Sunday 17th of October at 8 p.m., violist Julia Eckhardt and John McCowen, composer and performer, invite us to experience the broad spectrum of listening, during an evening of solo music. The concert is a collaboration between Hafnarborg’s concert series Phonemes and Sequences X – Time Has Come.
At the concert, Julia Eckhard will perform Éliane Radigue’s OCCAM IV, a work which is written specially for her. Radigues work unfolds in intensity which is at once subtle and monumental, where vibrant life thrives beneath the still surface of the sounds. Julia will also perform her own work, Mother Viola (Study #1), where the music and the listening shifts between language and sound. In his solo work, Models of Duration, John McCowen then extends the soundscape of his contrabass clarinet and seemingly exposes microscopic life that thrives within the sounds.
Julia Eckhardt is a musician and organiser in the field of the sonic arts and at the intersection of composed and improvised music. She is a founding member and artistic co-director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels. As a performer of composed and improvised music, she has collaborated with a variety of artists, such as Éliane Radigue, Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Jennifer Walshe, Wandelweiser-composers, Rhodri Davies, Taku Sugimoto, Manfred Werder, Angharad Davies, Lucio Capece, Manu Holterbach, Anne Wellmer and Carol Robinson. To note, several of these collaborations are represented on recordings. She has been teaching and lecturing at the Lemmensinstituut in Leuven, LUCA and La Cambre in Brussels.
John McCowen is a composer and performer focusing on extending the possibilities of the clarinet. John embraces drones, different tones and beating harmonics as a means to extrude the dimensions within this acoustic sound source. His work has been described by The New Yorker as “the sonic equivalent of microscopic life viewed on a slide”. His music has been released on Edition Wandelweiser, International Anthem, Astral Spirits, Sound American, among others. In 2017 and 2019, John was an artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio in Yunnan, China, and the 2020 artist-in-residence at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn, New York. He currently resides in Reykjavik, where he is a guest instructor of improvised music at the Iceland University of the Arts.
Hafnarborg’s concert series Phonemes is dedicated to presenting music by various contemporary composers from the 20th and 21st century, shedding light upon artistic research in the abstract world of the poetry of sounds. The event is also supported by The Music Fund and the French Embassy in Iceland.
Everyone welcome – free entry.