CYCLE MUSIC AND ART FESTIVAL IN BERLIN 5 DECEMBER 2015

The inaugural Cycle Music and Art Festival was held in Kopavogur, Iceland last summer. The festival is a new platform for exploring and exhibiting the meeting point of creative worlds, producing and presenting works that reach beyond the traditional boundaries of discipline, craft and process. On 5 December Cycle travels to Berlin to exhibit three key works at the project space Import Project.

The danish composer Simon Steen-Andersen, a superstar of contemporary music, will perform his piece ‘Run Time Error’ which is an audio-visual performance which Simon Steen-Andersen performs himself, controlling a stereo sound track and double video projection with two joysticks. The video (and sound) for this double projection are pre-recorded in advance of each performance and shows the composer playing energetically on a large number of objects, while also recording the sound of his actions. As such ‘Run Time Error’ effectively turns Simon Steen-Andersen into the protagonist of a video game-like situation, in which he is also the game player. He turns into an energetic performer that embraces the entire building in which the work was created as a musical instrument.

Iceland’s most famous performance group The Icelandic Love Corporation will recreate the work ‘Ceremony Harmony’ adjusting it to German circumstances. In their performance they playfully deal with sterotypes and expectation. The performance will take place in a public space outside the gallery. The composer and performer Kaj Duncan David is an upcoming star within the experimental music scene. He will perform his piece ‘Replay’, a techno-logical music for amplified electromagnetic relay and three light bulbs. A relay is used to individually turn on and off the lights. The acoustic sound of the relay’s switches is filtered and transformed. Performed live, Relay is sound and light combined in a rhythmic, trance inducing play of echoey clicks and dancing shadows.

The event is held in collaboration with the Berlin project space Import Projects which is run by Anja Henckel and Nadim Samman. Nadim was the curator of Cycle’s exhibition in Gerdarsafn Kopavogur Museum in August 2015. The event is to mark the beginning of the official collaboration between Import Projects and the Cycle Music and Art Festival and to draw attention to the cross section of music, art and architecture.

The next Cycle Music and Art Festival will be held in October 2016 Kópavogur Iceland.

Cycle Music and Art Festival is organised in collaboration with Curated Place and is a partner of Moving Classics – European Network for New Music co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The festival is also funded by Kópavogur, the ernst von siemens foundation, the Icelandic Ministry of Education, Science and Culture and more (see Cycle homepage).