Ata Ebtekar, better known as Sote, is an electronic music composer and sound artist based in Tehran, Iran. His wide-ranging love of rich sounds and textures is embodied in diverse paths such as hardcore club sounds, collaborations that straddle (traditional) acoustic and electronic instrumentation, and solo experimental electronics – making Ebtekar equally at home in concert halls, galleries, or clubs. Over the last three decades, he has released on labels such as Warp, Diagonal, SVBKVLT, Sub Rosa, Morphine, and Opal Tapes.
Russudan Meipariani is a Georgian composer, pianist and singer. Her music combines classical, minimal music, georgian polyphonie, contemporary new music, and works with elements of pop culture. The soundscape that Russudan's music creates is academic and archaic, contemplative and extrovert, dreamy and wild, strange and familiar at the same time.
Gefördert von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien ("BKM") und der Initiative Musik.
Das Konzert wird unterstützt vom Verband für aktuelle Musik Hamburg und der Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg.
Curated by Beka Glonti & Stubnitz booking.
Sote
Ebtekar’s compositions and installations weave expansive sonic tales that exhibit a strong engagement with electro-acoustic techniques, sound design, microtonal systems, and polyrhythmic motifs. His vivid soundscapes employ various synthesis strategies and DSP techniques, both in analogue and digital environments.
Much of his output deals with a continual exploration of abstract musical form as a commentary and reflection on current social and political experiences, mental states, and the human condition. His music challenges the listener with mutating sonic movements that contrast moments of fleeting melodic beauty and deep emotion with painful dissonance and abrasive noise. On his latest album Ministry of Tall Tales, out in February 2024 on SVBKVLT, Sote has further intensified this compositional approach in an attempt to process the immense amount of frustration, anger, confusion, helplessness and fear he went through in the recent years because of what has been happening in his surroundings and in Iran’s sociopolitical system. Consequently, he describes the album’s all-synthesis based music as an equally dark, melodic, and noise-driven contemplation on corruption, oppression and murder.
Sote’s ability to combine emotional depth with a relentlessly maximalist aesthetic is unique – as, for example, heard on 2022’s Majestic Noise in Beautiful Rotten Iran, about which The Sound Projector wrote that it »demands all your attention and, once it has all your focus, it takes it over entirely«, or on Hardcore Sounds from Tehran, which was listed on The Quietus’ Top 100 albums of 2016, and saw Sote re-invent high-energy banging hardcore by twisting it into challenging rhythmic and sonic structures. With the Sound System Persepolis album, released on Diagonal in July 2024, Sote revisits and actualizes his unique take on hardcore to once again push the very limits of contemporary underground brain/body music. It is a futuristic hardcore album of pummellingly rhythmic and harmonically complex computer music, which takes its name from Persepolis: the beating heart and administrative centre of the historical Persian Empire. Even at low volumes the harmonics, rhythmic textures and buffeting decay conjure the sense of a monumental rig (as featured on the album artwork) playing at earth-shaking volume, capable of displacing huge volumes of air, yet with barely a kick or a snare in sight. Intended to be performed live, on muscular and multi-channel soundsystems whether gallery or club, this computer music is not only meant to be heard but felt by the listener: its brutalist vibrational polyrhythms make it impossible to stand still, its directive to move standing in contrast with the more academically rooted computer music and sound art that has explored the same sound synthesis techniques used on the album.
Russudan Meipariani
Die aus Tbilisi stammende und in Stuttgart lebende Komponistin, Pianistin und Sängerin Russudan Meipariani agiert in einer musikalischen Zwischenzone und verbindet die archaische Tradition der georgischen Polyphonie mit postminimalistischen Strukturen und Elementen des experimentellen Pop. Bei ihren Solo-Auftritten erkundet Russudan mit Musik aus ihrem aktuellen Album Voices & Mountains neue experimentelle Klanglandschaften: sie bringt dunkle, archaische Klänge eines georgischen Männerchors mit Elektronik und ihrer eigenen Stimme zusammen – und verortet den traditionellen polyphonen Gesang an dieser musikalischen Schnittstelle neu und unerhört.
In Tiflis geboren, wuchs Russudan in einem oszillierenden urbanen Kosmos zwischen christlich geprägten georgischen Traditionen und westlich orientierter Kultur auf. Die Entdeckung der Musik von Björk, Tori Amos, Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush und Laurie Anderson während ihres Klavierstudiums war für Russudans künstlerische Entwicklung sehr prägend. Später studierte sie Komposition bei Wolfgang Rihm in Karlsruhe und bei Lasse Thoresen in Oslo und agierte in verschiedenen Welten: als klassische Pianistin und als Komponistin/Performerin, experimentierte mit der Stimme und arbeitete Genreübergreifend.
Bis Heute erkundet Russudan musikalische Universen in verschiedenen Ensembles und interdisziplinären Projekten. Das Ensemble Anchiskhati ist einer der berühmtesten und aufregendsten Männerchöre Georgiens, bekannt für seine außergewöhnlich authentische Art, traditionelle Musik aufzuführen. Ein Teil ihrer Pionierarbeit bestand darin, Feldaufnahmen von Ältesten zu sammeln, die an den meisten verborgenen Orten in Georgia traditionelle Lieder sangen. Ihre rauen und kraftvollen Stimmen sind wie eine Naturgewalt, eine ganz eigene Zeitkapsel mit unendlichen Schichten der Geschichten der Vorfahren, Mythen und Klängen.
* Ermäßigter Eintritt an der Abendkasse für Schüler*innen, Student*innen, Sozialhilfeempfänger*innen.
* Reduced admission at the box office for students and welfare recipients.
