MAWADα
(Rayan Abdelkhelek)
MAWADα is a hybrid production and DJing project that explores voice, mourning, ritual, and community-based healing. Born in recall to the Beirut underground movements in the early 2000s that revolved around discreet yet highly inclusive acid, hardcore, and experimental parties in and around the city, MAWADα’s practice is ever evolving. Through bringing together different elements from Hardcore, techno, prayer, noise, pop, and club cultures, MAWADα seeks to instigate and nurture collective affect through music.

Mattin is an artist, musician and theorist working conceptually with noise and improvisation. Through his practise and writing he explores performative forms of estrangment as a way to deal with structural alienation. Mattin has exhibited and toured worldwide. He has performed in festivals such as Performa (NYC), No Fun (NYC), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Arika (Glasgow) and lectured and taught in institutions such as Dutch Art Intstitute, Cal Arts, Bard College, Paris VII, Princeton University and Goldsmiths College. In 2017 he completed a PhD at the University of the Basque Country under the supervision of the philosopher Ray Brassier. Along with Anthony Iles he edited the book Noise & Capitalism (Kritika/Arteleku 2009). In 2012 CAC Brétigny and Tuamaturgia published Unconstituted Praxis, a book collecting his writing plus interviews and reviews of performances. Anthony Iles and Mattin are currently in the final stages of editing the volume Abolishing Capitalist Totality: What Is To Be Done Under Real Subsumption? (Archive Books). Urbanomic has just published this year his book Social Dissonance. Mattin is part of the bands Billy Bao and Regler and has over 100 releases in different labels worldwide. Mattin is currently co-hosting with Miguel Prado on the podcast Social Discipline and he is also part of Noise Research Union with Cecile Melaspine, Sonia de Jager, Miguel Prado and Inigo Wilkins. Mattin took part in 2017 in dokumenta14 in Athens and Kassel.

IG: @abjectmusic

twitter: @abjectmusic

Jessika Khazrik (b. 1991, Beirut, based Berlin) is an artist, composer, technologist, writer, and DJ whose indisciplinary practice ranges from steganography to performance, machine learning, ecotoxicology, visual art, philosophy of intelligence and history of science and music. Khazrik works with a trans-millennial production of knowledge based on an environmental understanding of the techno-politics of voice, media, and code. While tracing the history, political economy, and myths of discipline, her indisciplinary practice revolves around the collective search and need for polymathic resonance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and long-term future. Khazrik holds BAs in Linguistics and in Theatre from the Lebanese University (LB) and a MS in Art, Culture and Technology from MIT (US) where she was awarded the Ada Lovelace prize.



Her multi-channel sound installations and performances have been commissioned by Para Site (HK), Kunsthalle Wien (AT), LACE (US), Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi (PL), ar/ge kunst (IT) and LUMA Foundation (CH), among others. Her essays and short stories have been published in edited anthologies and multiple publications like Bidayat Journal (LB), Zweikommasieben (CH), MadaMasr (EG), Kohl Journal (LB), The Funambulist (FR), and Ibraaz (US), to name a few.

Her indisciplinary research-based work has been presented at the Stanford Research Institute (US), the Arab Image Foundation (LB), Birbeck’s School of Law at UCL (UK), Center for Documentary Arts and Research at UCSC (US), and Amnesty International (UK & DE), among others.

Khazrik has been a fellow at Home Workspace Programme (2012–13), Digital Earth (2018–19), HfK Bremen (2020), and SHAPE Platform (2021–22), and is at present a principal investigator at Research on the Arts Programme by ACSS and AFAC (2021–22), a fellow at If I Can’t Dance (2022–23), and Helmholtz Center (2022–23), and visiting faculty at the Critical Media Lab in UoB (CH), and the Live Art Forms programme at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg (DE).

From a race of bioluminescent extraterrestrial creatures with Nubian features booming in speakers.

