The concert within the framework of the NEXT 2024 festival of experimental music and sound art.
November 27, 2024, Wednesday
Concert Studio of the Slovak Radio, 19:00
Garazi Navas
The Basque accordionist and recent graduate of the Musikene Academy is an unusual phenomenon in the contemporary music scene. Despite her young age, she has participated in numerous projects (such as performing with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra) and has received various awards. Garazi Navas regularly collaborates with artists from different fields on projects involving dance, poetry, theater, and artistic installations, both individually and with various groups. She explores the close relationship between contemporary experimental scenes and traditional music while significantly enriching the sound possibilities of her instrument. In her current solo project, she will present pieces composed together with Miguel A. García.
Robert Henke: CBM 8032 A/V
CBM 8032 A/V is a journey into the beauty of abstract graphics and sound, created with five iconic personal computers from the 1980s. The work explores the ambivalence between contemporary aesthetics and the use of outdated technology. When artists began exploring computers as a medium in the 1950s, the limits of technology forced a minimalist creative approach. Half a century later, the view of the green screen of a cathode-ray display—once a symbol of an exciting future—becomes a source of nostalgia but also innovation.
The immersive audiovisual performance CBM 8032 A/V uses five Commodore CBM 8032 computers. Each is equipped with an 8-bit processor running at 1 MHz and a total memory of 32 KB (today’s smartphones and laptops are thousands of times more powerful). These machines were never intended for creating audiovisual art, so the results appear slow, rough, geometric, with low resolution, and exclusively in monochrome green. Despite, or perhaps because of this, they emit a unique rhythm and visual appeal. The sound spectrum includes digital noise, deep coarse sine waves, occasional clicks, and glitch percussion—all metrically adjusted and interwoven with silent or even completely mute moments, further processed and enhanced with 1980s studio electronics.
Robert Henke is an artist and tool creator. For him, code and hardware are sources of inspiration and necessity. Henke’s works span a wide spectrum—from musical compositions and concerts to large-scale audiovisual installations. In creating them, he often relies on technology that requires him to invent and construct his own tools and program his own algorithms.
His music draws inspiration from the raw, repetitive energy of techno as well as the sophisticated structures and textures of more abstract contemporary works. Henke’s visual works are rooted in the legacy of minimalist art and early computer graphics pioneers. He is also one of the main creators of the Ableton Live software. His installations, performances, and concerts have been featured in prestigious galleries such as Tate Modern in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and MoMA PS1 in New York. The CBM 8032 A/V project won the Best Production Award at the 67th International Contemporary Music Festival, La Biennale di Venezia, in 2023.
Admission:
Pre-sale: €25 / Discounted: €20
At the door: €35