Luz González - Bi Gezur (record launch) / Lara Alarcón - Pagan Celebration

«This is a story about bodies/morphing, merging/brutally separating/becoming landscape,» reads the cover. Bi Gezur shows how bodies emerge, merge, and break apart, ultimately becoming landscape themselves. This soundscape is full of anger, gentleness, and joie de vivre. Bi Gezur means two lies in Basque and seems to say to the listener: «This is not what it seems to be.» The music oscillates between abstraction and narrative. Whipping rhythms, complex sound design, and constant distortions create a sound world beyond all genres. Luz González focuses on the physicality of sound. Noise, rhythm, and harmony merge into something else—music as sculpture, as space, as living substance.

Luz González understands sound as a physical phenomenon that is perceived with the whole body and not just with the ears. Her music thus moves at the interface between precise sound design and improvisational openness, exploring the interaction between instruments, space, and audience. This dynamic creates a multisensory experience that goes beyond pure sound perception.

González is involved in a wide range of musical activities: she explores interdisciplinary sound objects with scenographer Annatina Huwiler, works with clarinetist Rebeca Minten in the electroacoustic duo Minten & González, and with pianist Ueli Kempter in the electroacoustic duo Go/u.k. She is a guest artist with the IPSO Ensemble and has developed the piece Superorganismus with the contemporary trio Tramontana.

For the concert at Dampfzentrale, lighting artist Jonas Fehr has created a minimalist lighting design that incorporates the space as a moving plane into the musical dynamics. With almost twenty years of experience in live performance environments, he combines visual composition and technology to create precise works that translate sound into a sensually perceptible movement of light. Through the collaboration of Jonas Fehr and Luz González, sound and space are condensed and become physically perceptible. Atmospheres and fields of tension are created as a subtle, visual resonance of hearing. A shared interest in architectural landscapes, sculptures, and space forms the basis of this collaboration, in which sound and light listen to each other.

Pagan Celebration is an immersive multimedia opera in 5 movements, which through the use of acoustic extremes and poetic images, takes agency over the miseries that built symbolic and cultural capital in societies like Argentina. The precarious, austerity as a result of emptying, the sense of belonging in distress. To present resistance in the face of invasion constitutes the skeleton of Latin identities and mobilizes it. Celebrating as an act of resistance proposes an antithesis of the docile and malleable body, vindicates the spirit and brings togetherness. In the face of growing dehumanization policies, returning to the collective body implies a valorization of the entity of the other. This other constructs me and I construct them. In this construction we create values of listening, of appreciation and we offer resistance to the plundering of our human and cultural capital.

Lara Alarcón is a vocalist, composer, and curator from La Plata, Argentina, who lives in Berlin and Bern. Her work, which spans vocal art, noise/experimental, and contemporary electroacoustic and multimedia music, can be seen on stages across Europe, Latin America, and Asia. She is currently particularly active with her project VQ, a platform for extended solo performances that combines electronic music, vocal art, choral pop, and harsh noise. She also performs with GORZ, a band that moves within the musical spectrum of electronic noise rock and experimental metal. As co-founder of the label Numeral, based in Argentina and Switzerland, she promotes experimental music by Latin American artists.

Johanna Schmalöer: cello and voice
Sid Werner: double bass
Arne Braun: drums
Cyrill Ferrari: guitar and sound assistance
German García: touchdesigner and visual assistance
Lara Alarcón: composition, voice