Room 4

Sound performances

Room 4 is a space dedicated to sound performance, experimentation and diffusion. This environment, designed by artist and designer Lucas Uhlmann, offers a setting for a profound hearing experience. In the enfilade of a bar, where the audience meets leaning on the counter, a hallway leads to a room with curved padded lines in which stools are scattered, ready to welcome listeners. The notion of time is very quickly altered and gradually adjusts to the rhythm of the sounds filling the space. Everything here points to exceptional moments. The performers stand on the same level as the audience and offer them an intimate, sometimes gentle, sometimes brutal one-on-one experience; moments of communion of which only the rumour of a place that would have existed will remain. About twenty performances, developing over eight events between 22 November and 14 December, will make up the contrasting programme of Room 4.

FRI 22 NOV    Doors 19:00

Laurent Güdel focuses his work on listening policy issues and an auditory approach to the social body and institutions. He takes up these challenges to create work that takes many forms. With the piece The Missing Computer at the Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, he is interested in the evolution of electroacoustic music studios founded around the world in the post-war period. These studios were places of futuristic utopias held by engineers, electricians, researchers, musicians and artists who had the responsibility to invent a new sound world with public money.

REA uses her voice as a sound material, which she transforms and alienates from her own body by passing it through analog electronic devices. Through missing pulsations, she emancipates herself from ready-made rhythmic constructions and takes us on a cinematic journey between a dark and dystopic electronica and a dreamy and hopeful poetry.

Svetlana Maraš works at the crossroads of experimental music, sound art and new media. She explores musicality in all its forms to test its elasticity and constantly renew its approach. Through dense and changing textures, granular and pointillist structures, Svetlana Maraš’s music calls for a full involvement of the mind and body to appreciate its subtleties.

SAT 23 NOV    Doors 19:00

Radial + Sudden Infant is a collaboration formed for this purpose. The precise and reduced language of Radial’s performances (Mio Chareteau and Alexandre Babel), located at the edge of sound and movement, meets the sweet madness of the primitive impulses of the industrial punk dada group Sudden Infant (Joke Lanz, Christian Weber, Alexandre Babel). The body is revealed here as a place whose vibratory essence is activated by the voice and the articulation of words. The squeaky stories told by Joke Lanz collide with the words from the conference Le Corps Utopique (Michel Foucault, 1966) read by Mio Chareteau.

FRI 29 NOV    Doors 19:00

Optical Sound (www.optical-sound.com) is a hybrid and atypical, furtive and mobile structure that draws its own boundaries between experimental music and contemporary art. Since 1997, this label has been working on interdisciplinary mixing and has produced projects by musicians, artists or graphic designers, as well as a specialized journal, without distinction. Its artistic director, Pierre Beloüin, has developed a program for Room 4 that brings together artists from Optical Sound.

Cocoon is the solo project of Christophe Demarthe, co-founder and singer of the group Clair Obscur. With this project he is wondering about the presentation of music in public, and more particularly laptop music. The show We Need A Volunteer, first looks like a replica of a classical electronic music concert before it becomes – through a succession of changes – a performance, requiring the active participation of the audience.

Paradis Noir is a project of composer Jefferson Lembeye (Bernard Faucon, Emmanuel Demarcy Mota, Pierre Schoeller, Alain Guiraudie, Les Possédés). In 2015, he began a duet with the performer Olivier Le Borgne mixing electronics and poetry, inspired by Malcolm Lowry. Following the death of Olivier Le Borgne, Jefferson Lembeye finished alone the album “Cream” which appeared on Optical Sound, illustrated by Tom de Pekin. He produces a powerful and wild live performance where machines, fiction and voices collide.

BlackNox is a duo composed of Black Sifichi and Gerome Nox. Black Sifichi (Black Dog, Von Magnet…), as a master of spoken word, says his words about the evolving sound landscapes created by Gerome Nox (NOX, Eric Arnal Burtschy, Michele Murray, Claude Lévêque, Christian Rizzo) alternating between power, excess and purest minimalism, the sound material is manipulated and the powerful voice unfolds over a long telluric and intense range.

