by Ring Ring | 16.05.2024.
May is the Ring Ring month! The 28th edition of the prestigious Belgrade festival of new, different, experimental music is ahead of us, and will be held from May 23 to 26, 2024, at the Jewish Cultural Center and Zappa Baza. The organizer of the festival, the Ring Ring Association, promises four exciting musical evenings and a total of seven diverse concerts featuring artists and bands from the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, the USA, Turkey, and Serbia.
. . .
Running an independent, alternative festival in Serbia is demanding and challenging work. Each year, you push that stone anew. Sometimes it seems that the uphill climb gets steeper with each passing year. On one hand, financial support is often undefined until the start of the festival, while there’s an increasing number of brilliant bands and musicians. They persistently apply and patiently wait. It appears as if they have more understanding of the situation than we do ourselves.
The program pieces of every “Ring Ring” are arranged according to the desire and necessity to introduce new and familiar names to the audience, both from the domestic and international scenes. However, there is, of course, too much phenomenal music on the planet for just one festival per year. But when that one festival arrives, and the audience fills the familiar space at Jevrejska 16, the organizers are simply ecstatic. And already then, they joyfully begin making a wish list for the next edition of the “Ring Ring” Festival.
The combination of debutants and artists known from previous festivals has reached one of its possible peaks this year. Thus, on the same evening, May 25, the legendary Dutch band The Ex, which has been around for 45 years, and the Istanbul-Belgrade TRIOBROK, which will soon celebrate its first anniversary, will perform.
The opening night, May 23, belongs to a long-awaited collaboration – the Belgrade band Fish in Oil has long admired Vienna’s, and our own Jelena Popržan, recognizable for her creative, alternative approach to instruments, voice, and composition. Their long-held dream comes true in full force this year.
Manja Ristić is another name in our festival program. For the first time, she performs at “Ring Ring”, to the great joy of organizers and audiences, bringing a completely fresh program. In the past few years, Manja, working from Korčula, distanced from all metropolises, has entered the circle of more significant sound explorers. On the same evening, May 24, we will hear another debutant of “Ring Ring”, performing in a solo performance: American experimenter Michael J. Schumacher brings his usual sound devices, including eight special speakers.
As it begins, the festival “Ring Ring 2024” will also end with concerts on the floor of the hall at the Jewish Cultural Center. On the last night, May 26, the Cologne trio C/W|N will perform, led by (again, our own) Dušica Cajlan, joined by the trio’s old acquaintance of festival audiences, Georg Wissel, and Dutch percussionist Etienne Nillesen. The last performance at this year’s festival belongs to the international Šalter Ensemble, which performed seven years ago in a slightly different lineup. In early May, they released a new album, “Tri dela”, on which the collective improvisation of this ten-member ensemble shows that for creative musicians, there are no obstacles to opening new collaborations and achieving an ever closer connection with the audience.
Tickets for the festival (individual and a festival pass) can be purchased via the Tickets.rs website, as well as through email at ringringfestival@gmail.com.
. . .
🔗 Video teaser „Ring Ring Festival 2024”
🔗 Facebook Event „RING RING 2024”
🔗 Facebook Event „The Ex u Beogradu, na festivalu Ring Ring”
🔗 Tickets: Festival pass ǀ May 23 ǀ May 24 ǀ May 25 ǀ May 26
🔗 YouTube: Manja Ristić ǀ Šalter Ensemble ǀ The Ex
by Ring Ring | 19.03.2024.
On their tour marking 45 years of work, the legendary Dutch punk group The Ex will perform in Belgrade at Zappa Baza on May 25, 2024, as part of the 28th Ring Ring Festival. The same evening, the Istanbul-Belgrade based TRIOBROK will also perform.
. . .
The years and decades may pass, but The Ex never falter! The famous quartet from the Netherlands, highly respected in circles of unconventional, avant-garde punk music enthusiasts, celebrates its 45th birthday in 2024. This jubilee is marked by an impressive series of concerts in 45 countries, including their 2000th career concert held in the Netherlands at the beginning of March. This is their first tour since the pandemic.
