Unsafe+Sounds Festival Showcase
feat. মm. , Alpha Tracks, Inou Ki Endo, S.verin
Seit einer Dekade präsentiert das Unsafe+Sounds Festival zukunftsweisende Positionen einer Gegenwartskultur, die sich gegen das Diktat einer vermeintlichen Mehrheit stemmt. Das in Wien stattfindende Festival für avancierte elektronische Musik, experimentelle Klänge, progressiven Clubsound und aktuellem Diskurs steht für klangliche Herausforderung und Kompromisslosigkeit, ist aber auch eine Einladung, gemeinsam Brücken zu bauen. Es nimmt künstlerische Positionen ins Visier, die auf Konfrontationskurs mit den grassierenden Herausforderungen unserer Zeit gehen. Mit einem Diskursprogramm, dessen Fokus auf sozio-kulturellen Themen und der verhältnismäßig jungen Disziplin der Sound Studies liegt, rückt es zudem den Zusammenhang gesellschaftlicher Trends und zeitgenössischer Ästhetik in den Fokus. Im Jahr 2024 feiert Unsafe+Sounds seine 10. Ausgabe.
Unter dem diesjährigen Festivalthema „Of Many Worlds“ werden knapp 80 Künstler:innen und Speaker:innen in 7 unterschiedlichen Locations der Stadt zu erleben sein.
মm. (read: mwo, just like the bangla alphabet) is a DJ, curator and community organizer based in Dhaka & Vienna. They curate and perform DJ sets along historic and socio-cultural movements of sounds and music and, when possible, they try to evoke the listener’s nostalgia. Their sets are percussion-driven, featuring genres, styles and rhythms from/of the global South with intentions to trace collaborative music histories across the larger region. Their sets are heavily inspired by diasporic movements, memories, and hybridities, and can feature genres ranging from popular bollywood and bangla music, batida, dancehall, baile funk and afrobeats to hip-hop, gqom, vogue cuts, kuduro, soca, jungle, hard percussions and techno, really depending on the mood and space. The style of music they play, they like to call it “south-on-south”, and they try to embed it in movements of club & dance influences from all over the world.
Felix Benedikt, alias Alpha Tracks, is a producer based in Vienna, Austria. At the beginning of the millennium, he received his basic musical education under the wings of Erdem Tunakan at Cheap Records and started DJing. From 2012 till 2018 Benedikt worked at TONGUES, a Viennese record store with an in-house studio, where 2016 the project Alpha Tracks was born. The first release on Erdem Tunakan’s reactivated label Morbid has had a strong international resonance. The music of Alpha Tracks is mainly produced live on analog machines, often with different guest musicians, focussing less on technical fetishism than on live dynamics of studio collaborations. The result is a sound that refers to the rave era of the early nineties. Alpha Tracks blithely ignores tempo limits or taste doctrines. Aesthetic taboos or even fragments of often maligned genres, are not picked up as a retro fetish but are folded into the contemporary oeuvre with playful Viennese charm. Felix recently teamed up with Filip Storvseen (also known under the alias Oprofessionell and as one of the founders of the Norwegian label UTE ) for a new musical project called KINETA.
Inou Ki Endo’s preference lies in infernal and cerebral sounds, obscure dilettantes and professional borderliners beyond the musical mainstream. Shilla Strelka hosts concerts in Vienna under the name Struma+Iodine, curates the Unsafe+Sounds Festival, is part of the Elevate Festival team of curators and active as a music journalist for various magazines. As Inou Ki Endo, she is filtering communal sounds and rhythms from the past and the present, drawing from techno, hybrid club, industrial, ambient and noise from around the globe.
S.verin ist ein in Wien ansässiger DJ und Mitglied von Funkroom, einem DJ- und Party-Kollektiv, das sich auf Electro und Leftfield-Genres spezialisiert hat. S.verin begann vor fast zwei Jahrzehnten damit Vinyl aufzulegen – dementsprechend makellos sind seine Sets. Seine elaborierte Selection ist geprägt von breaky Grooves und deepen Basslines, unterkühlten Vocals und catchy Melodien.
Fotos © Inou Ki Endo / Billo Bikes / Christiano Terkidalis / Light, Meha & Marlo
