IN/OUT Festival connects experimental music scenes in disparate locations

IN/OUT Online Advanced Music Festival is a collaboration and exchange between experimental music scenes in disparate locations. The first edition of IN/OUT was initiated as a response to the pandemic in the context of COINCIDENCIA – Swiss & South American Culture Exchanges to stimulate collaboration between experimental music scenes in South American. For this second edition supported by the Pro Helvetia liaison offices in South America and Johannesburg, IN/OUT connects three major music festivals from the very different geographies of South America, East Africa and central Europe: Novas Frequências [Rio de Janeiro, Brazil], Nyege Nyege [Kampala, Uganda], and Sonic Matter [Zurich, Switzerland] – together with 23 artists from these regions – to investigate new pathways for sonic exchange and forms of collaboration in times of COVID.

The IN/OUT Festival takes place on the Internet during a period of social isolation. A way to stay connected while being apart, the festival is a unique cross-platform event, disseminating online concerts, video art, DJ sessions, immersive audio-visual performances and hybrid proposals bridging music and other art forms on 3-4 July 2021 on the festival’s own channels.

Nyege Nyege

Nyege Nyege formed as a club night in Kampala with the aim to create a space where homegrown, East African DJs, musicians and artists could take risks playing a wide range of sounds in a safe and supportive environment; a place where like-minded people could hang out and enjoy music, share ideas and become friends. The motivations behind the night, and the emergence of a community around it, form the basis for every subsequent project, including a music festival, a professional community recording studio and residency space and two record labels all integrated into a holistic incubation platform to support the underground music community. Using their collective expertise to produce, programme and curate, Nyege Nyege is focused on exploring new, boundary-pushing ways to platform and champion an emerging generation of creatives.

For their IN/OUT programme, Nyege Nyege opted to invite DJs and music producers  Badsista, DJ Cris Fontedofunk and DJ Jessé Martins and visual artist Caipora de Cativeiro from Brazil as well as Swiss yodeller HéloHeïdi for an immersive residency and open space for free collaboration at their studios and headquarters in Kampala. Over a month-long period before the festival, the visiting artists connected, exchanged and created new material with local artists Turkana, MC Yallah, Rey Sapienz, Kabochi, Ocen, Kato, Chrisman, Titi, Aunty Razor and Ecko Bazz. Three projects have emerged from the residency that will be showcased during IN/OUT: BADSISTA and Caipora de Cativeiro presents, Swiss ancestral culture preservation program and Hybrid Futures.

Hybrid Futures

Swiss ancestral culture preservation program

BADSISTA and Caipora de Cativeiro presents

Novas Frequências

Novas Frequências Festival is South America’s main international event on experimental music and sound explorations. Taking place every first week of December in Rio de Janeiro, the programme happens in different city places and presents activities that range from concerts, sound performances, installations, sound walks, club nights, commissioned and site specific projects, talks and workshops. Born in 2011, Novas Frequências is always in search of artists that break pre-established frontiers looking for new sound languages.

Working under the conceptual guideline “Where to now”, Novas Frequências presents two projects for IN/OUT that seek to answer this question; perhaps the most relevant humanity inquiry at such a dark and uncertain time as ours. Titled Roam, the first proposal bridges a series of new songs made jointly by the Brazilian/British supergroup Deafbrick (with members of the bands Deafkids and Petbrick), Duma (Kenya) and Simon Grab (Switzerland) to the vision of a meta-labyrinth made by Brazilian organization Genesys. Shaped as a first-person 3D game, the maze is composed of a series of labyrinths built from references coming from art, pop-culture, literature and history, creating a metaphor, among many, of these strange and disoriented times we are going through. The second project, Filaments of a Circle, is an experimental storytelling created by Argentinian Sol Rezza and Peruvian Analucía Roeder that has as its central axis the idea of the Alice in Wonderland syndrome, a rare neurological disorder characterized by distortions of visual perception, the body image, and the experience of time. This multilingual storytelling (English, Spanish, Portuguese, German) is divided into 4 different spatial sound stories of 5 minutes each.

Roam

Filaments of a Circle

Sonic Matter

The new Zurich-based platform SONIC MATTER is an invitation to go on a common journey of discovery, exploration and creation in the field of experimental music. This platform comprises a festival in Zurich that takes place in December 2021 and an online forum that is active through the year.  SONIC MATTER aims to offer a space for urgent contemporary issues that can be negotiated jointly by artists and audiences over long periods of time. Sound is at the heart of SONIC MATTER; a constant companion, shaping our environment in ways that can be either striking or enigmatic, and which contains within it a multi-layered content: from the critical to the sensual, the unifying to the energetic, the contemplative to the danceable.

For IN/OUT, SONIC MATTER brings together six unique artistic voices, opening up spaces of thematic resonance around themes of collaborative processes, communication, interferences and coincidences, resistance, continuity and endurance. At a time when knowledge of new voices and direct artistic exchange are massively limited by travel and contact restrictions, Swiss horn player Samuel Stoll has developed a Virtual ping-pong that looks to find new ways of thinking to enrich the exchange of experiences between artists. With Congolese rapper and producer Rey Sapienz and Swiss visual artist Julia Maria Morf, the project proposes a system of online call-and-response co-creation. The second project, Where do we go from here?, sees Swiss duo reConvert (Lorenzo Colombo & Roberto Maqueda) pair with artists Milena Pafundi (Argentina) and Efe Ce Ele (Colombia) to re-energise the often passive online listener experience and create an interactive dimension where the participant is not passive, but a fundamental piece for the existence of the artistic product.

Virtual Ping-pong

Where do we go from here?