Concert — KONTEJNER

Manus Tremens – for for accelerometer-controlled vibration motors, amplified toy harp and live sound processing | Steven Kemper

Manus Tremens is a structured improvisation for accelerometer-controlled vibration motors, amplified toy harp, and live sound processing. “Manus Tremens” is Latin for “trembling hands,” referring to the tremolo articulation produced by the vibration motors on the strings, soundboard, and tuning pegs of a toy harp. The performer holds the leads of two vibrations motors, one in each hand, to actuate the harp. Accelerometers affixed to the performer’s wrists directly affect the vibration intensity of each motor, which enables nuanced dynamic control of the sounds being produced. The design of this system and the performance are inspired by the cimbalom, an Eastern European hammered dulcimer instrument.

Steven Kemper is a music technologist, composer, and instrument designer. Steven creates music for acoustic instruments, instruments and computers, musical robots, dance, and video. His research has been published in Leonardo, Leonardo Music Journal, Organised Sound, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Steven is currently Associate Professor of Computer Music and Digital Arts at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, USA.

 

Chant – for violoncello and live electronics | Yoonjae Choi

Chant is a live electronic project using phonetically augmented instrumental language. By reinterpreting the spectral tones of the instrument and combining them with the vowel formants, the sound of the cello is reminiscent of a primordial voice. The instrument’s expressive gestures and the spectrally processed layers evoke sentimental qualities, functioning as a metaphorical form of voice.  This piece forms part of a broader research project of Vowel Generator developed in my paper “Chanting the Cello: Vocal Formant Synthesis in Live Electronics”, which investigates vowel-based formant synthesis, real-time timbral transformation, and the creation of a vocal–instrumental hybrid language in live electronic performance.

Yoonjae Choi is a composer whose work explores the musical applications of extended acoustic techniques and spectral sound materials drawn from both instrumental and non-instrumental sources. His compositional works include live electronics and soundscapes, incorporating computer technologies and software while frequently collaborating with media artists and the experimental music scene. His music and research have been presented at international conferences and festivals, including ICMC, ACMC, SEAMUS, NYCEMF, DICMF in Daegu, WOCMAT Conference in Taiwan, PMF at Indiana, and Electronic Music Midwest.

He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in composition at the University of North Texas, studying with Panayiotis Kokoras and Sungji Hong.

 

rain contained, rain contains… – for fixed media | Wei Yang

rain contained, rain contains… gradually blurs the boundaries between everyday objects and nature using sounds of bottles, tubes, and rain. While bottles and tubes symbolize containment, playing them creates resonances transcending physical boundaries. Rain unifies this soundscape as an environmental force while remaining sonically discernible as individual, containable drops. Through careful transformation, the piece highlights shared granular qualities, allowing domestic clinks of glass to seamlessly morph into falling rain and vice versa. This blending illustrates how these elements "find and contain each other," fostering an "ecological listening" that reveals the profound interconnectedness of ordinary life and the natural world.

Wei Yang is a composer and sound artist from China. He works with High Order Ambisonics and explores the body’s role in sound production, spatial expression, and the integration of environmental performance data (reverberation, light). His pieces are performed internationally at events such as the Darmstadt and Salzburg Festivals, BEAST, Sonosfera, Tonmeistertagung, ICMC, ORF Musikprotokoll, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, SEAMUS, Forum Wallis, CubeFest, and Ars Electronica.

 

You Say You Love Your Children Above All Else – for a dancer and live electronics | Andreas Bergsland, Robert Wechsler, Camille Jackson and Amie-Blaire Chartier

The dancer’s body is a conduit for sound, memory and urgency. Sensors on the dancer’s wrists, torso and ankles turn her movements into a soundscape. Much of the sound we hear comes from the raw, unfiltered signals from the sensors, reflecting the blunt honesty with which Greta Thunberg addressed the world. Her voice, and the speech that gave the work its title, runs through the piece as both lament and provocation. Caught between action and inertia, the dancer navigates a feedback loop as she struggles to come to terms with the reality that our planet may be dying. The piece builds to a final, fiery crescendo of transformation and collapse.

Robert Wechsler is a choreographer, dancer and pioneer of interactive performance. He studied with Merce Cunningham and John Cage, founded Palindrome and creates tools linking movement and music. This is his 10th collaboration with Andreas Bergsland. Camille Jackson is a contemporary dancer performing widely with dance companies, leading opera houses and on international stages. A Boston Conservatory graduate, she continues to explore dance, video and fashion with FMKF Kollectiv in Berlin. Andreas Bergsland is a music researcher and practitioner composing interactive instruments that turns movement into music. His work with Wechsler has been performed in Europe and North America.

