READER: NOISE IS A QUEER SPACE
29.07.2025
Luxa M. Schüttler, Håkon Stene, Queers & Allies: Noise is a Queer Space (2025)
Noise is a Queer Space is an installative composition that will be premiered at the Darmstadt Summer Course on July 29th, 2025. It consists of an expansive structure of around 20 snare drums. A further 30–40 snare sounds are added as samples, partially sumbitted as a sound-contribution by a group of Queers & Allies. Including also live electronics, Håkon Stene creates a rhythmically dense, intense noise environment within this setup. The duration of the composition is about one hour and is organized modularly. The final version will be worked out during the rehearsals.
A central aspect of Noise is a Queer Space is to include around 50 guests from the LGBTQIA+ community. In doing so, we not only want to undermine the principle of authorship. Above all, it is about the visibility of queer identities in the still quite normative reality of contemporary music. Perhaps it will be something like a queer group selfie in the Darmstadt concert program.
Eloain Lovis Hübner
Eloain Lovis Hübner is a non-binary German composer with a particular interest in experimental sound research in the analog world, spatial and transdisciplinary formats, collaborativity and links between music practice and social, natural, technical, urban, domestic and media environments. Many of their works are in the field of artistic research or incorporate influences from sociology and queer studies.
SOUND-CONTRIBUTION
1.) https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/track/4O9Ln2vjUlPLvIdMTQCIeb?si=21a96470ca2b41d8 (the entire song, but the best part is from 1:51 on)
2.) https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/track/0WXRyVQp9w0e8jdE1RTGSx?si=3baf9cb665b64fbe
3.) https://open.spotify.com/intl-de/track/4ND3RwY5oi87X9tijlI7au?si=975aed3cd67b41e3 (the entire song, but the best part is from 0:42 on)
I've been discovering a lot of niche bands in the field of screamo and hardcore over the last years, and I remember many evenings and nights when I came home late and this music on headphones kind of gave me the power and self- confidence to walk upright and determined through Berlin. When traveling, this music often gives me stamina and endurance, and I believe that it has also influenced my own composing in different subversive ways.
Ricardo Eizirik
Ricardo Eizirik (1985, Ribeirão Preto, BR) aka auto_timer is a Brazilian composer and DJ. Their artistic practice moves between contemporary music, club culture, and performance art. As a composer, their work explores themes such as bodily perception, mechanization, colonial histories, and cultural memory – often using found objects, noise, and fragmented gestures.
SOUND-CONTRIBUTION
Brazilian Funk
Kari Watson
Kari Watson (they/them) is a Chicago based composer, performer, and sound artist working between the mediums of contemporary concert music, electroacoustic music, live performance, and interactive installation work. Their creative and scholarly work explores an array of musical/theoretical issues such as physicality, attunement, and embodiment, often incorporating electronics as mediators/extensions of the human body. Recent pieces have also played with genre-bending and uncanny soundcraft, juxtaposing acoustic and electronic sound sources.
SOUND-CONTRIBUTION
SOPHIE‘s snare sounds are particularly formative and attractive to me. I particularly love the snare sounds in faceshopping and ponyboy from her album Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides.
I have one distinct memory where I heard faceshopping come on at the Chicago club Berlin, which has now closed :( but was a staple of Chicago's queer nightlife scene. Everyone totally freaked out and danced so hard. It was right after SOPHIE's death, so it was a huge cathartic moment where people were laughing and dancing and crying all together. It was the most communal experience I'd ever had with strangers, where a room full of queer people all danced and felt the music together. It was also a moment where the gravity of SOPHIE's loss was palpable. She was this huge unifying force, who also spearheaded this entire new genre, one that was by and for queer people, sonifying characteristics of drag like artifice and exaggeration, playing with the uncanny sound to create a new glossy airbrushed airtight genre.
Sara Glojnarić
Sara Glojnarić is a Croatian composer based in Leipzig. Her work explores pop culture – its aesthetics, socio-political impact, nostalgia, and cultural memory – across opera, orchestral, chamber, and video formats. Sara also mentors in composition, with a focus on cultural theory, translation, linguistics, and queer/feminist perspectives.
SOUND-CONTRIBUTION
I am a big fan of the classic 80s big snare drum sound, with tons of gated reverb on it. It brings me in a good mood basically every time I hear it. There is something deeply nostalgic about it, without being cheesy, and it gives me a sense that anything is possible. When I think about that particular snare sound, I think of Dancing in the Dark by Bruce Springsteen or Heaven Is A Place On Earth by Belina Carlisle. That being said, I grew up on a steady diet of grunge, so the more organic sounding, 90s grunge snare, like Nothingman by Pearl Jam or Would by Alice in Chains.
In case of "Heaven Is A Place On Earth" by Belinda Carlisle, it is a song that came to me a little bit later in life – I obviously knew the song, but it "hit" differently after watching an episode of Black Mirror, called "San Junipero", which is probably the only one, or at least one of the few ones that does not end terribly depressing. It also happens to be a queer love story. I remember while watching it, I kept on expecting one of them to die or something terrible to happen, because gays always die in these kind of shows. But, no one dies (at least not in the virtual world), and they live happily ever after! "Heaven Is a Place on Earth" is the soundtrack to that. It is also an episode that I bonded over with my partner, before we were dating, so it reminds me of her and the sweetness and intensity of young love.
Lucia Kilger
Lucia Kilger’s work is characterized by an idiosyncratic hybridity between instrumental, intermedial and performative forms of expression. Her works include instrumental-electronic, music-theatrical, installative, interactive compositions and video walks that interweave analog and digital worlds. Since 2023 she is Professor of Composition and Sound Design for Digital Media at the HfM Detmold/Kreativinstitut OWL.
