The Cosmic Awakening festival brings utopian sounds to HKW from November 10 to 13, 2022

Cosmic Awakening
Concerts, installations, films, lectures, discussions
November 10–13, 2022
Tickets: 13€ / 10€
Register via presse@hkw.de

Time and space travel, cyborgs and escapism – Cosmic Awakening explores how visions of the future transform into music

Science fiction “suspends our disbelief in the unreal in order to look askance at our belief in the real.[...] Its game is called cognition; the prize is the cosmos.” This is how Dietmar Dath put it in Niegeschichte, his monumental examination of the history and theory of the genre. Science fiction has many manifestations: literature, films, comics, visual arts and even music. From the sound experiments of Joe Meek or Bebe and Louis Barron to the “cosmic music” of German electronic artists, the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra or George Clinton and funk artists like Earth, Wind & Fire and Janelle Monáe, science fiction-influenced music has grown to become a fertile and diverse genre over the past sixty years. Cosmic Awakening aims to make science fiction resound, but also to deal with its theories and criticism. There will be concerts, installations, films, lectures, discussions and a few surprises.

More information: hkw.de/en/cosmicawakening

Press photos: hkw.de/pressphotos

Program

Thursday, November 10

8 pm
Auditorium

Pantha du Prince: Garden Gaia
Concert

For the Garden Gaia project, Hendrik Weber aka Pantha du Prince puts together ideas of ecology and aesthetics, nature and humankind in a variety of media. The music, released as an album at the end of August 2022, translates formative processes in nature into oscillating sound poetry that mediates between echoes of techno and avant-garde. The work can be seen in this form for the first time at Cosmic Awakening: with the Chor der Kulturen der Welt and percussionists, as well as partly self-built sound generators, Weber now brings Garden Gaia to the stage as a comprehensive audiovisual performance, which in turn represents a world of its own. Video works by Natalia Stuyk are used within the stage set designed by Something Fantastic. Acoustic and electronic sounds, physical environments and digital imagery represent and comment on the lifeforms on the super-organism Earth in an interaction of different art forms.

Friday, November 11

8 pm
Auditorium

Gelbart: The Portal, Finally
Concert

Gelbart doesn’t just bring music to the stage, but pushes open the gate to other worlds. In his composition The Portal, Finally, a work commissioned especially for the festival, he undertakes a sound experiment with influences from avant-garde jazz, soundtracks of early science fiction films and works of classical modernism. The Portal, Finally asks whether first contact with another universe can happen this very evening. The composer and media artist gathers a 14-piece ensemble with instruments such as harp, harpsichord and electronics under a large triangle. This is not meant to represent the titular portal, but to function as one. Because in view of a potentially infinite number of parallel universes, the transition into one of them is within the realm of possibility. If another world emerges at the end of the performance, the experiment will have succeeded.

9.30 pm
Weltwirtschaft

Makimakkuk
Concert

The musical influences of Makimakkuk, a rapper, DJ, music producer and artist from Ramallah, are as diverse as her activities. As an emcee, she is known for a tone that is both abstract and serious and at times sarcastic as she flows through personal, social and political issues. Since becoming internationally known through a collaboration with Sun Glitters, she has steadily expanded her musical scope: She brings hip-hop as well as varieties of bass and club music, pop and R’n’B as well as folkloric forms and their contemporary adaptations into productive dialogue. This also applies to her performances, most recently in the multimedia exhibition May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth at MoMA in New York and at the Boiler Room and as a support act for Nicolás Jaar.

10.30 pm
Weltwirtschaft

Kuunatic
Concert

Kuunatic’s psych-rock is more than transcultural; it’s interplanetary. Of course, the Tokyo trio draws its inspiration from Jamaican dub, various forms of Japanese music, Krautrock, British post-punk and various rhythmic and vocal traditions – thus from pretty much all corners of the earth. However, it already set off for the eponymous planet with its debut EP Kuurandia and made its musical home there. The band stayed there for Gate of Klüna, their debut album released in October 2021 on the German label Glitterbeat, and traced the genesis of this wondrous world for their audience on eight tracks. Adventurous, wayward, unconventional, and absolutely to be understood as an invitation: Come with us to Kuurandia!

