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When something breaks, it emits a sound different from before. That’s why sound is a means of diagnosing the health of ecosystems. Is the world broken? The sounds of our planet are changing rapidly; species go extinct along with their calls, people are wiped out along with their songs, water bodies evaporate, and even as radio-frequency waves become ubiquitous, entire areas fall silent, stripped of life.

This keynote invites you to listen to this silence as if it were a factory mark of the world—the place where two parts were glued together or split apart; and to contemplate on how such silence no longer signals brokenness— but it stands out as a portal; a space where new possibilities can grow, a plot hole that contains the promise of different stories. It further welcomes you to imagine that the cracks between who speaks and who listens, what is language and what is noise, who makes the future and who is made past, what is human and what is stone, and so on—can be undone or at least reexamined through speculative sonic practices, and that this interrogation has the power to rekindle our connections with the material world and with one another, and to nurture caring ways of knowing, unlearning, reinventing, and becoming-with.

This September 4th /19:00 I'm presenting a new performance as part of Sound Campus Festival in Linz.

Playing with the theme of metamorphosis, Monstrua is an interactive live set that explores human and non-human aural representations as active agents in our relationship with the natural world. Through sound manipulation and the playful use of audio and image classification algorithms, Monstrua seeks to reimagine this divide as a shared, interconnected space.

This September in Linz we are presenting "Close Conversations of Other Kinds" a discussion and sonic intervention by Marie-Andrée Pellerin and myself as part of this year's Sound Campus festival on September 4th, at 18:00.

We will be chatting about speculative sonic practices that critically explore our relationship with the natural world, centered around Marie-Andrée's publication "Close Conversations of Other Kinds" and my work on embodying the other through voice and listening.

Publication "Close Conversations of Other Kinds" by Marie-Andrée Pellerin
Graphic designer: Katharina Zimmerhackl         
Preface by Maximilan Lehner  
Short stories by: Monika Rinck, Christiane Vadnais and Élisabeth Vonarburg

Curated by dearest Gabriela Gordillo and Andreea Vladut.

Radio Slumber

INSTALLATION SOUND

Manifesta 2024 | Barcelona

My contribution to Radio Slumber’s Manifesta 2024 installation is a sonic spell for protection.

I’m thereby exploring the form of amanes; a West Asian vocal music genre linkable to the gazal, and the layali, which has a special place in Greek music tradition, and is often used to convey intense emotions, in contexts of pain, desire, and resolution.

Radio Slumber’s work will be on show in Barcelona this September: 
09/08/2024 - 11/24/2024

Undoing  

DIGITAL SOUND LAB

Together with Błażej Kotowski, we are launching a sound design studio called undoing. We are excited to work on projects that involve sound design, music composition, and audio programming. We are also interested in collaborating with artists, filmmakers, and game developers. If you have a project in mind, feel free to reach out to us.

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8/2024

Hold The Sound

PUBLICATION
Basecamp Festival 2024 | Switzerland 

I selected a quote from Mosab Abu Toha's book 'Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from G az a' for 'Hold The Sound', a wonderful publication edited by Jan Steinbach for this year's Festival Basecamp's library at Locarno Film Festival.

Can you hold a sound? This book experiments with giving tangible form to something seemingly immaterial. Within these pages, you will find a collection of thoughts on sound gathered by artists and researchers, each attempting to grasp sound’s fleeting nature through verbal and visual expressions.

What are auditories? The plural of “auditory” emphasizes that there is no one way of hearing, and that hearing is not an isolated activity. For the inaugural presentation of the library, we reached out to artists and writers encountered during our investi­gations into books on sound. We gathered quotations about auditories that have inspired them. Collected here, they assemble a multitude of voices, offering thought-provoking ideas, introductions, and modes of access to the auditories that concern them.

With contributions by Agus Nur Amal PMTOH, Aio Frei, Alisa Oleva, Andrew Norman Wilson, Ben Rivers, Bertrand Bacqué, Camille Llobet, Daniel Deshays, Daphne Xanthopoulou, David Horvitz, Eleni Ikoniadou, Haroon Mirza, Hildegard Westerkamp, Jan Steinbach, Jean-Paul Felley, Justine Stella Knuchel, Kevin B. Lee, Lauren Tortil, Marie Losier, Marina Rosenfeld, Nina Dragičević, Philippe Ciompi, Pierre Leguillon, Samson Young, Sarah Brahim, Simone Merli, Stefano Knuchel, Stephan Crasneanscki, and Tomoko Sauvage.