SAT 30 NOV    Doors 19:00   Before Superette

La Superette (www.superette.ch) is a Neuchâtel festival of contemporary music with an electronic focus that takes place on November 30 at La Case-à-chocs. As a prelude to the event, the Superette invites artists Extrastunden, Nlenitav and Sacha Blank to present their MODULAR IMMERSION project in the spaces of Room 4. The trio formed especially for this occasion will evolve among an armada of modular synthesizers from which they will extract an original sound experiment.

THU 05 DEC    Doors 19:00

Lionel Friedli + Gilles Furtwängler + Louis Schild have been an active trio since 2014. I create my life, I create the exact amount of my financial freedom. J’ai bien joui. is a proposal created in a spirit split between silence and unleashing. For Room 4, between Johannesburg and Neuchâtel, via internet communication technologies, the three artists will bring together their practices (voice, drums, percussion, bass and others) in an intercontinental performance that brings together energies.

Félicia Atkinson develops a multi-faceted artistic work that navigates between music, poetry and fine arts. She is interested in the elusive relationship between microcosms and macrocosms. Although many of her compositions are shaped by language, her latest album, The Flower & The Vessel, ventures into silence, absence and voicelessness in the wilderness.

SUN 08 DEC    Doors 16:00

PURPURA offers harsh noise sets with an extraordinary telluric force. Using analog electronic instruments, homemade oscillators or feedback, she immerses us in a bath of frequencies, from the lowest to the most strident, and pushes everyone’s threshold of resistance to its extreme to access what she calls “opening portals of the underworld”.

Axelle Stiefel uses her own amplified voice and language as a source material. Through ordinary gestures and words, stuttering or moments of latency, such as the intervals created by inhaling a cigarette, she activates the sensitivity of her audience and invites them to become aware of the uniqueness of the shared situation.

FRI 13 DEC    Doors 19:00

Claudia Stöckli creates installations in the form of a constantly evolving laboratory that she activates with sound performances. She explores, through polyphonic sounds, the state of the earth and tries to approach non-human beings. In the context of Room 4, she invites Nicolas Buzzi (synthesizer) to experiment new forms and collective ideas.

SAT 14 DEC    Doors 19:00

JMO (Julie Semoroz) sculpts sound using several sources such as field recording, live microphones as well as her voice through software and hardware elements. Her sound pieces are like inner journeys into the unconscious where one penetrates areas of shadows. Her work questions the relationship of the individual to mechanical and organic time in his bodily practices. She questions the post-industrial consumerist society and new technologies. In a research of ecology in the sense of “housing”, Julie Semoroz poses the question of how to inhabit our bodies and our lives in society.

David de la Cendre can proudly claim to be the creator of small sound earthquakes. Equipped with a bass guitar and a panel of pedals with the most diverse effects, he sets his audience on long gravelly beaches and gradually carries them away in a tide made of buzzing and crackling.

SOUHARCE (Emma Souharce) lives with her electric and electronic instruments that she transforms and manipulates sometimes like toys, sometimes like tools of massive decomposition. With a disconcerting freedom of movement, between lo-fi caresses and micro-machine screams, she sculpts in the sound material to extract the most subtle harmonies and dissonances. Through her landscapes with their turbulent and rugged physicality, this ritualistic alchemist works a trance resulting from a series of intense movements with benevolent resolution, with the secret ambition of reaching complete symbiotic states.

Effraction Vacances (Julie Semoroz et Emma Souharce) proposes a mutant pop ballad on field recording background. The two accomplices take as a starting point for each of their gigs a mainstream song that they brutally decompose to extract a delightful sound magma.

CAN team:

Martin Jakob, Sylvie Linder, Magali Pexa, Nicolas Raufaste, Julian Thompson, Sebastian Verdon