Navid Navab presents Organism: In Turbulence (Live)

What happens when you unleash wild and chaotic processes on a traditional organ? Leave this question to Montreal-based Navid Navab, who takes it completely apart and creates a new instrument and sound constellations from it.

Navid Navab is an antidisciplinary composer with a background in contemporary music, biomedical sonification, and philosophical biology. Through an investigative ArtScience practice, Navab’s recent creations meticulously stage uncanny forms of order by imbuing machines with a sense of liveliness through fusion with the excitable dynamics of matter. These investigative works orchestrate sensory attunement to forms of life, at the pre-metabolic border between breathing and not breathing, while cybernetically enfolding their excitable dynamics.

In this acoustic solo performance, Navab improvises with Organism: a 1910 Casavant pipe organ, exploring ways in which its turbulent thresholds manifest unstable timbres and intricate sonic self-organisation.

The experimental instrument destabilises the socio-historical tonality of the organ to liberate and sound its hidden turbulent materiality, robotically unleashing timbres unheard after centuries of sonic restraint. During the concert, Organism’s slowly-shifting metastable states allow for the pipes’ energetic thresholds to transductively fall into and out of compatibility with one another, turning each pipe into a vortex-shedding, edge-tone jumping, theatre of spectra and tone.

With no digital sounds, Navab aerodynamically shapes the resulting ecology of interdependent timbres into emergent realms, traversing microsonic polyrhythms, post-rock overspill and swampy soundscapes.

The people at FIBER Festival 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 ‘Navid Navab in the subject line + your name in the email.