Featuring quotes from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Brandon LaBelle, Daniel Deshays, David George Haskell, David Horvitz, David Toop, Eliane Radigue, Gavin Steingo & Jim Sykes, Gilles Deleuze, Jason Stanyek & Benjamin Piekut, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jenny Odell, John Cage, John Hull, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Mannie Fresh, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Stocker, Mosab Abu Toha, Pierre Leguillon, Rajni Shah, Steve Roden, Sun Ra, Susan Schuppli, and Tony Conrad.

Pre-Order:
https://edcat.net/item/hold-the-sound/

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26/7/2024

Songlines

MIX  
radiosygma

𓆙 new mix for radiosygma with songs by women that stitch the wounds between worlds, singing places I feel bound to, with melodies that travel far, across languages and bodies.

~ ... been thinking of fandalas*, of how there’s no word like this for men, of how when my grandpa called me such, I stopped speaking my thoughts and started humming melodies ~ reading Anzaldua's Borderlands, cliffs melting into water, moving east, against the clock, abandoning habits, hugging ghosts, reclaiming what’s yours, reconnecting dots, decoding traces, re-membering my grandpa’s sweater, my grandma’s silence, my dad’s throat tumor, my mom’s singing, loud and clear, over the sink, over the voice of those who called her ‘out of tune.’

*fandala is a pontic word for women that speak a lot.
ps. this photo is by my friend Sara Piñeros (sarapineros_) and I would have preferred the eels to be alive; but they're still singing.

Sing along: https://soundcloud.com/radiosygma/lacuna-daphne-x-songlines

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8/7/24

Sonic Utopias ft. Llorenç Barber

INTERVIEW at stegi.radio | Onassis Stegi

Uploaded to Stegi Radio the first part of a conversation with Llorenç Barber, the legendary Valencian composer, visionary and storyteller known as ‘campanero’, talks to us about his ‘social music’, “From Sun to Sun”, “Bell Concerts”, "Naumáquias”, and "Sounding Cities”, where an entire city with all its elements—from the neighbors to the seagulls, from the ships to the fireworks, from the trains to the sirens, from the wind to the cannons, from the shofars to the muezzins—transforms into a splendid orchestra thanks to this restless utopian. Barber vividly recounts his creative trajectory, interweaving Western European and Spanish avant-garde music and history, from Cage to the Spanish Fluxus group called Zaj, his collaborators Bartolomé Ferrando, Fátima Miranda, and his companion in art and life, Montserrat Palacios Prado — but also from Franco to the fall of the Berlin wall, reflecting on sound, power, and society all through a unique perspective.

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13/6/24

Liquid Strata

INSTALLATION SOUND  
Open discussion at Sónar+D | Barcelona

With Joan Llort, Entangled Others Studio

The Mies van der Rohe Pavilion transformed again, with SonarMies, into sound research platform presents Liquid Strata, the tenth “site specific” intervention at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion as part of the Sónar+D festival.

Oceanographer Joan Llort and artists Feileacan McCormick and Sofia Crespo from Entangled Others Studio together with Daphne Xanthopoulou stemming from the bold and innovative use of scientific data reveal the hidden dynamics and layers of the forgotten world of the mesopelagic, the twilight zone, in a happy encounter between science and art.

From the surface of the sheet of water in the outdoor pond of the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, a large visual and sound piece plunges us into the deepest layers of the ocean. It tells us about a world where light barely penetrates, the largest marine ecosystem on the planet, as unknown as it is vital, populated by millions of tiny sea creatures that migrate to the surface every night to feed.

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18/5/24

Tape Release Show

CONCERT
w. Flora Yin-Wong and Dania

On May 18th, Hangar’s orbital collective Paralaxe Editions @paralaxe.editions will host an evening of live performances featuring Flora Yin Wong, Daphne X and Dania.

Flora Yin Wong @floraytw is an artist and writer from London whose work incorporates field recording and early instruments, such as singing bowl, yangqin and kemence, process through pedals, Max/MSP, as well as text-based storytelling and abstraction. Her second album is due this September on Modern Love, and her multichannel composition for Paris Institute’s INA GRM will be released as a split EP next year following a residency for their iconic 48-channel diffusion system.

