Preemptive Listening

Preemptive Listening is an evening of sound experiments and expanded performances revolving around Aura Satz’s feature film in the making that reimagines emergency sirens in the age of manmade and ecological disasters. Sound artists that are performing – from Sarah Davachi to Debit and Mazen Kerbaj – have all collaborated with Aura Satz in imagining new sounds of emergencies, that will be signalling new disasters in times of climate catastrophe.

Sonic Acts is proud to present a newly commissioned short film by Aura Satz, The Future Waters of the Storm Surge, made in collaboration with Amsterdam-based sound artist BJ Nilsen. Measuring nearly eight kilometres in length, the Oosterscheldekering barrier is a storm surge and a bridge that connects the Zeeland islands, and is designed to protect the Netherlands from flooding from the North Sea. In Satz’s film, BJ Nilsen reimagines sirens around Oosterscheldekering in order to ‘speak to the centrifugal chaos of storms to come’.

Following the film screening, fresh from the resounding success of her debut album The Long Count, Mexican-American producer and sound artist Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, will perform a new piece specially devised for this occasion. In her work, Debit processes samples of the flutes of ancient Mayan courts and puts them through a machine-learning program to create ambient soundscapes in which whistles appear like sirens. Lebanese trumpeter and improviser Mazen Kerbaj – also a composer of a spectacular composition Walls Will Fall (2018) for 49 trumpeters – follows with a solo performance, as he moves through the space with his trumpet creating siren-like acoustic phenomena.

The evening closes with the Canadian composer Sarah Davachi, who will present a solo electronic performance that explores the close intricacies of timbral and temporal space. As in her recorded work, including the newly-released Two Sisters, Davachi's music utilises extended durations and considered harmonic structures that emphasise gradual variations in texture, psychoacoustic phenomena, and intonation. In addition, accompanied by the contemporary, experimental music collective Nemø Ensemble, Davachi will perform an arrangement of Long Gradus, a long-form composition designed to considerably slow the movements of both listener and player, and to focus their attention to the relationships between moments.