X100 is a new one-off festival that celebrates and contextualises the legacy of Iannis Xenakis (1922 – 1997). Xenakis’ pioneering work initialised techniques and directions that continue to inspire a variety of disciplines from architecture and drawing to music theory and light design. But a hundred years after he was born, the continuing presence of this great composer is felt most strongly in the thriving and overlapping tradition(s) of experimental electronic music – the world in which Berlin Atonal operates. The sonic world of Xenakis, this once musical outsider, used formidable musical techniques such as arborescences, stochastic synthesis, and proto-granular synthesis in service of high-impact musical events, sensorial immersion, spectacle and noise. Contextualised here amongst diverse practices and trends within contemporary electronic music, the music of this prolific utopianist continues to not only challenge modes of temporal existence, but of how music can be imagined and shared.
X100 will be accompanied by three discourse events. As part of the ancillary programming, Sergio Luque will trace the aesthetic and historical origins of stochastic synthesis: a microsound synthesis technique that uses stochastic processes to create and vary waveforms. Ahead of Pan Daijing’s performance, Loop curator Craig Schuftan will discuss how she explores music and architectural space to encourage active listening and create emotional experiences in a session made possible by Ableton. The HAI Trio (Alberto De Campo, Hannes Hoelzl & Isak Han) will examine how the NonTrivial Musical Instrument (NTMI) embodies the idea of making complex worlds of sound playable by intuition and how this relates to Xenakis’ UPIC system.
X100 is organised by OUTER (the team behind Berlin Atonal) and curated together with Studio LABOUR, with the support of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.