Saturday, November 12

6 pm
Cloakroom foyer

The Sound of Tomorrow
Panel with Heiko Hoffmann and Lisa Rovner
Free admission

When Bebe Barron and her husband Louis produced the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet in 1956, they were not allowed to call it “music.” The producers of the science fiction film only granted the Barrons credits for creating “electronic tonalities.” In her documentary Sisters with Transistors, Lisa Rovner shows how influential these tonalities were to become: The female pioneers of electronic music shaped the sound signature of modernity as such. Heiko Hoffmann illustrates their ubiquity in a selection of short videos, commercials and sound logos that he curated. Together, Rovner and Hoffmann discuss examples of how the inventive spirit of Daphne Oram, Wendy Carlos, Suzanne Ciani and other musicians was disseminated via mass media and how The Sound of Tomorrow became a natural part of collective imaginary worlds.

7 pm
Auditorium

I Snuck Off the Slave Ship
Film

To call I Snuck Off the Slave Ship a monumental piece of music is certainly accurate given its length of nearly 18 minutes. But the tone poem at the center of Lonnie Holley’s celebrated album Mith was by no means monolithic. The flowing character of the music is underscored even more by the short film of the same name. In his directorial debut, many of Holley’s artistic activities over the past decades flow into one another. First presented at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, the short film, shot in collaboration with Cyrus Moussavi, combines the self-taught artist’s sculptural works with images, sounds and words in a way that is as immersive as it is impressionistic. The past and present of the USA are condensed, the personal politically charged.

8 pm
Auditorium

Lonnie Holley & Mourning [A] BLK Star
Concert

For over four decades, Lonnie Holley’s artistic practice has been marked by an improvisational creativity that fills his entire life. Whether with his debut film I Snuck Off the Slave Ship, his work in visual and performance art or as a poet and musician who preserves African-American traditions from blues to jazz and yet rethinks them in ways that are as powerful with words as they are with sound, the boundaries between genres and even works are constantly being re-shifted and sometimes dissolved. This is also true when Holley goes into the studio or takes to the stage. What can be heard on his solo albums such as Mith or most recently National Freedom represents both the provisional endpoint of an experiment and the starting point of performances that repeatedly set off into the unknown.

9.30 pm
Weltwirtschaft

Space Afrika
Concert

Space Afrika make the colors of the night resound. The duo from Manchester moves at the intersection of crackling ambient, brittle dub, spherical R’n’B or rap interludes, set pieces of classical music and mirror reflections of club music. From these, most recently in 2021 on the album Honest Labour, they collage dynamic sound sculptures that draw a mosaic-like picture of urban living spaces. In their audiovisual live shows, Josh Reid and Joshua Inyang rely just as much on condensation, but never leave the ground of facts. Like their breakthrough mixtape hybtwibt? released during the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and their audiovisual collaboration Untitled (To Describe You) with filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, they use abstract sounds to refer to concrete realities of life.

10.30 pm
Weltwirtschaft

Nídia
Concert

Nídia is one of the leading producers from the environment of Príncipe Discos. The Lisbon-based label is the focal point of the city’s batida scene and thus a platform for renegotiating Afro-Portuguese dance music in the club setting. Nídia has collaborated with Kelela, Fever Ray and Yaeji, and gave Lafawndah’s track Tourist an award-winning remix. She regularly releases new music through her own channels and in 2020, in addition to the two EPs Badjuda Sukulbembe and S/T, she released Não Fales Nela Que A Mentes through Príncipe Discos, an album that took the tempo from her sound, inspired by the rhythms of kuduro and other dance styles like tarraxo. Nídia’s music remains uncategorizable. Its visionary character reveals itself most directly on the dance floor.

Sunday, November 13

4 pm
Weltwirtschaft

At the End of Black Music: Infotech, Biotech, Afrotech
Keynote by Louis Chude-Sokei
Free admission

This lecture will be written after the turn of the next century. In it, Louis Chude-Sokei, author and director of the African American Studies Program at Boston University, will have reflected on some technological revolutions around the year 2022, particularly on neural links, biometric sensors and bio-technological interfaces that are now able to effectively link the human brain with computers. Chude-Sokei will have charted the evolution of these technologies along infotech, biotech and Afrotech frontiers retrospectively: Looking back at the coming one hundred years, he will have explored their cultural and political implications, particularly in terms of music and race.

