Sonic Acts Biennial 2026: Heart Rests Twice #5

The final edition of Heart Rests Twice – a curated series unfolding across five Thursday nights at murmur during Sonic Acts Biennial 2026 – explores how sound can carry narrative, transforming and retelling stories. It asks how sonic practices might sustain relationships, communities, and fragile ecologies, imagining listening as a shared resource that redistributes energy, attention, connection, and emotion.

Hannah Hajar is an electronic duo influenced by mystical dub, ambient, bass, and musique concrète, singing in Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia. Their soundscapes drift between rhythmic and contemplative layers, where accordion dissolves into a synthetic mesh and deconstructed rhythms twist through shadows – some haunting, some soothing – revealing veiled dreams.

Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت) is a long-term project by Lebanese artist Nour Sokhon: a sonic memory capsule tracing personal and collective stories of migration and displacement. Interviews, field recordings, voice, piano, electronics, violin – and even objects of transit like luggage wheels and office bells used as instruments – transform time and movement into sound, creating an in-between space for those who left, and those who remain.

Guitarist Nina Garcia and trombonist Maria Bertel push themselves and their instruments to the limits. Driven by an absolute desire for intensity, their language is feedback, drones, crackling circuits, overtones, and random harmonies. Working as a duo since 2016, Garcia and Bertel have cultivated a practice of extreme improvisation and focused sonic force.

Heart Rests Twice draws together artists who work across discursive formats, composition, audiovisual performance to explore ideas of home, place, and belonging. In Amsterdam Noord, murmur’s custom-built surround sound system comes alive with vibration and conversation. Tuning into the pulse of the heartbeat – a circular rhythm – the series invites a heartfelt, hearingful mode of engagement – a way of listening that is not only receptive but relational, even transformative. The concerts will be followed by a Q&A.

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: Heart Rests Twice #5′ in the subject line + your name in the email.

Registrations are open until 12.00 PM on weekdays.