Fem Fest 2023 DAY 2: Sonic Rebelles

The power of the musical Avant-Garde
Festival - Thu 9 March 2023
WORM Rotterdam
WORM Central Station
Start → 20:30
End → 23:00

Celebrating the power of Fem Avant-Garde!

VÄLVĒ
‘Experimental sound-art group’
with:
Chlöe Herington: vocals, bassoon, saxes, electronics, homemade instruments
Emma Sullivan: bass, microkorg, vocals
Chlöe Herington is a Nottingham-born bassoonist, saxophonist, composer and sound maker, based in Wiltshire. Classically trained in Notthingham and at Goldsmiths College in London, she soon ventured out of the concert hall to seek new ways of creating music, suddenly finding herself in a very different kind of orchestra, Chrome Hoof, in 2000, with whom she stayed throughout their career. Also notable is her being part of the project Lindsay Cooper Songbook with Chris Cutler, Dagmar Krause, Tim Hodgkinson and Yumi Hara, performing the music of that other legendary bassoonist from the UK: Lindsay Cooper.

VÄLVĒ is the outlet for her compositional work using text and image as the starting point for scores. Chlöe collects sounds and diagrams, composing predominantly for bassoon, saxes, electronics and found sounds to explore synaesthetic memory and collective experience.

What is VÄLVĒ? Folk lullabies re-imagined by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Found-sound collages interrupted by Welsh language orations and sudden outbursts of fuzz bass. Gleaming synthpop workouts that collapse into swirling dreamscapes of sax and harp. Tiny sounds opening out onto the epic. Hi-tech and no-tech, deployed with equal measures of discipline and abandon. Carefully sculpted disorder. Uncanny geometries of noise and melody. Dizzy and gleeful and drawn in notebooks. That is VÄLVĒ.

Isa Otoya & Catalina Jimenez
Isa Otoya is a contemporary composer, singer, songwriter and producer, creating bridges between artists from different cultures and disciplines, most of all artists from Peru, her home country. She is one of the driving forces behind RETAMA, a collective of female composers in Peru, who stand up against repression, polarization and disinformation in their country and, of course, for women’s rights. Isa will be joined by poet and writer Catalina Jimenez for a newly developed music & literature performance premiering at Sonic Rebelles.

Adela Mede
Adela Mede is a Slovak-Hungarian musician and singer whose works explore themes of home and spiritual growth.
She draws on a wide scope of influences and incorporates elements of minimalism, contemporary vocal techniques or Eastern European folklore into her work. Trilingual singing, field recordings, experimental electronics and vocal processing intertwine to create intimate, powerful compositions.
Her debut album Szabadság received positive reviews in The Wire, The Quietus, Dazed, Full Moon magazine and Foxy Digitalis.