Present Trajectories

Art Printing House, Black Hall
18.09, Sunday, 18:00, 20:00

This festival day will include two concerts.

18:00 - Alla Zagaykevych (UA)
Breaking through

The act, acting… Instantaneously, almost reflexively… To escape from your own house under fire or to go to the shelter when the air alerts sound. Too many of us now have such experience…

Or, conversely, throughout several years being focused on the slow solitary breaking through and getting out… To spend years on building your own artistic space.

The sense of time betrays us. Both in music and life. Several generations of Ukrainian composers, who are so different, unexpectedly have come so much closer.

The idea of Nonexistent Civilizations Chronicles, a 2014 piece by Sviatoslav Krutykov, one of the pioneering composers of electronic music in Ukraine, unexpectedly provides meaningful echoes with Umbra, the work by Alex Tchorny written in the summer of 2022 in Kyiv. Both pieces appeal to the treasury of meanings in the ideal world.

Inmostones by Yurii Samson was brought to life in the occupied Nova Kakhovka, while Edward Sol composed Almost Sugar in his own house, which has miraculously escaped demolition after the liberation of the Kyiv region in the spring of 2022. It is impossible not to think about that.

It seems that the sound of boundless space, for the release of which we all seek, shows through the mathematical symbols #18 5 19 21 18 18 5 3 20 9 15 14 employed by Georgii Potopalskyi, aka Ujif_Notfound.

Alla Zagaykevych is a Ukrainian composer, performance artist, curator, musicologist, and, since 2010, the president of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Ukraine. Her list of works includes symphonic, instrumental and vocal chamber music, electroacoustic compositions, multi-media installations and performances, operas, and soundtracks. In 2017, she was awarded the Golden Dzyga prize as Ukraine’s best film composer.

Author of musicological articles in scientific periodicals (Ukrajins’ke Muzykoznavstvo, Muzyka, Krytyka, Organised Sound, MusikText.)

Winner of the Ukrainian Film Academy Golden Dzyga for Best Composer (2017)

20:00 - Yana Shliabanska (UA), Alla Zagaykevych (UA), Kotra (UA)
Terra Santa

The audiovisual live electronic set is based on the image of the earth, and more
specifically, the field during the war in Ukraine. It is inherent for us to personify
the earth, calling it native or foreign. We say “wipe off the face of the earth”,

which implies the presence of a face. On the one hand, the earth appears as a personification and a living matter, which relates it to sound. As the action aimed at destruction, war wounds the earth. Does the action aimed at healing exist? Is healing a passive background process? Nature can heal a person, but could it be the other way around? Modern filming technology allows us to see something that is not inherent in the natural perception capabilities of the human eye. Such a vision scales our awareness of the world and should also scale our thinking and our actions. This performance is about wounds and healing, about understanding them in the context of small and big, temporary and eternal, person and land.

Yana Shliabanska is a composer and sound artist based in Kyiv. She writes chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic compositions, music for theater and creates interactive sound installations. She is a co-founder and member of GUMA, the electroacoustic duo that has performed her music for multidisciplinary projects and live electronic shows.

Disorientation on Location

The works presented during this performance by composer Alla Zagaykevych and violinist Orest Smovzh are linked by the idea of mastering space through outward movements. The works were written at different times, hence we hear different musical languages.

Orest Smovzh was the first performer of Transparency in 2009 in Lviv. Back then, the piece spoke about the transparency of the environment, as an opportunity to grasp the perspective of space and to feel the brightness, incisiveness and fullness of its sounds.

The optics in 2022 are different. The reference here to Céline’s novel “Le voyage au bout de la nuit” appeals to the rupture of planes, the destruction of borders, and the loss of the integrity of space and internal balance. This is a move in the dark without signposts or landmarks, in the midst of silence.

Alla Zagaykevych is a Ukrainian composer, performance artist, curator, musicologist, and, since 2010, the president of the Electroacoustic Music Association of Ukraine. Her list of works includes symphonic, instrumental and vocal chamber music, electroacoustic compositions, multi-media installations and performances, operas, and soundtracks.

In 2017, she was awarded the Golden Dzyga prize as Ukraine’s best film composer.

Blazing Anthem For The No One Who Is Just Anything.

Through the years, while working on the most experimental and extreme side of sound, the main idea behind Kotra’s releases and live performances was that of provoking his own and his audience’s limits of perception, exploring the possibilities of music to affect body and mind in the most extreme conditions, and treating experimental music as a practice of transformation. Radness Methods opens a new chapter in Kotra’s ongoing sonic research.

The idea of the piece stems from ancient ritual drum music and rhythmic meditation techniques, where a ritual sound performance appears as a series of abstract sonic actions, rather than musical events, provoking a journey to non-ordinary states and realities, drumming a way into silence.

By layering deafening sounds into the patterns of acoustic hyperventilation, Radness Methods initiates a flow of invoking contrasting conditions and offers an artistic method of extreme urban meditation, and a fierce sonic driver for the ultimate sledgehammer dance.

Radness Methods is a shamanic ritual for the sorcerers of concrete and asphalt, an ecstatic hymn for the philosopher warriors debating the power over life and death. Blazing anthem of excellence for no one who is just anything.

Kotra is the moniker of the Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist, Dmytro Fedorenko. He is one of the pioneers on the Ukrainian experimental electronic music scene responsible for a number of highly acclaimed projects, festivals and art events dedicated to experimental music

in his home country, Ukraine. For him, music is one of the most powerful abstract tools of communication. By offering his artistic extremes to the audience, Kotra takes a bizarre look into the radical experimental nature of music.

Events website: https://festival.jauna.org/