SHAPE+ is a platform for innovative music and audiovisual art from Europe.
It consists of 16 festivals and art centers and aims to support, promote and exchange innovative and aspiring musicians and interdisciplinary artists with an interest in sound. SHAPE attempts to present a variety of idiosyncratic music and sonic art from all over Europe, and provide audiences and professionals with insightful lectures, talks and workshops by experts in various fields related to sound and performance.
Each year, the 16 involved associations will collectively choose 48 creatively strong artists and musicians to participate in a mix of live performances, residencies, workshops and talks across festivals and special events.
SHAPE+ is an initiative, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union.
The European Union-funded SHAPE+ platform for innovative music and audiovisual art is announcing its 2023/2024 list of artists. The artist selection places a number of audiovisual projects and sound artists alongside musical acts that range from club music and forward-thinking media art to experiments with traditional music, free improvisation and spatial music. The second year of SHAPE+ will continue its focus on collaborative residencies and one-off performances simultaneously.
The 2023/2024 artist list of SHAPE+ will begin its year of activities on July 15, and their activity period will last until July 14, 2024.
The platform is run by a union of 15 European festivals, including Construction Festival (UA), schiev (BE), Unsound (PL) and CTM Festival (DE). You can find the full list of partners in the “Festivals” section.
Click here to find out more about the voting process and the platform itself.
Full list of SHAPE+ artists for 2023-24
Second wave of SHAPE+ artists at Mutant Radio showcase
m.a.t.a.d.a.t.a. is the latest dance/not dance solo moniker by electroacoustic musician, film and theater composer Toms Auniņš from Riga, Latvia. It came to life as a film score for Matīss Kaža feature film Neon Spring, a film for which Toms Auniņš attempted to create a full and total Riga underground techno and rave scene sound score with the help of local (Latvian-built) Erica Synths Techno System. Individually m.a.t.a.d.a.t.a. also serves as an instrument to sail the long presence in extreme music into a new, unknown sonic territory.
For the musician himself m.a.t.a.d.a.t.a. is a transfer to origins of consciousness, and ultimately a vessel for change.
NZIRIA is an experimental project by artist Tullia Benedicta, the project integrates the main forms and themes of the Neomelodic song, while regenerating the cis-heteronormative scenario. Through a powerful and androgynous singing, they reinterpret the
stereotyped, almost archetypal stories of the Neomelodic genre, welcoming narratives of the LGBTQI+ community and singing of queer love and mercurial identities.
NZIRIA debuted on Gabber Eleganza’s imprint Never Sleep with a full-length titled XXYBRID. Recorded during a period of worldwide lockdown, the album represents the artist’s psychomagic act to redeem their Neapolitan origins and to reinterpret some of the topoi of the Neapolitan culture.
Felisha Ledesma is a sound artist and musician living and working in Berlin. Over the past decade, Ledesma has run project spaces, overseen festival curation and events programming, helped establish community programs around modular synthesis education, and performed live. More recently, Ledesma’s focus has widened to releasing solo compositions – two debut releases titled ‘Fringe’ and ‘Sweet Hour’ released on Ecstatic Recordings and Enmossed x Psychic Liberation, respectively.
On both releases, Ledesma draws extensively on a custom-made synthesizer called AMQR developed together with instrument designer Ess Mattisson, a collaboration that has since flowered into Fors, a music technology project focused on creating software instruments and effects. Exploring an emergent lowercase sound, Felisha Ledesma’s music shimmers with elusive timbres that occupy a unique space – neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates tenderness and warmth.
Qow, aka Omar El Sadek is an audiovisual artist specialising in electronic sound design and animated visuals. His works focus mainly on documenting the fragile nature of his surroundings, including himself. He takes a similar visual approach, investing in poetic imperfections and unexpected intimacies. This principal appears mostly through his collaborations with artists such as MSYLMA & Ismael, ZULI, Drew Mcdowall and KNOW V.A. His works have been previously exhibited at audiovisual festivals such as Unsound Festival 2019, Lunchmeat Festival 2020 and Rewire Festival 2022.
Hui Ye (b. in Guangzhou, China) is an artist and composer based in Vienna. Her works use various media (semi documentary, video, sound installations, and live sound performance) to address questions relating to individual social identity and its entanglements with different cultural and political contexts. In her recent projects, the artist focuses on sociopolitical aspects of the act of listening in contemplation of exploring diverse correlations between sound and the different social phenomenon in contemporary societies.
