Archipelago 2020

For a fourth consecutive year, the concert series Archipelago invites the audience to delve into the complex nature of the contemporary world through listening and explores the relationship between experimental music and popular culture by way of sounds from different narratives and geographies. The present edition continues to conduct research into that popular repertory as a form transmitting knowledge, questioning the globalising principles associated with notions such as experimentation and avant-garde.

Mix, transmission and mutation are terms which, musically, can have a positive meaning, and are aspects this concert series has always embraced. Yet today these words have become imbued with a negative connotation, reflecting the shift towards the hermeticism of nation states and their borders: How will contemporary music genres be affected? What about the different sound communities scattered around the world? To what degree will it impact the practices of an entire generation of musicians? And the live music experience? How will local aspects be re-signified in this new setting? How will networks be re-built in a world where the freedom of movement and contact of bodies are limited?   

In dealing with these enquiries, the latest edition of Archipelago assumes a novel format: all acts will take place outdoors in the Sabatini Building Garden via a quadrophonic arrangement of sound, placing the stress on the physicality of sound and offering DJ-led listening sessions, whilst drawing inspiration from the experience of diaspora. Concerts which look to reinvent popular culture and speculate on what is in store and on constructing in a particularly unpredictable future.       

Programme

Friday, 18 September – from 7pm to 9pm

Doors open at 6:30pm

  7pm - Cher-ee-lee

Cher-ee-lee is the moniker Jerilyn Gonçalves uses for her sessions and podcasts, some of which have featured on digital platforms such as Radio Relativa and KRAAK. Of note is her radio show Música para Camaleones (Music for Chameleons), in which she traces the plurality of directions taken by Venezuela’s sound heritage, within and beyond its borders, with the project leading Gonçalves to study her country’s music with the aim of, as she puts it, “building a home away from home”. Cher-ee-lee is a native from Caracas who had to move to Madrid, integrating into the community of Venezuelan expatriates settled in Spain, the largest in Europe. For Archipelago she leads a session around the captivating musical syncretism of Venezuela and its subsequent influence on manifestations of contemporary experimentation. In short, an invitation to discover an uncommon narrative on Venezuela’s fertile culture and history.

  8pm - Jessica Ekomane

Rhythm, tone, time and space are probably the four variables that define the compositions of this French artist, residing in Berlin, who is a great admirer of Györgi Ligeti and Maryanne Amacher. In Archipelago, she performs a concert which, through the use of a quadrophonic system and the immersive nature of her sonic landscapes, seeks to trigger a cathartic effect among the audience as she employs her experience of making installations in which psychoacoustics are at the core. Ekomane’s pieces, moreover, depart from an investigation into the relationships between individual perception and collective dynamics, between listening and its social determinants. Multivocal (2019), her debut album, aptly demonstrates her rigorous aesthetics and working methodology — seemingly static, but ever-changing, to the point of inducing a kind of trance in the listener.

Saturday, 19 September – from 1pm to 2pm

Doors open at 12:30pm

  1pm - Lucrecia Dalt

In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.    

Saturday, 19 September – from 6pm to 9pm

Doors open at 5:30pm

  6pm - Jokkoo (Baba Sy & Mbodj)

The Jokkoo collective came into being in Barcelona in 2017 to disseminate music and sound narratives from the African continent and its diasporas. Despite a markedly electronic identity, their sounds did not find a place on the dance floors of the Catalan city. Thus, Baba Sy and Mbodj (Maguette Dieng) — joined by Opoku, Mookie and B4mba over the past year — decided to bring this musical ebullience to the fore at parties, events and a programme on the radio station Dublab, with reference points most notably including genres which, with a cosmic and futurist spirit, seek to transform the analysis of the past and foreground the present. This guided listening session focuses on the inheritance and echoes of the black Atlantic, a sound journey that is also an account of certain histories that closely run through this duo.      

  7pm - Tarta Relena

Tarta Relena is a Catalan duo, made up of Marta Torrella (contralto) and Helena Ros (soprano), that explores, a cappella, the sonorities of different oral tradition music and singer-songwriters related to the Mediterranean. Both came into contact with polyphony via choral music, leading them to explore renaissance and baroque repertoires, in addition to their background in musicology (Marta) and linguistics (Helena), which goes some way towards explaining their performances of ancient Sephardic, Greek, Corsican and Menorcan songs. Whilst respecting tradition, their aim is not to perpetuate it and both are quick to avoid any glimmer of purism — thus, they accept with humour the tag “progressive Gregorian” in defining their music. For Archipelago they put forward a concert that reflects the achievements of their outstanding debut, Ora pro nobis (2019), and more recently Intercede pro nobis (2020), a work which welcomes the introduction of subtle electronic arrangements.    

  8pm - Lucrecia Dalt

In recent years, this Berlin-based Colombian artist has developed a prolific career at the intersection of electroacoustic music, vocal experimentation and installation. Dalt’s work perpetually draws from myriad musical, literary and artistic references, moving between territories as far-reaching as science fiction, geology and animism. In this vein, it is worth highlighting the installation made in 2019, with Maria Thereza Alves, in the German capital’s botanical garden during the CTM festival, in which both gave a voice to tropical plants renamed under Western classifications. Her appearance at the festival also served to present No Era Sólida (2020) in a quadrophonic format, a record which delves into the strands already opened in Anticlines (2018). This latest work unfolds through Lia, a kind of projection of the artist that materialises vocally in an act which draws parallels with Interface, a poem by Chicana poet Gloria Anzaldúa in which she narrates her affaire with an extraterrestrial being; a queer and mestizo text, from which the title of the album originates.     

With the sponsorship of: