Mikrozvuk #66: Pablo Diserens, Stefan Maier

On November 20th, LOM space will host the 66th edition of Mikrozvuk, featuring performances by Pablo Diserens and Stefan Maier.

What happens if we shift our perspective and sense of scale to embody that of a glacier? With this question in mind and following their recent album “ebbing ice lines”, Pablo Diserens invites listeners into the sonic intimacy of glaciers and the Low Arctic environments, animals, and technologies that surround them. Performing spatially on a multiple-speaker set up, Diserens proposes to journey downstream, from the astonishing expressivity of glacial bodies, via the droning machineries of local scientists and industries, to the tumultuous birds and drift ice of the polar coastlines. Together, these sounds form an acoustic portrait of the Low Arctic and its vulnerability.

Pablo Diserens (they/them) is a field recordist, artist, and the co-founder and curator of the publishing house forms of minutiae. Pablo is devoted to listening practices, non-human realities, and possible forms of interspecies coexistence. In practice, Diserens plays with a wide array of microphones to listen to the minute, often little-known and inaudible, sounds of animals, geologies, and technologies. Rooted in ecological engagement and site-specificity, their work emphasizes listening as a political practice that centers presence and permeation for a radical planetary interrelation.

Imaginary Magnitude explores digital synthesis as a technology for speculative worlding. Empty, originless sounds sketch crude alternate models of reality: a cartoonish synthetic bouncing ball obeys the physics of another world; natural phenomena unfold under unknown atmospheric conditions; an uncanny speech-organ—evolved along some divergent evolutionary pathway—jabbers on in comedic abjection. In imaginary magnitude, synthetic sound becomes both aesthetic vehicle and organon for these speculative realities, reconfiguring perceptual frameworks and estranging us from habituated modes of listening.

Stefan Maier is an artist and composer from Vancouver, Canada — the unceded, traditional territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. His multimedia installations, performances, writings, and compositions explore sound as a tool for speculative worlding. Highlighting material instability and unruliness, his work explores the flows of sonic matter through buildings, sound systems, instruments, software, and bodies, to uncover minor histories, sonic fictions, and alternate modes of listening and authorship. His work has been presented by institutions such as INA-GRM (FR), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (DE), Festival d’Automne (FR), Julia Stoschek Foundation (DE), Liquid Architecture (AU), Deutschlandfunk Kultur (DE), or Ultima festival (NO).

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This project is supported by the City of Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak Republic.