The Ex exude inexhaustible energy and strength. Their concerts and tours boast an enviable intensity, while their discography remains highly dynamic. They are also known for their frequent, unusual, and diverse projects and collaborations, which span the realms of avant-garde, traditional, and improvised music.
Founded in 1979 in Amsterdam, The Ex began collaborating with jazz musicians and a Kurdish-Iraqi group in the early 1980s. Throughout the 1990s, these collaborations became more frequent and diverse, but perhaps their most famous phase of musical cross-pollination began in 2002 with Ethiopia. This culminated in a collaboration with the renowned saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria, with whom The Ex released two albums and performed over a hundred concerts.
As unwavering advocates of the “do it yourself” concept, The Ex have operated independently of record labels, managers, and roadies throughout the years, serving as a model for other progressive bands and musicians. They have released 28 albums on their label “Ex Records”, and from the outset of their career, they formalized their independent management activities under the name “Stichting Ex”. They have performed concerts across nearly all of Europe, as well as in the USA, Russia, Canada, and Ethiopia. In Belgrade, they have performed three times, with their last appearance in 2015, also at the “Ring Ring” festival.
The members of The Ex are: Terrie Hessels (guitar), Arnold de Boer (vocals, guitar), Andy Moor (guitar), and Katherina Bornefeld (drums, vocals).
The concert of The Ex at the 28th “Ring Ring” festival will be preceded by a performance from the Turkish-Serbian ensemble TRIOBROK, starting at 8:30 PM. This very young group, founded in 2023, is composed of esteemed and experienced musicians from the jazz, improvisational, and experimental music scenes: Ali Onur Olgun (tenor saxophone), Daniel Izmaylov (double bass, electric bass), and Atilla Ozan Keskin (drums).
Tickets for the entire evening, priced at 1800 dinars (balcony: 2500 RSD) in advance, can be purchased through the Tickets.rs website, as well as at their sales outlets.
The organizer of the “Ring Ring” festival is the Ring Ring Association, with the concert of The Ex also being organized in collaboration with the Connected Agency.
. . .
🔗 Facebook Event “The Ex u Beogradu, na festivalu Ring Ring”
🔗 The Ex: Website ǀ YouTube ǀ Facebook
🔗 TRIOBROK: YouTube: A gig in Belgrade, at the “Živa” Cultural centre
by Bojan Đorđević | 23.05.2023.
The twenty-seventh Ring Ring, an international festival of new music, was held in Belgrade, at the Jewish Cultural Center Oneg Shabbat and Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade, from May 17th to May 21st, 2023.
. . .
For many years now, the Ring Ring festival has been starting preparations for its next edition even before the previous one has ended. It’s simple – there is a lot of good music and great musicians in the world, and since we can’t fit them all into one year, even if we had a huge budget at our disposal, it goes without saying that we’ll leave something for the next year. Or the one after that…
During the preparations for the 2022 festival, we came up with the idea that the focus of the next one, in 2023, should be on the youth, on the new generation of improvisers. Whether “youth” officially refers to those under 40 or 35 was one of the less important questions.
Already on the last day of the 26th festival, the performance was agreed upon by the ensemble that opened the 27th festival this year: the TiTiTi trio from Slovenia with Serbian pianist Marina Džukljev. Marina returned on the same day from Cerkno, where she performed for the first time with this trio at our fraternal festival (trio had previously performed at the Ciglana club in Belgrade a few days before, in front of us 12 enthusiasts in the audience).
As life often humorously dictates, it turned out that this first agreed concert happened precisely at the opening of this year’s festival, while the concert that closed the 27th Ring Ring – the trumpet duo of Leonel Kaplan and Franz Hautzinger – was the last one agreed upon, exactly three days before the start of the festival and just seven days before the concert took place! Yes, that’s also possible in Serbia.
But this is just a part of the story of the festival that has passionate followers among musicians, festival organizers, and also among those who support it, such as foreign cultural centres in Serbia, and increasingly local institutions that can financially support the festival.