Jaka Berger is one of the most active, creative and diverse drummers, percussionists, composers and improvisers on the Slovenian music landscape in the last fifteen years. Since 2014, he has been creating music for a prepared drum kit, with which he regularly releases solo works that are regularly published in international publications for improvised music. He is also active in the field of ambient music, experimental hip hop (DUF), and dub (Darla Smoking), experimental composition (Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise), noise, contemporary jazz and improvised music (Fresh Dust Trio, Shoe & Shoelace, Niemoy, …), installations (Party) and electroacoustic music. In recent years, he has been intensively involved in the field of modular sound synthesis, establishing and expanding new sound fields in his work.
ABADIR (Rami Abadir) is a music producer and sound designer born in Cairo, Egypt. His work focuses on experimental, club, glitch and ambient music, and he’s one half of the duo 0N4B. ABADIR holds an MA in Digital Media Design from University of the Arts, Bremen.
Mutant Radio has also added the following names to the Georgian line-up of the event: Levan Luka Nakashidze, Zesknel, JD J, TINA & TEDI.
Program overview
Summarizing both artist announcements,, here is the program overview:
Friday, June 23
Levan Luka Nakashidze (DJ SET), ESI , Nziria*, m.a.t.a.d.a.t.a.*, Hui Ye*, The Stanley Maneuver*, Ale Hop*, Thea Soti*, ABADIR*, BMI (DJ SET), Nino Davadze
Saturday, June 24
JD J (DJ SET), TeTe Noise, TINA & TEDI, Zesknel, Roxane Métayer*, Maria Bertel*, Jaka Berger*, Qow*, Felisha Ledesma*, undo despot*
*Artists of the SHAPE+ platform.
First wave of SHAPE+ artists at Mutant Radio showcase
Alejandra Cárdenas Pacheco (also known as Ale Hop) is a Peruvian-born artist, researcher, and experimental musician based in Berlin. Her body of work includes live shows, record releases, sound and video artworks, research on sound and technology, and original music for film, dance and theater projects.
Thea Soti is a multi-disciplinary artist, working within the fields of experimental vocal music, electronic sound, installation, text-based media and video art. She uses digitally manipulated sound, human voice and poetry in various formats, continuously manipulating and processing her own voice. Her pieces often go over the auditive experience and bravely explore space and movement, thus creating dynamic spaces. She often reflects on current socio-political issues, such as modern escapism, non-binary identities, beauty myths or collective fear.
The Stanley Maneuver is the solo project of András Molnár, a musician, dj and organizer based in Budapest. His practice focuses on weaving a web of fragile environments that have their own histories, desires, faults and secrets. Building upon improvisational and generative techniques he constantly repurposes his materials to explore territories in and around experimental music and intimacy.
Maria Bertel is a Danish trombone player, improviser and composer. The acoustic sound of her instrument amplified creates an output that draws inspiration from drone and noise music. What is normally not hearable is presenting itself, movements, metal and breath becomes a swirling part of her compositions. Changing organic patterns are emerging, tiny sounds becomes brutally clear as well as the range of overtones of the instrument.
Roxane Métayer was born in France in 1992. She learned to play the violin at a young age, and then continued her studies in Belgium, at the Ecole de Recherches Graphiques, where she obtained her Master’s degree, in Speculative Narration, Narratives and Experiments.
She continues her practice as a visual artist and musician, based in Brussels. She has released several albums with the labels Primordial Void, Kraak, Morc, Wabisabi tapes and Vlek with the duo Sage Alyte.
undo despot is an experimental audio-visual artist from Odesa, Ukraine. Her musical practice is focused on combining deconstructed visual and music influences, coupled with academic techniques. At the same time she’s most known as a live artist, who combines various genre influences.
The event will also present a string of Georgian acts: BMI, Nino Davadze, TINA & TEDI, TeTe Noise.
Stay tuned for the full lineup announcement!
New partner organizations
After the showcase in July, Tbilisi’s Mutant Radio will become a permanent partner of SHAPE+.
Mutant Radio is a media platform that focuses on various directions: mixes, interviews, educational shows, live performances and discusssion broadcasts that are either live-streamed or filmed and streamed later on. It gathers various artists, DJs, and interesting personalities that have an opportunity to focus on the subject of their preference and their interest. What is unique about Mutant Radio is that it is mobile.
The physical station is a fully-equipped caravan-wagon that is based in Tbilisi yet also streams from other regions and special locations around Georgia. Apart from the live streams, Mutant Radio also has an open-air cafe, where like-minded people have an opportunity to enjoy quality music and a friendly vibe.
The second new partner is Portugal’s OUT.RA, responsible for organizing OUT.FEST. Started in 2004, and continuously held in Barreiro, Portugal, OUT.FEST is an annual festival celebrating adventurous and experimental music in all its diversity (improvised music, electronics, jazz, contemporary classical music, metal, new idioms), gathering and mapping, in its programme, music vanguard’s history, present and future.
Both organizations will start their work within SHAPE+ after July 15, 2023.
