Conflux Festival 2026 – Saturday w Merzbow & more

Conflux is a festival exploring multisensory encounters, urgent ideas, contemporary art, and experimental music. From 24 to 27 September 2026, Conflux will once again take over various venues across Rotterdam.

Saturday performances at Brutus:

Merzbow
A vegan, straight edge noise project of Masami Akita from Japan. Merzbow started out in the noise industrial scene of early 1980s and began releasing music. In the 1990s, Merzbow were influenced by grind core and released an album on the death metal label Relapse. In the late 1990s, he resonated with Mego’s “punk computer music” and were one of the first in Japanese Noise Scene to adopt a live performance technique using laptop computers.

Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand – 10000 Peacock Feathers in Foaming Acid

As a multi-colour laser beam enters a soap bubble (the chemical ancestor of a living cell’s lipid membrane), it splits into microscopic optical branches. Unlike other light sources, the laser’s coherent emission gets trapped inside a bubble’s skin, carving out filamentous pathways along which the light propagates unperturbed. During the performance, these laser branches meander through clusters of hemispherical bubbles, which serve as molecule-thin lenses for a 360° laser projection. The projection envelopes the audience in an unfathomable magnification of the electrochemical and optofluidic dynamics within the sensitive skin of a bubble.

Nicky Assmann & Robert Pravda – Dante’s Circle

Dante’s Circle is a kinetic and visceral performance by Nicky Assmann and Robert Pravda for six monolithic burners arranged in a circle around a rotating loudspeaker and played as a live instrument.

The automated burners move vertically along the copper panels, heating them and creating continuously changing prismatic colours. The sounds of the burners and heated copper plates become a source for the soundscape, moving through the installation and projected into the space by the kinetic speaker at its centre. The copper plates function both as screens for the iridescent visuals and as acoustic reflectors.

The rotating speaker and the circular choreography of stroboscopic lights, fumes and shadows extend the circle into the architecture of the Cathedral of Brutus. As artefacts of the performance, six uniquely burned, iridescent copper plates remain.

The people at Conflux 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 ‘Conflux Festival 2026 – Saturday performances’ in the subject line + your name in the email.

Registrations are open until 12.00 PM on weekdays.
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