4.45 pm
Weltwirtschaft

A Sound Civilization
Lectures & Panel with Ann Cotten, Duduzile L S Mathonsi, Lonnie Holley, moderated by Natasha A. Kelly
Free admission

Fictional spaces thrive on the power of words and their sounds. In 2019, Ann Cotten published Lyophilia, a collection of science fiction short stories in which at times every thought becomes reality. Her lecture Turning Knobs, Hesitatingly: Interfaces and Dithering explores the normative power of language and technical interfaces between control, music and corporeal knowledge. Journalist and performer Duduzile L S Mathonsi’s contribution is dedicated to the importance of conceptual spaces, poetically and critically underpinning the claim We All Should Be Re-imagining to Imagine. Afterwards, Cotten and Mathonsi will talk with musician and visual artist Lonnie Holley, who will also present his first directorial work I Snuck Off the Slave Ship on the festival Saturday before his concert. Their conversation about the possibilities of a Sound Civilization will be moderated by Natasha A. Kelly.

7 pm
Weltwirtschaft

Kristen Gallerneaux
Concert

As a filmmaker, curator and sound researcher, not to mention a musician, Kristen Gallerneaux engages in a kind of productive spectral analysis exploring the ghostly traces inscribed in media. Her debut album Strung Figures reflects on the string games used by Indigenous peoples of North America for narrative purposes and passing on knowledge. Rhythmically, it moves between electronic pop and club music, but counters this with manipulated field recordings and samples, synthetic sounds and noisy sonic textures that give the music an eerie character. The album thus follows in the tradition of her previous musical works for film and radio, but also ties in with her monograph High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter.

8.30 pm
Auditorium

Klein
Concert

To call Klein’s approach multidisciplinary falls short. It is omnidisciplinary. Whether it’s her feature film debut Care, her visual art such as, most recently, her collaboration with Josiane MH Pozi at Berlin’s Galerie Buchholz, her numerous web design projects or her work in the field of sound and music, everything is constantly woven together and interweaves with each other. As a composer, producer and vocal artist, Klein, with radical consistency, also brings together elements from R’n’B songwriting or rap with avant-garde methods and forms inspired by classical music. For her latest album Harmattan, she became a one-person orchestra, recording everything from piano to string instruments and saxophone on her own. And live? Consequently, anything can happen.

Daily from 10 to 13 November

Free admission

4–11 pm
Cloakroom foyer

The Sound of Tomorrow
Installation by Heiko Hoffmann

Animated TV logos, the sound design of early science fiction films and the bubbling in soda pop commercials: Starting in the late 1950s, the musical avant-garde made itself heard in mainstream living rooms. Commercial commissions such as those by Delia Derbyshire, Oskar Sala, Raymond Scott or Suzanne Ciani led to innovative ideas and alien sounds anchoring themselves in the collective consciousness while the future flickered on the television screens. The selection of videos compiled by journalist and curator Heiko Hoffmann, shown in three thematic blocks under the title The Sound of Tomorrow: Electronic Music in Short Films, Advertising and Sound Logos, retells the story of the electronic pioneers of the 20th century.

7 pm
Eastern lobby

Sisters with Transistors
Film

Sisters with Transistors tells the story of pioneering women in electronic music such as Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Éliane Radigue, Suzanne Ciani and Wendy Carlos. Lisa Rovner sifted through much archival footage for this acclaimed documentary about the unsung heroines of musical progress in the 20th century, and was able to engage Laurie Anderson as a narrator to paint a nuanced picture of her various protagonists. Sisters with Transistors should be seen as a music-historical intervention, exploring the influence of the radical ideas of Laurie Spiegel or Pauline Oliveros. But it also paints a portrait of a (musical) world in upheaval – and not least of the fundamentally different women who played a key role in shaping this revolution.

Visitor Information

Current information for visitors at hkw.de/visit

Weltwirtschaft Restaurant opens daily at noon. weltwirtschaft.berlin

Partners

Part of The New Alphabet (2019–2022), supported by the Minister of State for Culture and the Media due to a ruling of the German Bundestag.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and by the Federal Foreign Office.

Press Contact

Jan Trautmann
Head of Press and PR

Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10
10557 Berlin
T + 49 (0) 30 39787-192
presse@hkw.de
hkw.de