The night will also be celebrating Daphne X @wawrzyn.wawrzyn and their first tape release on Paralaxe, ‘An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember’. Daphne X is a musician and new media artist of Anatolian Greek descent based in Barcelona. Through participatory performances and interactive installations, they explore human and more-than-human materialities, using sound as a means of re-enchanting the world.

Dania @dania_paralaxe, the head of the Paralaxe imprint who also has releases on Superpang, Ecstatic and Longform Editions, will be joining and presenting some new work and found sounds. She is a transnational artist, musician, curator and emergency doctor based in Barcelona. As a sound artist, her output focuses on identity, borders and displacement, drawing on her transitional experiences as a forced migrant. Employing sampling and field-recording techniques, and utilizing her voice as an instrument of cultural and gendered sonic agency, she composes longform electroacoustic works.

📅May 18
🕢8 pm
📍Sala Ricson, Hangar
🎫Early bird tickets 10 € (until May 11)
🔗More info at hangar.org

📷 Poster by @niall_greaves

An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember

RELEASE
Tape Release on Paralaxe Editions

I am deeply honoured to announce that my new album An Echo Of Something I Don't Remember will be released by Barcelona's Paralaxe Editions under the attentive care of Dania Shihab.

It has been beautifully mastered by Rupert Clervaux, featuring graphic design by Oficina de Disseny, and hand-printed with love at L'Automàtica.

The music of Daphne X is often rooted in the voice, but on her striking new album, An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember, the Barcelona-based, Greek Anatolian artist and sound designer stretches that idea well beyond her own utterances and vocalizations. While her wordless murmurs do seem to angelically hover throughout the record, they’re merely one string in a delicate aural web, one that includes not only others’ voices, but a litany of sounds both organic and synthesized. The gentle clacking of her laptop’s keyboard, the familiar groan of a rusty window handle, loops plucked from tapes she listened to as a child—these are just a few of the elements one might hear in Daphne’s slow-brewing soundpieces, which also draw warmth from field recordings she captured in an Austrian garden and the gauzy drones of an old Magnus Electric Chord Organ she found at a Polish flea market.

Deeply inspired by the meditative works and deep listening ethos of Pauline Oliveros, Daphne is most interested in fostering connection, filling her reverb-glazed compositions with feelings of wonder and anticipation as she builds a sense of sonic kinship with the world around her. Perhaps that’s why An Echo of Something I Don’t Remember, even during its most ethereal moments, feels so distinctly tactile. Daphne X may imbue her work with a certain sense of weightlessness, but rather than drifting off into some fantastical realm, she quietly draws attention to the beauty, majesty and melancholy of her immediate surroundings.

Buy here: 
https://daphnex.bandcamp.com/album/an-echo-of-something-i-dont-remember

8/4/24

Art for Advocacy

TALK
DHub, TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary
With Joan Llort and Entangled Others

What do we know about what’s going on below the surface of the seas? Every day, we are flooded with tales about the ocean besieged by plastic pollution, the controversies of deep-sea mining, and species becoming extinct without us even knowing of their existence, but the deep seabed often remains a mystery. In this session, we will embark on a journey to the deepest and darkest layers of the ocean. In our quest to look beyond the strictly scientific, we will delve into projects from various disciplines that envision unconventional ways of relating to the deep.

Through talks, interviews, screenings, and more with artists, scientists, policymakers, and other oceanic practitioners, we will dive into the deep sea with an amphibious perspective, entangling scientific research with artistic inquiry and creating space for collective interdisciplinary discussion. In this immersive event, mediated by Sónar +D curator Antonia Folguera, artists and scientists will enter the deep sea community hand in hand, trespassing the borders that traditionally define the creation and dissemination of scientific knowledge.

This is an opportunity to collectively foster a deeper understanding of one of the most elusive parts of the Earth. The ocean could be the answer (or at least part of it) to humanity’s most pressing issues and our biggest ally in fighting the effect of climate change. Together, we can think about collaboration rather than extraction, about making a commitment to regenerate and respect the most expansive part of the blue planet.

The event was organized by TBA21 in collaboration with Disseny Hub Barcelona, Schmidt Ocean Institute, Sónar, and the Institut de Ciències del Mar, with the participation of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center  – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) and the Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation.LOCATIONDisseny Hub Barcelona
Pl. de les Glòries Catalanes, 37-38, Sant Martí, 08018 more: https://tba21.org/artforadvocacy