Chaya Czernowin
Chaya Czernowin’s music has been performed throughout the world, by the best orchestras and performers of new music, and she teaches composition at Harvard University. Czernowin’s output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Characteristic of her work are working with metaphor as a means of reaching and analyzing a sound world that is unfamiliar; the use of noise and physical parameters as weight, textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness, brightness or darkness); an inquiry of the handling of time; and shifting of scale and perspective. These ways of working/thinking fuse her work with multi-sensory content and work to reach a sonic expression which includes the subconscious and goes beyond style, conventions, or rationality.
Jennifer Walshe
“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (The Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. Walshe has worked extensively with AI. ULTRACHUNK, made in collaboration with Memo Akten in 2018, features an AI-generated version of Walshe. A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance, her third solo album, released on Tetbind in 2020, uses AI to rework canonical works from early Western music history. Walshe is currently professor of composition at the University of Oxford.
Laure M. Hiendl
Laure M. Hiendl (*1986) is a composer based in Vienna whose work explores the aesthetic effects of circulation-driven capitalism – digitality, acceleration, and demediatization – on contemporary art music. Central to his approach is the use of score sampling to create intertextual constellations from digital archives. Influenced by Lauren Berlant’s notion of the “animated still life,” Hiendl reflects on the frenetic stasis of today’s media landscape. In 2022, he co-founded the festival Music Installations Nuremberg, focusing on performative spatial music. He is University Professor and Head of the Department of Composition and Music Theory at Mozarteum University Salzburg.
Stellan Veloce
Stellan Veloce is a Berlin-based Sardinian cellist and composer. Their music focuses on timbral research, iteration and modulations of sound densities, integrating composition with improvisation and band playing. Beside performing live they compose music for ensembles and for dance performances, favoring collaborative practices. They collaborate regularly with choreographer Sheena McGrandles, composer Neo Hülcker and filmmaker Silvia Maggi and occasionally work in the pop music sphere (among others with pop icon Peaches).
SOUND-CONTRIBUTION
sonic youth, the cure, karate
Neo Hülcker
Neo Hülcker is a composer and performer. Their compositions evolve as situations, performance-installations, actions and interventions, and deal with digital subculture (like ASMR), childhood, human-animal-relations, queer practice and cultural hacking. They are a part of the Y-E-S collective, who publishes music dealing with performativity, temporality, sound as physical experience and the cultural frames of concerts (y-e-s.org).
SOUND CONTRIBUTION
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVTXrcDIIms
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aa7FnyXcm4
Matthias Kaul has been a good friend and collaborator to me for many years. His death in 2020 was a shock. Watching these videos of Matthias performing in his unique way brings back so many memories. For example how we were standing in exactly that room trying to blow up hot water bottles. I've always loved his way of experimenting with materials, his humour, his ability to listen so precisely. I still feel close to him and know in which situations he would laugh and what he would say. It feels a bit like we are still talking.
Timothy McCormack
Timothy (Ti) McCormack writes haptic, viscous music which makes audible the tactile, physical relationship between a performer and their instrument. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes hermetic, their music threads an intimacy between tone and noise to create strangely affecting sonic ecologies which alter one’s perception of time. They also engage with contemporary queer aesthetics: hæmal ancestries, incurable disease and its histories, mourning, listening, and the erotics of form.
SOUND CONTRIBUTION
soft sustained noise of a snare drum w/ the snare on: sustained membrane vibration via friction or vibration
it's just a sonic situation i like: tone shrouded in soft noise. I guess sub-genre would be "noise", but more in the "Grouper" / "My Bloody Valentine" sort of approach to noise. Neither queer (actually I think Grouper might be…) but i'm always surprised that there's not more queer pop artists (okay Grouper & MBV are not “pop” but in comparison to Neue Musik…) don't make more use of noise because i feel it is incredibly queer in its power to shroud, conceal, but reveal vulnerability
Sarah Saviet
Sarah Saviet is a violinist based in Berlin and dedicated to the performance of contemporary music. She performs as a soloist and chamber musician and ist part of the Saviet/Houston Duo and Ensemble mosaik.
SOUND CONTRIBUTION
SOPHIE’s Ponyboy – kind of hard to hear but comes right before the beat.
I first started listening to SOPHIE after listening to some of her music at a friend's queer family forming ceremony. Her tracks have accompanied me through an intense time in my life – powerful and beautiful.
Lucien Danzeisen
Lucien Danzeisen (*1989 in Switzerland) is a composer, improviser and artist. Their compositions range from solo pieces over diverse constellations of Ensembles to orchestral works, featuring purely acoustical as well as electroacustical and electronical works. Lucien Danzeisen is involved in various free projects. With Lennart Melzer, they created the GPS soundinstallations FELD_ in Berlin and Interferenz on Hasliberg (CH). Their aesthetics range from delicate and rich in detail to rough and tart. Differences and heterogenity are a fundamental part of their formal language. Time-informed mediality is part of their expressive spectrum.
Rebecca Lawrence
Based in Frankfurt, Germany, Rebecca Lawrence is known for her collaborative work as a contemporary and early music double bassist in Europe and the USA. Most at home in creative small ensemble environments, Rebecca is passionate about working with living composers and providing a solid ensemble foundation while imagining new possibilities for the double bass and its predecessors in various contexts. She combines her interest in contemporary and baroque music with individual projects involving improvisation on early instruments.
