In Residence: Jane in Ether feat. Christine Abdelnour & Emilie Škrijelj

eine Koproduktion mit Wien Modern

Jane in Ether in residency feat. Christine Abdelnour & Emilie Škrijelj

To celebrate the groups fifth anniversary, Jane in Ether will develop a new installation-performance during their residency at Echoraum, as a quintet with guests Christine Abdelnour & Emilie Škrijelj. They will create a shared space and explore compositional and improvised practices in order to create new sonic experiences, explore timbral blends and intimate, tactile harmonic/non harmonic concepts. Their interest is to allow for the emergence of slowly transforming immersive sonic soundscapes over an extended period of time.

Ticketpreise: 20 € (ermäßigt <30: 50 %, Ö1) | 5 € mit Festivalpass
Ticketvorverkauf: https://www.wienmodern.at/2024-kartenverkauf-de
Restkarten an der Abendkassa | Einlass eine Stunde vor Konzertbeginn | Jahreskarteninhaber:innen des echoraum erhalten freien Eintritt.

Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic, thoroughly engaged composer-performer, violinist, interdisciplinary artist, improvisor and curator with highly individual, unconventional artistic language. Through the prism of listening, her early education in classical music and the years of development as contemporary artist-performer, she explores states of spontaneity and intuitive resonance embodied in her multifaceted activities. Her work spans a wide range of sound, vision, movement and includes concert performances of improvisation, contemporary composition and original site specific work, exhibitions, long durational/multidisciplinary performances, audiovisual works and installation formats with focus on the interconnection between inner world and sound space. Biliana works internationally as a soloist and in collaboration with many renowned artists and ensembles (the Splitter and Trickster Orchestras, Ensemble Modern, her groups Jane in Ether, Voutchkova/Thieke duo and the L a n d S t a g e s Collective among others). She is the founder and curator of the DARA String Festival, faculty at the Academy of Arts Bern/HKB Bern, SHAPE+ Platform artist for 2022/2023, recipient of the Berlin Residency Stipend at Cité des Arts / Paris ans Villa Aurora / Los Angeles, the Composition Stipend from the Berliner Senate, and multiple grants (Musikfonds, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, (INM/Berlin, the National Culture Fund/Bulgaria, the Trust for Mutual Understanding/New York etc.) She has releases on the labels Unsounds, Another Timbre, Elsewhere, Relative Pitch Records, Confront Recordings, Inexhaustible Editions and Cafe Oto’s Takuroku.
Born in the family of musicians, Biliana began playing violin at the age of 4, made her orchestra debut at the age of 9, and recorded her first CD for the Japanese label Crown Record Ltd. at the age of 16. By the age of 18, she started realising classical music wasn’t her path. In search for artistic growth, Biliana moved to Los Angeles to further study and discover music. This was followed by a period on the East Coast of the US (New York and Boston), where she engaged with contemporary/experimental music and improvisation, fulfilled her Master’s Degree, broke from standard classical convention and began to understand something of her calling. In 2008 Biliana moved to Berlin where she pursued further the development of her artistic vocabulary, incorporating the voice and performance/movement, creating a unique quality as a composer-performer. Most recently, Biliana has been drawn into the visual world as a different medium for creative input. She continuously follows her intuitive path that organically reveals itself.
“I am now mostly interested in creating new work, collaborative or solo, composed or improvised, acoustic, electro-acoustic or audio-visual, always allowing space for spontaneity and response to the current moment and place. I connect to intuition and the knowledge locked within us, searching for the circumstances which enable them to arise to the surface. Through sound and deep listening, I engage with the ephemeral, transient, dreamworld, by various kinds of verbal and non-verbal communication and connectivity between people, places and all of life, allowing the occurrence of touching and meaningful experiences.” www.bilianavoutchkova.net