What particularly satisfies us is that the audience is expanding. The venue at Jevrejska 16 has not been so full on festival evenings for a long time. This year, there were even ensembles completely unknown not only to our audience but also to the European audience, yet the ground floor of the hall was filled to the very entrance doors.
The excitement in the audience could be felt even at the announcement of the call for interested individuals to apply for the opening concert at Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade, where admission is free but due to limited seating, advance registration is required. It has never happened before that the registration process was halted so quickly… If it were possible, it seems that at least 50 more people would have come.
The reason for such increased interest is a special topic for study, but the festival with tradition has once again attracted audiences from Canada, Russia, Germany, Croatia, Italy… Additionally interesting is the fact that within just a month after the Ring Ring festival, three more events will take place in Serbia (two in Belgrade, one in Novi Sad), which will largely have a program that would suit our festival, with some of the artists having already performed at Ring Ring in previous years.
The tragedies that shook Serbia at the beginning of May left us all paralyzed. Tears, a lump in the throat… And the festival was supposed to start in less than two weeks. Despite all the difficulties, aware that there are people whose pain is immeasurably greater, cautiously and with a careful and unobtrusive campaign, we reached that opening on May 17th.
Radio Belgrade 3 has long been a place of freedom and new ideas, as well as an open space for collaboration. Since 2013, Ring Ring has been present in Studio 6 with its programs and concerts, in that special place for musicians and listeners/viewers. And when it comes to something the festival has been promoting from the very beginning – collaboration between local and foreign artists, and when that collaboration is so successful – it has provided us with new levels of enthusiasm for the rest of the festival.
From the second day, everything was moved to the location that both the audience and we, the organizers, love the most, because it is the true home of the Ring Ring festival – Jevrejska 16, now the Jewish Cultural Center Oneg Shabbat.
Even the change of sound engineer went smoothly, without delays or any complaints. When you hear the buzz from outside the building and when the hallway fills up with familiar and new faces patiently waiting to buy tickets, it’s clear that the audience knows well where and why they come. Not always knowing what kind of music will greet them, they come open-minded, full of trust.
On the second night, May 18th, the Austrian trio /kry took the stage, with only one album behind them and a small number of performances outside of Austria. Following them, the quartet named IRK Performing Reflection appeared on stage in the way the audience loves the most – acoustically, from the floor of the hall, in close contact with the audience.
The name of the band IRK Performing Reflection may not say much. Those willing to search the internet could find that the band is led by the young Croatian double bassist Ivar Roban Križić, who lives in Vienna, just like three-quarters of his bandmates. This year, Ivar had the opportunity to perform at three festivals, thanks to the EFFEA platform, which is intended to support and promote young European artists. In a broader context, the band performed at the Music Biennale in Zagreb in April, and after Ring Ring, they are scheduled to perform at the 80 Degrees festival – Laboratory for Innovative Art in Sofia in July.
For the Ring Ring Association, which organizes the festival of the same name, this was a great opportunity to participate in one more European project, as well as to collaborate with other major and significant festivals, and to meet new, young, extremely creative artists. One of them, trumpeter Nikola Vuković from Belgrade, has been hidden from our attention for years due to his studies in Graz and his jazz activities in Vienna. For both us and him, this was an opportunity to open up new possibilities for collaboration.
Joining the EFFEA platform and including the performance of IRK Performing Reflection in the program of the 27th Ring Ring festival may have been our venture of the year.
For the third evening, we knew it would be excellently attended, as one of the heroes of Ring Ring, Otomo Yoshihide, was coming to town. He has performed at the festival multiple times, and his concerts with the group Ground Zero (1997) and with Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura (2000) are still talked about.
This time, in line with the main idea of this year’s festival, Otomo came with the young saxophonist and improviser Chris Pitsiokos, who lives and works in Berlin. Marina Džukljev drew our attention to Pitsiokos, as she increasingly spends time in Berlin, where she plays and records with local musicians, as well as one our “special advisor” from Berlin, who regularly attends concerts of this “ringring” kind of music.