IG: @ixa_psyborg

Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean-American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, a collection of poems, performances, and essays; and the novel On Hell. Their album Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House, a doom-metal guitar and voice performance influenced by Korean shamanist ritual, was released in January 2021, and their 2019 album The Sun and the Moon had two of its tracks played on the moon. Their work has been shown in Berlin at Gropius Bau, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Klosterruine, and Institute of Cultural Inquiry; The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Performance Space New York; Gyeongnam Art Museum in South Korea; the LA Architecture and Design Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon; and in the Transmediale, Unsound, and Rewire Festivals. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 10 languages.

IG: @bighedva

Pisitakun is from Bangkok, Thailand. He started making visual arts and music in 2014 and is interested in music in different media environments. He uses a variety of inspirations in his songs, such as historical events, synthetic sounds, and musical instruments. In 2016, the album "Black Country" began to be prepared. In this album, Pisitakun is talking about a country full of dialogues between dark voices.

As Thai history currently unfolds under martial law following the military coup d’état on 22 May 2014 – the thirteenth since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 – Pisitakun’s practice represents a decisive break from many of his Thai peers: he questions fundamental and increasingly universal values without merely decrying the fact of corruption or offering neat palliatives.

Pisitakun's works are based on political speculation and the external and internal frustrations artists are subject to.

Shaddah Tuum is the longtime collaboration of Niko de Paula Lefort and BrandonRosenbluth who have performed together at events including CTM Festival, BozarElectronic, Norberg Festival, and Ritournelle. De Paula Lefort is a musician, musicalinstrument developer, field recordist, radio transmission and installation artist as well asaudio technologist who has presented work at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Gaité Lyrique andCentro, Cultural Internacional de Panama as well as Umlaut and Emitter Micro festivals. Inaddition to Rosenbluth's lifelong musical and artistic practices, he is a music and media artcurator and artist and label manager which has yielded collaborations with CTM, Sonica,Indigo, and Urvakan festivals as well as performances at the Centre Pompidou and VeniceBiennale. Their album 'The Wheel' was released by Portals Editions in 2021, inspired by Vilem Flusser's 'The History of the Devil'.

Choasmosis a step further into Shaddah Tuum's research into new forms of rituals inexperimental music. By implementing an immersive ecosystem of hybrid acoustic, electronicand mechatronic instruments, apprehended as a frame for composition and improvisation,they aim towards the emergence of experiences that relate, synthesise and re-inventsituations of rites experienced in contexts of traditional cultures, filtered through the lense ofthe Anthropocenic, post-colonial, technocentric environment we globally inhabit today.The term ‘Chaosmos’ is borrowed from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’sseminal essay ‘TheCrystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits’. It evokes a pre-cosmologicalcondition where the bodily and spiritual dimensions of beings did not yet reciprocally eclipseeach other. In that regard, mythic discourse can bedefined as first and foremost a record ofthe process of actualisation of the present state of things drawing from it. Composition andimprovisation as approached in this project by Shaddah Tuum works in a similar way,tapping into the possibilities opened by their constructed ecosystem of instruments to createa ritualistic electroacoustic performance.Chaosmos'ecosystem comprises an array of self-built instruments made of wood, metal andstone played by hand or activated by motors including guitar, lithophone, and bullroarer inaddition to modular synthesizer and vocals performed with extended techniques as well aselectronic processing. The composed frame for improvisation, beyond the setup itself,explores modal drones and melodic structures as wellas repetitive, cyclical rhythms,stripped down to their core and with a played with micro variations and long durations-asimilar approach to many traditional musics, early American minimalism and certain genresof experimental club music.

IG: @skeptic_mystic, @lfoniko

web:https://portals-editions.bandc...,https://nikolfo.com

Zuhour is a Palestinian dj and music writer based in Berlin. Aggressively anti-genre,anti-timing and anti-blandness, she curates heavily-charged sets pumped with starkindustrial elements, chopped-up beats, distorted vocals and heavy heavy heavy bass.