Concert

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Pia Achternkamp performs an electroacoustic set in a reclining position. Various string instruments generate abstract soundscapes that invite the audience to explore unfamiliar modes of listening. The audience is freed from a norm that often prevails in conventional concert settings – namely, the expectation that one should also watch attentively while listening.

Both the listeners and the performer are in a horizontal position, sometimes with closed eyes, sometimes with open eyes. They look at the ceiling, out of the windows, into the room…

What does it feel like to experience live music when the two conventional positions of the concert format – sitting or standing – are avoided? How does our listening change when our gaze is no longer directed exclusively at the performer, but is allowed to drift inward or outward? What do we hear when we let the space affect us?

Lying together, dozing together: somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, an immersive space opens in which something slowly and almost imperceptibly begins to transform.

Pia Achternkamp is researching on the borderlands of music, performing arts, language and fine arts – an obscure and yet fruitful landscape as a basis for multi-sensory experience and experimentation.

She interrupted her studies of philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin in order to dedicate herself fully to the composition of music and soundscapes for theatre/dance projects. As she had always been curious about the interdependencies in sound, space and movement, Pia is usually playing her music life on stage when working with actors/dancers. This is how her artistic practices transformed towards a point where it became unavoidable to move her own body and explore its performative qualities and potentialities. Pia Achternkamp is based in Berlin and is playing in a few band like Pomelo, grau& and Mildred.