We knew that the second concert of that evening, on May 19th, would meet the high expectations of the local audience. However, uncertainty regarding the first concert was sparked by the “Serbia Against Violence” protest, which gathered 60,000 people in Belgrade during the afternoon. There was concern that not everyone would be able to make it to the start of the evening after the protest, for the performance of Jesper Nordberg Trio. This ensemble had never performed outside of Sweden and Denmark before, and its two younger members were somewhat known to Serbian audience only through collaborations with some of our Roma musicians.
Despite everything, the hall was packed to the brim, and the great reaction of the audience carried the trio, whose debut album was released just two days before the performance, making their concert at Ring Ring their first opportunity for promotion.
Then came the expected auditory and visual assault – Pitsiokos and Yoshihide. It’s exciting to listen to them, but also to observe all the possible ways they produce sounds. Yoshihide on turntables / we haven’t seen that in Belgrade for 23 years! “Ring Ring style”…
Although ticket presales suggested that Saturday would be the least attended day, it turned out to be just a trick. Because the Ring Ring audience eagerly comes, often buying tickets on the spot. Moreover, each successful previous evening enhances the desire of attendees to come to the next concert.
One of the ideas that has guided us from the very beginning is supporting local musicians, promoting the local scene, as well as collaborating with other local projects, initiatives, and organizations. One such project, which has existed for several years and is mostly associated with the Ciglana club, is Muzika iz unutrašnjosti. This open project/band/initiative, led by Bratislav Radovanović and Branislav Radojković, both regular attendees of the Ring Ring festival, deserved an invitation, not only for their musical quality but also for their perseverance and enthusiasm to create a broader base for the further development of the contemporary and improvised music scene in Serbia through collaboration with local musicians.
Further strengthened by Ring Ring veteran, Aleksandar “Aca” Škorić, whose European reputation far surpasses his status in his homeland, Muzika iz unutrašnjosti attracted a large number of fans, friends, and curious individuals on the penultimate evening of Ring Ring, May 20th, who wanted to discover what lay behind such an unusual name. What they found was a furious free jazz energy, with heart and soul on the plate. The sextet sounded hot to the point of sizzling, with excitement in the audience. Viktor Kiš, a visual artist from Belgrade, joined in with a transistor, walking through scales and sounds.
Then, in the middle of the hall, Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler set up their synthesizers. The audience settled right next to them, quickly forming improvised concentric circles, and the quadraphonic sound setup added an extra attraction.
Interestingly, Lehn had only played on stage once before – with the Konk Pack trio in 2002 – and every subsequent time (there were three so far), he always played on the floor of the same hall.
The atmosphere in the lobby and outside the building was once again reminiscent of the years before Ring Ring’s temporary relocation to the Student Cultural Center (SKC): concerts, basketball, protests were being discussed, memories of previous festivals were being evoked, and CDs were being bought…
When it comes to merchandise, the largest merchandise booth ever at the festival was hosted by PoiL Ueda on the last night of the 27th edition, on May 21st. CDs, vinyl records, T-shirts, souvenirs – a true professional approach. Sales corresponded accordingly. However, there wouldn’t have been such extensive sales if the concert hadn’t been phenomenal. The incredible combination of the French alternative rock band and Japanese oral tradition was very attractive. Following their successful performance at WOMEX last year, this quintet has performed at several festivals on two continents during the 2023 tour so far.
And then, finally, there was the concert that had been labelled as a “Last Minute concert” just three days before the start of the festival. When you don’t know the budget until the beginning of the festival, organization can seem like alchemy. But we’ve been in this business for several decades… Ideas are never enough, and neither are great musicians. Especially those who want to perform at the festival. Franz Hautzinger had expressed a desire several months earlier to perform in Belgrade in the year he celebrates his 60th birthday. Surely, he didn’t expect our invitation to look like this:
(Sunday, May 14th, 2023)
“Hello Franz, are you available to perform at the festival next Sunday? We are unsure about the budget, but we’re hoping to have you play alongside Leonel Kaplan, the Argentinian trumpet player who lives here. You met him before, but you two haven’t played together yet, right?”
