Luka T. Zagoričnik wrote the text for the program book of the festival Sound Disobedience 2018.
The festival Sound
Disobedience emerged as an echo of the confrontation within a seemingly
homogenous music practice known as free improvisation This confrontation is its
key moment, for it tears apart the seeming unity of this music practice and
presents it in its own diversity. It represents marginal music practices that have
been internationally recognised as a part of the broader music environment for
over half a century and in Slovenia for the last thirty years. The festival did
not emerge from a vacuum, for it is a successor of numerous similar festivals
in Europe and broader (some of which appeared as early as the 1970s) which
appeared as initiatives by various musicians, associations, societies and
communes and are kept alive even today by public funds. In this aspect the
festival Sound Disobedience is an
initiative by a musician for musicians. From its very beginnings, free improvisation
could be found between institutional and non-institutional music fields. It was
always considered marginal, for the practitioners of this music are also its
main audience; however, by establishing its own spaces and festivals it regularly
managed to enter institutional spaces. The nature of this genre is typically
local in the formation of the audience, community and scene, even though it is
as a rule oriented internationally. On the outside it appears to be an
international community, which is built on connections and meetings and on establishing
its own publishing, distribution, concert and festival models outside the prevailing
dominant models, however as a community it is not immune to the mechanisms that
rule the music industry, i.e. the trends, the star system and cliques. It appears
to be open, all encompassing, but at the same time it is limited from within. It
assumes the position of an extreme inter-subjective expression, but at the same
time it is opening up and building a shared expression. It eludes hierarchies
and thus attempts to show its disobedience, but at the same time it establishes
temporary hierarchies and relations on as well as off stage. The temporality of
the moment is the medium in which it resounds, and the festival captures this temporality
and presents, reflects and confronts it through the silent sounds of fertile
and constructive confrontation.
It the broader sense
the festival is a child of the neighbouring festivals, such as Konfrontationen in
Nickelsdorf, Unlimited in Wels or the larger and broader set International Jazz
Festival in Saalfelden. However, these festivals all take place in remote,
small local centres, rather than in a big town or city. These festivals served
as a model for Jazz Cerkno and the Brda Contemporary Music Festival in Goriška brda,
which are similar in their outline to the Sound Disobedience festival. The Brda
Contemporary Music festival is organised by Zlatko Kaučič, one of the main
figures on the Slovene scene known not only for his work, concert series on Hum
and the teaching of young musicians, but also for exposing the Slovene
improvisers to the first live contact with the international scene. In the past
similar contents could also be found at the Ljubljana Jazz festival and the Druga
godba festival, as well as the series of concerts which took place in Cankarjev
dom, but even more intensively they resounded alongside the silent movies in
the series Kino-Uho (Cinema-Ear), organised in the Slovenian Cinematheque by Miha
Zadnikar, who is also the organiser of the Defonija series on Metelkova, which
has been running for a number of years now. Alongside these ran the early
concert endeavours of the woodwind musician Vasko Atanasovski which took place in
Maribor and the series The Hiden Notes of David Braun, also in Maribor, which
later provided the basis for the Izzven Jazz festival which today runs a
similar programme in Narodni dom in Maribor. Free improvisation occasionally
appeared at the Sajeta festival, in the projects and concerts organised in
Slovenia and abroad by Matjaž Manček within the frame of KUD Kataman, in the
series of sound events and lectures Bitshift, in the Sonica Series and at the
festival City of Women. This field was also briefly, but incredibly powerfully influenced
by the international festival of improvised music Personal – Collective, which
was organised by the Japanese percussionist Seijiro Murayama. These are all stations
on the path to our Sound Disobedience festival, which is today accompanied by
series such as FriForma, Ropotarnica and SOU.ND.ING duo in Ljubljana, Rojišče in
Vrhnika, Sunday NOISE in Bistrica ob Sotli and Mariboring in Maribor. Sound
disobedience is a sum of the creative, organisational, media and
cultural-political initiatives and endeavours, which formed the Slovene scene,
musicians, organisers, publishers, reporters, reviewers, spaces and the
listening community. At the same time the festival also represents the unrest
and conflict within the initiator and programme director of the festival, the double
bass player and improviser Tomaž Grom, who does not use the festival to
establish a coherent vision, but uses it as a unique training range for
creative meetings and collisions. In some cases he stages collisions between
free improvisation and contemporary theatre, performance and dance, or between
free improvisation and sound or inter-media art or the fields of jazz, free
