Opening: Liquid Room

The nomadology of movement becomes the natural order of thought. Nigel Thrift

“Liquid Room” is a special concert format that Belgian ensemble Ictus developed and now presents in its six edition: a format that shakes up concert conventions and starts up a kind of live streaming of music. Over time a handpicked repertoire mostly of chamber music gradually unfolds. The instrumental music and its performative quality, interdisciplinary ventures across the boundaries between acoustic and electronic forms, the fusion of sound and light, audio and video are equally important and come together to create a precisely planned composition in both time and space, enabling the visitors to move around freely within it.

The concert hall’s “fourth wall” gives way to four stages, with the energies unleashed by sounds and bodies newly reconfiguring and freely unfolding between them. A setting that enables self-determined listening and various listening positions: from the meditative immersion into sound landscapes or the analytical listening of a composition, a stroller incidentally listening while passing by yet maintaining a certain distance to the events on the stage, to being completely absorbed in the virtuosity and presence of the musicians and a self-selected pause.

“Liquid Room” refers to: the liquefied space, a concert as a complete experience between installation and performance, a hybrid that seems to correspond more to the nomadic and hectic pace of life and its logic of permanent change than sitting still in the darkened container space of a concert hall.

The Berlin edition of “Liquid Room” expands this approach for the first time towards a collaboration of two leading ensembles for contemporary music: invited by the festival, Ictus and Ensemble Mosaik have put together this highly energetic evening along with special guests such as Eva Reiter, Cédric Dambrain and Bruce McClure.

Music by Peter Ablinger, Michael Beil, Pierluigi Billone, Marko Ciciliani, Cédric Dambrain, Kaj Duncan David, Manon de Boer & George van Dam, Jürg Frey, Bernhard Gander, Michael Gordon, Clara Iannotta, Alvin Lucier, Bruce McClure, Enno Poppe, Éliane Radigue, Eva Reiter, François Sarhan and others

Ictus Ensemble
ensemble mosaik

Cédric Dambrain electronics
Eva Reiter viola da gamba, voice
Bruce McClure modified projector performance
Alex Fostier direction, sound direction
Daniel Plewe sound direction
Caspar Langhoff lighting design