After a few minutes, enough to check his calendar, Franz replied: “Yes, I am coming! Can you fly me the day before?”
And so it was agreed. We had a world premiere for the festival closing, with two outstanding musicians. Spending time with them the previous evening was wonderful, and the concert… Or was it a performing act? Again, acoustic and again in the middle of the hall. What a way to end the festival!
by Ring Ring | 08.05.2023.
The 27th Ring Ring, an international festival of new music, will be held in Belgrade, at the Jewish Cultural Center Oneg Shabbat and Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade, from May 17 to 21, 2023.
. . .
The Ring Ring festival continues on the path it has been on since 1996, giving space and time to contemporary, different and unconventional music. Towards the end of its third decade of living, as well as working on enriching the Serbian cultural life with rare content, the 27th Ring Ring brings a lot of new, fresh ideas and current events from around the world.
The program of the 27th edition will include nine concerts by local and foreign musicians and various collaborations and projects. Artists from Germany, Japan, Denmark, Slovenia, USA, Iran, Croatia, Sweden, Holland, Austria, Serbia and France will perform, among them some of the veterans of the European and world scene of improvised, experimental, free-jazz and avant-garde acoustic, electronic and acoustic-electronic music, such as Otomo Yoshihide or Thomas Lehn, who themselves have already performed at the Ring Ring festival as part of other bands and projects.
The festival will also host excellent musicians of the younger generation, who are just developing their careers or appearing in some completely new projects. Such bands with mostly younger artists (some younger than 30) include: TiTiTi, /kry, IRK Performing Reflection, and Jesper Nordberg Trio, who will release their debut album “TRIO” on the opening day of the 27th Ring Ring.
The concert of the young Croatian artist Ivar Roban Križić and his group IRK Performing Reflection is realized through the EFFEA project, another European project involving the Ring Ring Association.
Chris Pitsiokos also belongs to the young generations, whom we will listen to in a duo with three decades older Otomo.
Besides allowing its audience to listen live to representatives of contemporary music from various parts of the world, Ring Ring also gives a nice space to local performers. This time, we will listen to the band Muzika iz unutrašnjosti, which in the last two years has been honing its artistic expression with regular performances in the famous Belgrade club Ciglana. Also, for the fourth time at the festival we will listen to the Serbian pianist Marina Džukljev, an increasingly recognized name on the international scene, now in an exciting collaboration with the Slovenian trio TiTiTi.
Collaborations are precisely one of the characteristics of the Ring Ring festival, both ad hoc and some quite fresh, but also long-lasting ones, such as we will listen to on May 20 at the concert of Thomas Len and Marcus Schmickler, an analog-digital electronic duo that is active since the first meeting, in 1998, while both artists cherish their numerous other, separate projects.
Perhaps the most intriguing collaboration that will mark this year’s program is a combination of the experimental rock band PoiL and the artist Junko Ueda, a famous interpreter of Japanese medieval epics with the satsuma biwa instrument, and the Buddhist vocal tradition shomyo. The French-Japanese project PoiL Ueda released the self-titled album in early March, and now their schedule is full of concerts around the world, attracting more and more attention from the audience, media and festival organizers.
The ticket price for a single evening (from May 18 to 21) is 800 dinars. The price of the complete set of festival tickets is 2,800 dinars. Admission to the first evening (May 17) is free and requires advance registration in order to be placed on the list. Tickets can be purchased via the Tickets.rs website.
The festival is organized by the Ring Ring Association and the Music Information Centre of Serbia, and support is provided by: City of Belgrade, EFFEA/European Union, Goethe Institute, Austrian Cultural Forum, Zavod Sploh, Jewish Cultural Center “Oneg Shabbat” and RTS/Radio Belgrade 3.
. . .