Magda Mayas, born 1979, is a pianist and composer performer living in Berlin. Over the past 20 years she developed a vocabulary utilizing both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, using amplification, preparations and objects that become extensions of the instrument itself. Mayas has developed a set of techniques that draw on the history of prepared and inside piano vocabulary, but are highly individualized and expand the language for internal piano music making.
She holds a PhD in Music Performance and Interpretation from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2019 she is a professor at Luzern University of applied Sciences and Arts teaching improvisation.
Mayas performs internationally solo and in collaboration with a large number of musicians and composers. Current projects are Spill a duo with drummer Tony Buck, a duo with Christine Abdelnour (sax), Great Waitress, with Monika Brooks (acc) and Laura Altman (clarinet) and Jane in Ether with Biliana Voutchkova (vl) und Miako Klein (recorders). She has performed and toured in Europe, the USA, Australia, Mexico and Lebanon and collaborated with many leading figures in improvisation and composers such as Marilyn Mazur, John Butcher, George Lewis, Andy Moor, Nate Wooley, Peter Evans, Eddie Prévost, Phill Niblock, David Sylvian, Zeena Parkins, Fred Frith, Hamid Drake, Joelle Leandre, Paul Lovens, Ikue Mori, Ken Vandermark, Okkyung Lee, Nic Collins, Elliot Sharp and Maja Ratkje.
Festivals and exhibitions include Maerz Musik (2012,2015), Documenta (2012), the Berlin Biennale (2014) or Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (2015). She was awarded a residency at Villa Aurora, Los Angeles in 2016 and at the Montalvo Arts Centre, USA in 2017 and 2019 and co curated the festival “Music Unlimited” in Wels, Austria, in 2019. She has been producing radio pieces for ABC Australia and Deutschlandradio Kultur and released over 40 CDS to date. https://www.magdamayas.com/

Miako Klein is a Berlin-based recorder player and violinist and is dedicated to new, early and improvised music. She has made guest appearances with Ensemble Modern, ICE International Contemporary Ensemble, Il Pomo d’Oro and Quartet New Generation and has worked as a musician and performer in the dance company „Dorky Park“. She plays regularly with trumpeter Sava Stoianov, with WARBLE (duo with trumpeter Brad Henkel), with JANE IN ETHER (with Biliana Voutchkova and Magda Mayas) and in various chamber music formations for early music, new music and improvisation. In 2010/2011 she was a musician with Cirque du Soleil in the show „ZAiA“. Miako Klein has been a guest at the Ultraschall Festival Berlin, Heroines of Sound Festival, MATA Festival NYC, Early Music Festival Barcelona, Suite-Muziekweek Amsterdam, Musica Strasbourg, Festival Aix-en-Provence and Klangwerktage Hamburg. Recordings of her performances have been broadcast on HR, DLF, WDR3, arte and Concertzender. In 2014 she was Artist in Residency at the Kunstmeile Krems, and in 2015 a fellow of the artist residency Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since 2023 she has been the artistic director of her concert series Sonus feminæ in Berlin. As the daughter of a pianist, she was already musically trained as a young child. She studied recorder and violin/baroque violin at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam and at the UdK Berlin.
www.miakoklein.com

Born in 1978, Christine Abdelnour lives in France but is of Lebanese origin.  After discovering improvised music in 1997 she began a process of self-taught study and sound experimentation using the alto saxophone. In a few years, she has developed a very unique language, open to micro-tonality and contemporary techniques. Far from any narrative effects, her playing is close to electronic music. She approaches sound as a malleable material, rich in concrete textures which combines breath, silence and immersive sounds. Playing with the effects of compression and expansion of sound, she likes to brush against the limits of sound in a quest for electrical pressure, saturation, acoustic distortions or feedback.
In concert, thanks to a very focus listening, Christine Abdelnour engages herself instinctively and with an immediate availability in order to generate an intimate but shared space. The inside and the outside merges together to reveal an altered reality through sounds and its displacements. The result is a music of great intensity which questions the concept of form, rhythm, texture, balance, harmony or energy. Her work evolves with musicians such as Andy Moor, Magda Mayas, Chris Corsano, Eric Chenaux, Pascal Battus, Andrea Neumann, Joachim Nordwall, David Stackenas, Sven-Ake Johannson and many others. Christine has published more than fifteen CDs and has collaborated with different artists from the visual arts, dance, theater and poetry. Since a few years, through private or collective masterclasses, Christine Abdelnour shares her knowledge and findings from technicalities of specific sound production to methods for applying this palette of sounds in a musical context. For more than twenty years, Christine Abdelnour has performed in concert in different venues and festivals in France and internationally: Les Instants Chavirés, Sonic Protest Festival, la Muse En Circuit, GMEA, Willisau Festival (CH), Reina Sofia Museum (Madrid), Irtijal (Lebanon), Skanu Mezs (Latvia), Ruhrtriennale (Essen), Angelica Festival (Italy), Ultima Festival (Norway), Ideal Festival (Sweden), Sound Desobediance (Slovenia), Unlimited festival (Austria), A l’Arme Festival (Berlin), Interpretation Festival (Prague), Soundout Festival (Australia), Hit Parade Festival (Canada), Seattle Improvised Festival (USA) etc. https://christineabdelnoursehnaoui.jimdofree.com/