Category: Echoes of Dissent

Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 7): Fred Moten & Brandon López / Zara Joan Miller & Ute Kanngießer

29 April 2025, Brussels

14h00 Conversation with Fred Moten and Brandon López at Pianofabriek (free entrance)

An extended conversation with Fred Moten and Brandon López about their thought and practice, music and language, improvisation and politics, jazz and study.
Free entrance

20h00 Performances at Les Ateliers Claus (entrance: €12)

Fred Moten and Brandon López have been playing music together since 2018. They have released two remarkable albums with drummer Gerald Cleaver on the Reading Group label. Their first duo recording is due to be released on TAO Forms. “It’s poetry as music and music as poetry. Moten’s words lead, lyrically, timbrally, poetically – but the bass and percussion loosen the grammar. Associative inflections elevate the raw sound of each player, which at root – even if they were stripped of meaning or mood – runs each part in a constantly moving triangulated constellation of sound and meaning, evolving and repeating; stretching, infilling, and expanding.” (Jennifer Lucy Allen)

Fred Moten is a cultural theorist and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Moten’s writing and wording are characterised by a refined opacity and a musicality that is inspired by jazz and goes to the limit of noise: “what it is I want to say is subordinate to the sound, subordinate to a kind of feeling, a content that only that sound can provide”. His books include In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, the trilogy Consent Not To Be A Single Being , The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study and All Incomplete, co-authored with Stefano Harney, as well as numerous poetry collections.

Brandon López is a bassist, composer, and improviser working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise, and new music. His music has been praised as “brutal” (Chicago Reader) and “relentless” (The New York Times). His exploration of new sonic possibilities on the double bass has led him to work with the luminaries of the contemporary avant garde like John Zorn, Nate Wooley, Tyshawn Sorey, Leila Bordreuil and Cecilia López. He was a featured soloist with the New York Philharmonic and has been the recipient of numerous awards.

https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/moten-l-pez-cleaver
https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/the-blacksmiths-the-flowers
https://taoforms.bandcamp.com/album/revision

Zara Joan Miller is a poet and artist working across film, performance, and print—her practice often orbiting the limits of language and its entanglement with rhythm, image, and movement. Ute Kanngießer is a cellist and improviser whose playing resists formal structures, favouring an intimate, tactile approach to the instrument. Her sound drifts and unsettles, attentive to texture and silence, unfolding through spaces rather than over them.
Their collaboration grew from Miller’s poetry collection Blue Monday (JOAN Publishing, 2022), a book tracing the strange poetics of daily life—where domestic mundanities, memory fragments, and emotional dissonances are held together by the dry logic of signage, interrupted telephone calls, and birds overhead. This written work later took on new form in a live performance with Kanngießer at London’s Cafe OTO in 2023. The result—a performance that hovers between reading, concert, and cinematic slide lecture that was later released as an LP on Reading Group. At its heart, the work dwells in the in-between—a space where cello and voice intersect and diverge, where perception thickens, and language trails off into the static of thought.

https://readinggroupcompany.bandcamp.com/album/blue-monday
https://earshots.bandcamp.com/album/ge-der

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In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent), in collaboration with In vitro.

With the support of Flanders State of the Art, KU Leuven Commission for Contemporary Art & Royal Conservatory of Brussels (EhB).

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Graphic design by Ran De Vos.

Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 5) X-Ray Hex Tet // Documentation

Sat 19 October 2024 > Sun 20 October 2024, les Ateliers Claus Brussels

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)

Six musicians of different backgrounds working at the margins of what is (to many) acceptable in terms of music, genre, technique, interpretation, history and ‘tradition’; a set of subjectivities, energies and philosophies who, in dialogue together, venture and probe the awkward wealth and friction of investigation, finding pleasure (and treasure) in searching for the hidden, secret, and mysterious at the edges of music and meaning.
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In the context of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent). In collaboration with Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In vitro, with the support of VGC (Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie) and Q-O2.

STEGI.RADIO TAKEOVER 2025

Full programme available here.

STEGI.RADIO Takeover returns in 24 & 25 January with an even more resonant lineup to unfurl its diverse character and transform the Onassis Stegi into a kaleidoscopic musical playground. With guests from the international and domestic scene and unpredictable and original selections, the online radio station of Onassis Stegi celebrates for another year the many different aspects of contemporary sound through a multi-dimensional curation that runs the gamut of the global electronic scene.

The Main Stage is once again ‘dressed’ as a club that fills with the electro outbursts of Kittin, who comes to Athens after her impressive performance at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, the impetuous rhythms of the ‘Pope’ of minimal techno Robert Hood, the politicized, insurgent jazz of Irreversible Entanglements, who released their latest album on Impulse, the playful mix of disco, acid, and techno of David Vunk, the unpredictable genre marriage of Crystallmess, the cheeky combination of trap and rebetiko of Black Morris, aka Negros tou Moria, and the uproarious garage psychedelia of Acid Baby Jesus.

Onassis Stegi -1 radiates the intensity and hedonism of an underground club in a metropolitan center where different communities and subcultures meet and mix, with the frenetic beats of De Schuurman, the Mediterranean new club blend of STILL and Deena Abdelwahed, and the Afroglobal energy of Catu Diosis, artist of the Nyege Nyege Tapes label.

The Upper Stage is dedicated to Greek artists, with live performances by the now-acclaimed The Boy, the introverted, idiosyncratic Larry Gus, the up-and-coming cabaret pop singer-songwriter Kristof, and Venus Volcanism, who mixes polyphonic and traditional singing with experimental electronic music. The Upper Stage also includes a performance by Grand River, an Italian cinematic ambient artist.

Meanwhile at Onassis Stegi +3, join us for two hours-long sets by Dimitri Papaioannou, with eclectic ambient selections, and A@H2O, with dub, calypso, and reggae sounds, as well as a listening session by Invernomuto and a conversation between Yannis-Orestis Papadimitriou and Stoffel Debuysere, as part of the “Ways of Listening” program.

Preemptive Listening

14 – 18 January, 2025
BOZARCINEMA, Brussels

Preemptive Listening
Aura Satz, UK, FI, 2024, DCP, 89′

On 14 January after the film, there will be a conversation with director Aura Satz led by Stoffel Debuysere, as part of the Echoes of Dissent project (KASK & Conservatorium / School of Arts Ghent).

In an age of intersecting political, man-made and ecological disasters, Preemptive Listening is an ode to the sirens that are and those that could be. Siren compositions from over 20 collaborators form a resonant voice to ask; Does an alarm have to be alarming?

“At its most basic, beyond any learned sound signal, the siren is firstly a call to attention, secondly a call to action, and lastly, it faces the future.” Aura Satz

Featuring newly composed sirens by: Laurie Spiegel, Evelyn Glennie, Maja S. K. Ratkje, Anton Lukoszevieze, BJ Nilsen, Ilpo Väisänen, Rhodri Davies, Mazen Kerbaj, FUJ||||||||||TA, Sarah Davachi, David Toop, Christina Kubisch, Moor Mother.

Aura Satz (Barcelona, 1974) is a London based artist who works with film, sound, performance and sculpture. Satz has made several film portraits of listening and compositional practices as well as works centred on sound technology and unusual notation systems. Preemptive Listening is her first feature.