A night of speculative sonic fictions, hosted by CTM Festival, Goethe-Institut, Hypermedium, Modal Analysis, and Romantso.

CTM Festival is pleased to start a cultural dialogue with Athens. Welcoming both local and international artists, CHRONOTOPIA takes shape on June 20 as a twofold event that is produced in close collaboration with Goethe Institut, club venue Romantso, and Athens-based music labels Modal Analysis and Hypermedium. The next day, on June 21, the Contemporary Music Research Center in Athens (KSYME) will host CTM Festival for a discussion open to the public.

In the early evening, a series of live sets at the concert room of the Goethe-Institut will explore new temporalities and topographies that arise from transversal exchanges across times, geographies, and cultures. Through the collapsing, folding, dissolving, colliding, and weaving together of various cultural lineages, and of the ancient and the yet to come, these artists speculate on time (and culture’s) non-linearity and seek points of contact between older music practises and contemporary speculative experimentalism.

Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote, is a driving force behind Tehran’s vibrant experimental music scene. The formidable electronic music composer and sound artist has shared his work via Warp, Sub Rosa, Opal Tapes, Morphine, and, most recently, Diagonal. Sote will present Parallel Persia, which deals with the illusion and creation of an artificial hyperreal culture manipulated and controlled by an imperious agency somewhere within all galaxies. Amongst destruction arises beauty, grace, and symmetry. Traditional Persian acoustic tropes performed by instrumentalists Arash Bolouri (santour) and Pouya Damadi (tar) struggle against and enter into dialogue with Sote’s digital processing and futuristic computer sound. Snapshots of an apocryphal Iran are presented via sonic schematics for a synthetic "Persian" experience.

Performing with a quadrophonic setup is Jessica Ekomane, whose recent track “Common Fate” delves into psychoacoustics, playing with the perception of rhythmic structures and counterpoint between noise and melody. Her work draws on older forms of music, adopting tuning systems that lie outside of the dominant Western canon and folding them into undulating polyrhythmic structures. Her trance-inducing computer music is at once static yet constantly shifting. Ekomane is host of Open Sources, a monthly show on Berlin’s Cashmere Radio. Taking listeners on journeys through diverse folk musics and contemporary experiments, the show presents an insight into her expansive sonic interests.

Kolida Babo is a collaboration between Greek musicians Socratis Votskos and Harris P. Their eponymous debut album, woven out of live improv sessions, explores ancient Armenian music, the sounds of Greece’s Epirus and Thrace regions, abstract electronics, and free jazz. Their singular sonic palette traverses temporalities and localities: in Kolida Babo, the Armenian duduk meets a Moog synthesiser, braiding together seemingly separate traditions and sounds, the modern and the deep past, the local and the global.

xin has contributed to compilations on netlabels such as Genome 6.66Mbp, Intruder Alert, AN BA, and suspension. Their debut solo release, To Shock the Earth and Shake the Sky, came out on Subtext in 2018, and was made available solely via independent platforms. xin’s live set folds together various dance music strains, from the 90s to today, with a seemingly contradictory arrhythmic sensibility. Their performance will draw from their forthcoming LP, which mangles and strangles fragments of neurofunk, hardcore, and dubstep to produce alien, shapeshifting sounds.

Later that night, a host of formidable, fractured club sounds descend on Romantso to invoke uncharted musical territories on the dancefloor holodeck. Showcasing hybrid sounds that evidence genre collapse and temporal mutations, CHRONOTOPIA again explodes various traditions with xin and Sote, who will present more club-oriented material—the former with a DJ set, and the latter with a hardcore-inspired live set.

Shirking notions of identity, Born in Flamez subverts gender and genre with a panoply of influences somewhere in the nether regions between noise, grime, industrial pop, and club-not-club. In 2018, they released Impossible Love via Infinite Machine—a release which questions the restrictions and tactics of queer love in today’s political climate. BIF will present a live set based off of their more recent work, melding together collaborations, remixes, edits, and other unreleased material.

Athens-based Xyn Cabal appears with a DJ set that reflects his own futuristic club productions. The Hypermedium affiliate recently shared his Perfect Oracle EP via The Death of Rave. Slick and synthetic, Perfect Oracle synthesizes computerised dread with decimated, mutant kuduro, gqom, dembow, and weightless grime.

Kondaktor, who also hails from Athens, is a DJ, producer, and co-owner of the Modal Analysis label alongside ANFS and 3.14. His Afrikanochetos LP, which was released via Abstract Reality in 2017, draws on dance music lineages from Africa and their influence on mediterranean music. Presenting various rhythmic and temporal experiments, Afrikanochetos juxtaposes forward-charging momentum with lilting, unanticipated patterns.

Further Links

→ Romantso
→ Goethe-Institut
→ Hypermedium
→ Modal Analysis
→ Contemporary Music Research Center

Venues

Goethe-Institut
Omirou St. 14-16
10672 Athens

Romantso
Anaxagora 3
105 52 Athens

Odeion (Athens Conservatoire)
Room 10
Rigillis & Vas. Georgiou B´17-19
106 75 Athens

CHRONOTOPIA is a project by Goethe-Institut Athens and CTM Festival in collaboration with Romantso, Hypermedium, Modal Analysis, and KSYME.