Shaddah Tuum is the longtime collaboration of Niko de Paula Lefort and Brandon Rosenbluth who have performed together at events including CTM Festival, Bozar Electronic, Norberg Festival, and Ritournelle. De Paula Lefort is a musician, musical instrument developer, field recordist, radio transmission and installation artist as well as audio technologist who has presented work at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Gaité Lyrique and Centro, Cultural Internacional de Panama as well as Umlaut and Emitter Micro festivals. In addition to Rosenbluth’s lifelong musical and artistic practices, he is a music and media art curator, artist and label manager.
Choasmos is a step further into Shaddah Tuum’s research into new forms of rituals in experimental club music. By implementing an immersive ecosystem of hybrid acoustic, electronic and mechatronic instruments, apprehended as a frame for composition and improvisation, they aim towards the emergence of experiences that relate, synthesise and re-invent situations of rites experienced in contexts of traditional cultures, filtered through the lense of the Anthropocenic, post-colonial, technocentric environment we globally inhabit today.
The term ‘Chaosmos’ is borrowed from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s seminal essay ‘The Crystal Forest: Notes on the Ontology of Amazonian Spirits’. It evokes a pre-cosmological condition where the bodily and spiritual dimensions of beings did not yet reciprocally eclipse each other. In that regard, mythic discourse can be defined as first and foremost a record of the process of actualisation of the present state of things drawing from it. Composition and improvisation 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 create a ritualistic electroacoustic performance.
Chaosmos’ ecosystem comprises an array of self-built instruments made of wood, metal and stone played by hand or activated by motors including guitar, lithophone, and bullroarer in addition to modular synthesizer, computer, and vocals performed with extended techniques as well as electronic processing. This is supplemented by machine learning generated texts drawing from selected literary/theory sources for sung and spoken word. The composed frame for improvisation, beyond the setup itself, explores modal drones and melodic structures as well as repetitive, cyclical rhythms, stripped down to their core and with a played with micro variations and long durations – a similar approach to many traditional musics, early American minimalism and certain genres of experimental club music.
Shaddah Tuum presents Chaosmos (world premiere)
23.9.2022 | Doors 19:00 | Starts 20:00 CET
Morphine Raum | Köpenicker Strasse 147 | 10997 Berlin
