Bára Gísladóttir »Silva« & Robert Piotrowicz

Presented in collaboration with Deutsche Oper, Icelandic composer Bára Gísladóttir performs her work »Silva«, a downward-growing forest of bass and shadow. Gísladóttir has built an international reputation for compositions that treat sound as a living organism. Shifting fluidly between orchestral composition and interdisciplinary production, her work draws equally from contemporary classical rigor and the physical thrust of experimental music: heavy metal, noise, drone, techno and electronica are folded into her meticulously-shaped process. In cooperation with the Deutsche Oper, Gísladóttir will perform a rare presentation of her work »Silva«. Built entirely from the double bass and its electronically processed extensions, the work imagines a forest rooting itself into darkness rather than reaching for light. Thick, oil-dark drones gather at its core, while higher overtones hover like pale vapor rising from subterranean heat. Each tone originates from the instrument in Gísladóttir's hands, layered and transformed into a dense, breathing mass, slow-burning tectonic movements where darkness is radiant. Co-headlining the night, Polish composer and electro-acoustic instrumentalist Robert Piotrowicz's dense and highly structured sonic architecture flutters phantasmically between intense electronic design and the uncanny emulation of eerily familiar acoustic textures lurking just out of the corners of your ears. Serving as the artistic director of the Sanatorium of Sound festival in Sokołowsko, his practice punctures complex modular frameworks with eerie synthetic weirdings that evoke the acoustic behavior of organs, bells, and microtonal chimes. Subverting traditional forms in his most recent work Wrong Filament, the ghostlike energy of regional folk histories is funneled and refined into manifold meters and melodies meeting in rhythmic repetition, reforged as frenetic forces of collective celebration.