JD Zazie & Karin Weissenbrunner – beeswax records, turntables
Sandra E. Blatterer – light design
27.4. 19h opening & performance
Exhibition Fr. & Sat, 28. & 29.4. 15-20h
29.4. 16h Workshop Exploring Sounds in Beeswax (scroll down for workshop info)
Free Entry / Suggested Donation for the artists (5-15€)
Errant Sound Sound Art Space
Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin
Wax & Wane explores the sculptural and sonic link between local culture and urban nature by using custom-made records from regional beeswax. Karin Weissenbrunner and JD Zazie’s duo project unites the honeybees’ ›voices‹ as equal co-creators with their own wax, while recycling recordings of Berlin’s sound archives through the wax material. The key focus is to fully embrace the organic material with varying qualities in color, smell, or consistency specific to its origin environment – and to render these material features into a sonic experience.
For these unique records, the sound artists collaborated mainly with city beekeepers from the Mellifera society, who keep honeybees ‘organically’ on rooftops or in gardens and cemeteries, and Berlin related sound archives, such as the Lautarchiv der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Tierstimmenarchiv of Museum für Naturkunde and radio aporee. The project aims to situate turntable practices in the current context of environmental concerns and, in particular, to draw attention to the decline of insect populations – one of the less noticeable consequences of human intervention in natural systems.
Valeria Merlini (aka JD Zazie) and Karin Weissenbrunner are both based in Berlin. Avant-garde turntablist, experimental DJ, sound artist and curator Valeria Merlini completed the Master Sound Studies at the UdK Berlin after graduating in architecture in Florence. In her compositions she focuses on experimental electronic music, constantly expanding the conventions of turntablism, musique concrète, free improvisation and composed music. She is co-founder of Studio Urban Resonance, member of the label Burb Enterprise and of Reanimation Orchestra, and the artistic director of the festival »MuseRuole – Women in Experimental Music in Bolzano«.
Karin Weissenbrunner has a doctorate in music from City, University of London. She follows her interests in sound art, broken media, DIY, materiality, post-human concepts and unusual instruments as a curator of concert series and festivals. She is also active as an experimental turntablist in the duo Sage Thrashers with Stefanie Loveday that explores the conjunctions of synthesized and concrete sounds of otherness and propels them into spheres of mimetic transformations constructing soundscapes until the dissolution into noise.
Workshop
Saturday, 29.4.23, 16:00
Workshop: Exploring Sounds in Beeswax
Access to the workshop is limited to 10 – 12 participants
free entry // suggested donation for the artists 6 €
Experiment with beeswax and be part of making a beeswax record – either as a negative imprint of an existing record or with a ‘toy record cutter’. The workshop will provide you with practical information on this process while exploring new sonorities in giving voice to the material itself. We will put into question the common material for records – polyvinyl chloride, short PVC –, and share our sonic ideas that let us move towards malleable materials. In comparison to non-degradable plastic that is mostly encountered as an already »formed substance«, wax can be sculpted, molded and recycled. The grooves in this unstable material are extremely transitory which, in fact, makes our whole endavour about decomposition. Another focus in this workshop will be on the honey bees within their urban surrounding that contributes to the wax’s unique olfactory, optical and tactile qualities.
Participants will not need to bring anything, we will provide materials for making 1 beeswax record and 1 record with the record cutter. The workshop will be 2-3 hours (tbc) long.
Please sign up here: beetsandhums [at] gmail.com
Gefördert durch die initiative neue musik berlin e.V. und die Akademie der Künste aus Mitteln der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien im Rahmen des Programms NEUSTART KULTUR. Mit freundlicher Unterstützung von Errant Sound.
