Kontraklang w/ Sarah Davachi, Marta Zapparoli + Billy Roisz at Emmaus-Kirche / Sunday, 17.10.2021

As a composer and performer of both acoustic and electronic music, Sarah Davachi’s work is concerned with the close intricacies of intimate aural space, utilizing extended durations and simple harmonic structures that emphasize subtle variations in texture, overtone complexity, psychoacoustic phenomena, and temperament and intonation. Similarly informed by minimalist tenets of the 1960s and 1970s, baroque leanings toward slow-moving chordal suspensions, and experimental production practices of the recording studio environment, in her sound is manifest an experience that lessens apprehension of consonance and dissonance in likeness of the familiar and the distant.

At KONTRAKLANG, Davachi will present a mixed program of improvisations and pieces for the organ at Emmaus-Kirche, including tracks from her 2021 album Antiphonals, which was described as »listening to a half-speed progressive rock album except it’s just the keyboard parts.«

Marta Zapparoli and Billy Roisz are icons of the experimental music scene who have both expanded their musical practice with a unique, genre-bending approach. Zapparoli has been working for some time with repurposed and homemade antennas, with which she scans the environment for sonic emissions that normally go unheard. Thus, radio signals, mysterious frequency bands, and seemingly aimless pulsars become the material of her music. Roisz works musically-visually with the media of video and sound.

The aesthetics of image and sound interference is one of her central fields of experimentation. In the audio-visual performance Electromigration of Echoes, Marta Zapparoli and Billy Roisz bring their working approaches together and focus on the signals of the body. Using a modified medical ultrasound device, they dive live into the body’s interior and make the sounds of movement of bodily fluids and organs audible.