 

A Bit Unwise – for a live electronics duo | Dario Sanfilippo, Luc Döbereiner

A Bit Unwise is a live electronics duo by Dario Sanfilippo and Luc
 Döbereiner exploring 1-bit real-time digital signal processing as a means of sound synthesis and improvisation. The work draws on two computational paradigms: Stuart Kauffman's random Boolean networks (RBNs) and delta-sigma modulation. RBNs — dynamical systems of binary-state nodes governed by Boolean functions — give rise to complex, self-organising behaviour spanning ordered, critical, and chaotic regimes. The duo investigates how intricate sonic textures and formal trajectories emerge from the interplay between these minimal primitives and the performers' live interventions, foregrounding the entanglement of human decision-making and machine autonomy at the lowest level of digital representation — the single bit.

Dario Sanfilippo is a composer, performer, audio programmer, and researcher specialising in musical complex adaptive systems. He holds a PhD in Creative Music Practice from the University of Edinburgh, and his artistic research focuses on the exploration of new music through artificial intelligence (in the broadest sense) and artificial life implemented via adaptive audio feedback networks. His work combines principles of agency, autopoiesis, evolvability, and radical constructivism to design systems deployed in live performance for human-machine interaction or autonomous music. 
 
 Luc Döbereiner is a composer, musician and researcher exploring the fragility, materiality and relationality of sound. His work spans live performance, electronic music and scores for voices and ensembles, often incorporating generative processes and sound synthesis. Drawing on experimental computer music, polyphony, noise and improvisation, his music explores emerging and evolving sonic forms. His work has been presented at festivals including CTM, Gaudeamus and Wien Modern.

 

[air>coded] – for saxophone and live electronics | Grgur Savić and Sanja Star

Air: the essence of human breath. Coded: the logic of computation. In air>coded, Savić continues his exploration of how technology can expand the acoustic instrument. His saxophone, a companion for over two decades, and his voice enter a real-time Max/MSP system that listens, responds and transforms. The result is a hybrid instrument and a poetic dialogue between human vulnerability and digital precision. Who leads, and who listens? Performer and machine shape one another in a living negotiation of control, emotion and authorship, with no clear line between acoustic and electronic, composer and performer. Heavy bass, fragments of voice, sounds that answer, or don't. Authorship stays open, shifting and shared. My practice explores how we perceive, interpret, and make sense of the world through relationships between different systems. Working across sound, image, computation, physical materials, and embodied experience, I’m interested in how processes and forms of knowledge shift through translation and interaction. Bringing artistic experimentation into dialogue with interdisciplinary research, I use audiovisual and material practices to explore what emerges when different systems meet, opening up new ways of sensing, experiencing, and understanding.

Grgur Savić works with sound, visual art and technology. He deconstructs the saxophone to explore resonance, vibration and the tangible presence of sound, and composes graphic scores performed by Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Trickster Orchestra, LUX:NM and his ensemble the FORM. He listens for how sound, text and objects can be coded, re-coded and re-heard. Featured at Kanazawa International Festival, TENOR, TransTraditionale, Gibanja and ISEA 2026, he is active in Berlin's Echtzeitmusik.

Sanja Star (she/her, b. 1982, Croatia) is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator working across audiovisual performance, installation, sound, and material experimentation. Her practice investigates mediation, perception, and human–technology relationships through generative systems, embodied interaction, and collaborative research. Her work connects artistic experimentation with research across art, music, science, and technology.

 

Au Creux Des Dents – for fixed media | Nicola Cappelletti

Au Creux des Dents turns the mechanical relation between impact and the propagation of motion into a principle of sound generation, redefining timbre as a physical phenomenon explored in its materiality. Field recordings of cogwheels, belts, and chains are analysed and reworked through granular synthesis, concatenative synthesis, resynthesis, and spectral envelope-following. The piece develops a metaphorical and mimetic relation between sound of mechanical origin and its projection into a physical, biological space of fleshy cavities and occlusal grooves, a kind of instrumental probing of living flesh. A second dialogue unfolds between the recorded timbres and their algorithmically transformed counterparts.

Nicola Cappelletti (ITA/FRA) is an electroacoustic composer, sound artist and performer. Working across acousmatic and mixed music, his research centres on the compositional relationship between acoustic sound and electronic processing in connection with dance, visual arts, theatre and poetry, with a particular focus on soundscape composition exploring The Third Soundscape. He is a member of the ensemble Opificio Sonoro and teaches Electroacoustic Composition at the Conservatory of Cuneo, Italy.