Contact at the CTM Radio Lab 2022

The CTM Radio Lab is an initiative of Deutschlandfunk Kultur - Klangkunst and CTM Festival with the Goethe-Institut, Ö1 Kunstradio and ORF musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst and The Wire magazine. The call is addressed to artists from all over the world in the fields of experimental music, sound art, radio art, new radio play and performance. The works should deal with the annual theme of the CTM Festival and inspire a project between radio art and live concert or installation art, as well as allow for a radio version of 40-55 minutes in length.

CTM Festival 2022's theme, "Contact," explored how people can make contact with other realities beyond their own through music in a positively transformative way, whether between people with different ways of living, in different parts of the world, between generations, or with our planetary environment and the diversity of its life forms. What forms of listening are relevant and urgent in today's world, and how might we listen to one another in compassionate ways?

What is Not (O Que Não Está)
by Fronte Violeta and Marta Kiss

The proposed work takes off from the sound cosmologies, languages, voices, and vibrations of other worlds. These sounds occupy and infiltrate spaces, structures, buildings, walls, and emblematic architecture, producing dissident and underground sonorities that are invisible from dominant narratives and manifest as a sonic uprising. Through three movements – underground (the silence of what is unseen), flood (humidity and the weeping that make matter fertile), and uprising (the slow transformation of matter and the plurality of voices in a multi-species chorus), the artists investigate a cycle of various long-acting natural forces that promote structural transformation, while also pointing to contact between the human and non-human, and between inert and living matter.

In a context of end-of-the-world narratives, »What is Not (O Que Não Está)« provokes the possibility of types of contact that trigger new perceptions of listening to what is absent, and to narratives, bodies, and technologies that survive disasters. Contact is born as a friction of worlds, by composing and decomposing through difference – between what is captured and uncapturable, fixed structures in confrontation with wandering sonorities.

Awarded with the Palma Ars Acustica 2022.

Incantations
by Andrius Arutiunian with the Melos Collective

is a work for voices and a newly-made brass object. It sources Armenian spells and incantations from the city of Moks, as recorded in the 19th century through a secret language of Rushtuni. These spells are a codified attempt to conjure the supernatural, avert bad luck, and deflect misfortune through apotropaic magic. In their raw, oral, and vernacular states incantations bridge a gap between speculative futures and passing realities.

PROGRAM
CALENDAR