuality and violence with a unique and powerful voice that is altogether present, accessible and obscurely complex at the same time.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/zmSGEHsSWIQ
Influenced as much by the spirit of classical minimalism as punk rock and metal, Ben Frost takes a visceral approach to sonic and cinematic experimentalism that is rooted in contrast. His throbbing guitar-based textures emerge from nothing and slowly coalesce into huge, forbidding forms only to plunge back into sudden, complete, tomb-like silence. While the experience is on the one hand a cerebral exercise, it also has an undeniably physical effect; the combination of amplified electronics and the furious thrashing of live guitars is meant to be felt as much as heard. His compositions are created with an acute awareness of the listener and their comfort thresholds, exploiting every extreme of pitch and volume.
→ https://www.youtube.com/embed/iCfPJZzxzhE