jazz, electro-acoustic, electronic and contemporary classical music. Unlike a
number of other festivals and series that stage these collisions and meetings
by counterpoising the different music genres, Sound Disobedience tries to stage
them predominantly through the practice of improvisation. This is what makes
the festival contemporary in nature, for it is a festival that not only tries
to present these practices, but also reflects upon them and offers a critical
insight into them. The festival is a meeting ground for various generations of
improvisers, from the pioneers to the generations that follow them, and it also
provides a fertile ground for the different aesthetic principles and approaches
that are often linked to a certain geographic location. If the early
generations emerged from the Afro-American radicalisation of jazz (free jazz) and the
search for their own expression outside of it, i.e. a unique deviance from the modernism
found within classical Western music and the established forms and principles found
within popular music, the historical difference between the generations can be
found in the fact that the younger
generation of free improvisers no longer base their work on the differences and
deviances from other traditions, genres and approaches, but in the
confrontation with them. The confrontation with the concepts of sound and space in
sound art, with performance practices and concepts in contemporary art, entering
the interactive and audio-visual fields, confronting silence, intersecting the
tradition of experimental music as open compositions and non-determined sound
matter, disseminating sonority and the dispersion in space and the sounding of everyday
noise, the noises created by various objects, processes and surfaces, analogue
and digital electronic sound synthesis co-sounding with contemporary and past electronic
practices and with the field recordings and last, but not least, entering the
dialogue with others, presented by composed practices. These are the flows found
throughout Sound Disobedience, and to which the domestic clique of improvisers
in the local and international projects belong together with the numerous co-operations
created and nourished by the festival.
In the
background the Sound Disobedience festival is powered by its own inner logic that
draws from the contents of Sploh Institute’s annual production and brings these
contents to life in the new, festival format, which does not bring merely
meetings in music and in contact with it, but also alongside it, in the intense
social contacts that such an environment offers to the musicians as well as
visitors. We might even state that the festival emerged from the necessity to ground
the numerous activities created by the various creative people, while ensuring that
its contents get better exposure through the dynamics of the media space. At the
core of the festival lies the concert series Confine Aperto which has been
going on for years, however the festival provides focus for its dispersed
nature and the variety of sound aesthetics that form the series, as they are
confronted in the same space, which leads to contacts, collisions,
confrontations, meetings within the scene and provides the necessary and
healthy comparative frame within the Slovene scene. In the background murmurs
the influence of the music workshop Research,
Reflection, which has over the years of its existence became one of the
main incubators of today’s strong and extremely active domestic scene of improvisers.
Even though they hover in the background, the workshops provide an essential element
of the festival, for they provide a space in which knowledge, experience, the
various approaches, models aesthetics, and ideologies are transferred from one
musician to another, only to be in the end transferred to us through their performances
on stage. This obstacle course brings the festival its research component, while
reflection is brought to it by the guest lectures and the lively debates that
accompany them, where the internal dynamics within the field of free improvisation
obtain their reflection and criticism through the different views, which
indicate that this is by no means a unified field, but a dynamic entity with
internal conflicts, numerous positions, as well as ideological, aesthetic and
social views. The festival format is an ideal field for these confrontations
that are deliberately cultivated during the festival as a necessary reflection
for a creative practice. To a lesser degree the festival also includes the contemporary
dance and performative practices that are improvised together with the music
embodied in the series Non-form, and the field of inter-media art, which is
embodied in the practices of sound performances, installations, conceptual art
and sound art. These are the cross-sections and intermediate spaces, penetrated
by free improvisation in the attempt to confront them in various, sometimes even
conflicting ways. Disobedience is the key element that can be linked to the
term non-idiomatic improvisation as a radical and at the same time utopian
formulation of free improvisation, through which this formed and set its own foundation
and already at the very start showed its inner conflicts and contradictive
nature. This is also expressed in the field of disobedient as a unique
impossible rebellion, impossible, yet necessary.
