Shaddah Tuum

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