Sonic Acts Biennial: Expanded Experience

Expanded Experience pushes the boundaries of the audiovisual form. Step into an intense six-hour programme that keeps you wide awake and on the edge of your seat, as sound, image, and architecture merge within the spectacular Muziekgebouw. Throughout, a question lingers: how can sound and cinema break through walls, connecting us across the divides of war, migration, and ecological collapse? Transformative concerts, live performances and AV collaborations extend Sonic Acts’ legacy of bold experimentation, opening new dimensions of listening, seeing, and sensory encounter.

Transforming the enforced muteness of war into a resonant call, Mazen Kerbaj performs Lungless on the ‘Horns of Putin’, an instrument designed by Tarek Atoui and powered by an air compressor. The organ breathes mechanically, part artificial lung, part silenced human voice. Named with a nod to the Soviet rocket launcher ‘Stalin’s Organ’, the instrument evokes both destruction and endurance.

After a life-long career dedicated almost exclusively to electronic synthesis, French composer Éliane Radigue turned in the 2000s toward acoustic instruments, developing the OCCAM Cycle. Her Occam Océan – Occam Delta X (2018), composed for and performed by the microtonal brass ensemble Zinc & Copper, is an immersive voyage from the ocean’s unfathomable depths to its glistening surface.

A Forbidden Distance is a collaborative AV performance that delves into memory and displacement. Bringing together Iranian-Canadian brothers Saint Abdullah (Mohammad and Mehdi), Irish sound artist Eomac (Ian McDonnell), and London-based Italo-Australian filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori, the work unfolds through pulsing sound and vivid imagery to explore how intimacy and connection endure – transformed yet unbroken – across borders, distances, and generations. In another impressive cinematic experience, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe weaves together voice and modular synthesis into a live score of the film Grasshopper Republic. Filmed over three years in Uganda, and directed by Daniel McCabe, the part-fiction, part-documentary follows a team of grasshopper trappers as they try ‘to catch the swarm’. Lowe’s live score – shifting between falsetto incantations, resonant horns, and trembling electronics – creates a charged sonic ecosystem where sound mirrors survival and the precarious interdependence between humans and the natural world.

In Phytomorphic Topographies, Pierce Warnecke and Matthew Biederman map Latvia’s fragile ecosystems through enveloping frequencies and 3D imagery, revealing landscapes that breathe, erode, and mutate in real time.

Weaving human and geological time, in mātr, Paul Jebanasam asks how ecological consciousness might emerge from an expanded sense of scale and responsibility. The performance ruminates about how current scientific understandings of the world and ever-expanding crisis bring up vast and spiritual questions that traverse time, mortality, and faith.

Closing the night, bela presents Korean Love Sonnets with Anton Filatov – a work devoted to the acoustics of the guttural voice. Through creaks, feedback, and resonant tones, the performance uncovers a tactile form of romance, crafting a sombre yet intimate atmosphere suspended by inhuman sounds hovering just above the material plane.

This is a seated event – and tickets are not numbered.

Timetable (with breaks)

Mazen Kerbaj, Lungless (25 min)
Zinc & Copper, Occam Océan – Occam Delta X (50 min)
Saint Abdullah, Eomac & Rebecca Salvadori, A Forbidden Distance (50 min)
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Grasshopper Republic (40 min)
Pierce Warnecke & Matthew Biederman, Phytomorphic Topographies (30 min)
Paul Jebanasam, mātr (30 min)
bela presents Korean Love Sonnets with Anton Filatov (30 min)

The people at Sonic Acts have kindly offered a limited amount of free tickets for Subbacultcha members. Please make a reservation by sending an email to mailinglist@subbacultcha.nl with ‘Sonic Acts: Expanded Experience’ in the subject line + your name in the email.

Registrations are open until 12.00 PM on weekdays.