THE PROGRAMME
May 17, 8:30 p.m, Studio 6 of Radio Belgrade
TiTiTi feat. Marina Džukljev
May 18, 8 p.m, Jewish Cultural Center
/kry / IRK Performing Reflection
May 19, 8 p.m, Jewish Cultural Center
Jesper Nordberg Trio / Otomo Yoshihide & Chris Pitsiokos
May 20, 8 p.m, Jewish Cultural Center
Muzika iz unutrašnjosti / Thomas Lehn & Marcus Schmickler
May 21, 8 p.m, Jewish Cultural Center
PoiL Ueda / Last minute concert
by Ring Ring | 18.04.2023.
Respected cultural workers from Serbia, Bojan Đorđević and Marija Vitas, were awarded the prestigious Budapest Ritmo Award 2023. The award was given on April 13, 2023, in the capital of Hungary, at the famous world music festival Budapest Ritmo.
. . .
The Budapest Ritmo festival had its first edition in 2016. It is an event that is successfully and ambitiously led and developed by the association Hangvető, known for many high-quality European projects, including the multi-year project “MOST – The Bridge For Balkan Music”.
This widely famous project (2020 – 2023) made the Balkan world music scene significantly more visible and helped numerous artists, festivals, concert venues and music experts to raise their work to a higher level, giving them a serious “wind at the back”. Some of the names from Serbia that received support through “MOST” are: Naked, Rodjenice, Shira utfila, Lenhart Tapes, Alice in WonderBand, Etnofest, Todo Mundo, Zeman Fest, Malomfesztivál, Kvaka 22…
The festival itself, which had its eight edition from April 12 – 15, 2023, every year offers a lavish program consisting of concerts, conferences, film screenings and other accompanying activities, including the “Budapest Ritmo Award”, given to prominent individuals, for their significant contribution to the world music scene.
Previous winners include: Ben Mandelson (2017), Simon Broughton (2018), Hilde Björkum (2019) and Helen Sildna (2022). Cultural workers from Serbia, Bojan Đorđević and Marija Vitas, life and professional partners, joined the list this year as the fifth award winners.
They received the award, symbolically, together with their daughter, minor M. Đ, who has been regularly present at festivals throughout Europe since the first year of her life, including almost all previous editions of the “Budapest Ritmo” festival.
Bojan Đorđević and Marija Vitas were awarded for their dedicated, long-term work on the world music scene, which includes continuous promotion of traditional music, cultural heritage and the world music scene of Serbia and the Balkans.
Their work is very diverse and includes various activities: the magazine Etnoumlje, the radio show Disco 3000 (Radio Belgrade 3), the world music festivals Todo Mundo (Belgrade) and Pocket Globe (Novi Sad), the Ring Ring festival (Belgrade), the Music Information Centre of Serbia, World Music Association of Serbia, writing about music for various local and foreign media, field work, Balkan World Music Chart, projects like music albums and books, promotion of artists abroad, etc.
The “Budapest Ritmo Award” was given to them on April 13, during the second festival evening, in the popular Budapest club Szimpla Kert, in the presence of numerous delegates of the festival, musicians, journalists and representatives of the “Hangveto” association.
by Ring Ring | 06.04.2023.
In addition to the current project Sounds of Europe, Ring Ring Association recently became a partner in another European project – EFFEA. Thanks to the latter one, the 27th Ring Ring festival will host a concert by Croatian artist Ivar Roban Križić and his international ensemble. The concert will be held at the Jewish Cultural Center in Belgrade on May 18, 2023.
. . .
A large number of international projects have been realized in the last fifteen years with special programs of the European Union to support culture, cooperation and exchange. In the period from 2010 to 2016, our Association participated in two such projects (Phonart and Euterpe). Since last year, the Association has been a partner in the four-year project “Sounds of Europe”, and this year we also joined the EFFEA project.
Someone, obviously, understood very well how important culture is, and therefore, recently, new programs have been constantly being designed to support culture and the mobility of artists. One of such projects is EFFEA (European Festivals Fund for Emerging Artists), designed to support young artists, but also cooperation between festivals.
The advantages of this program are its frequency, faster decision-making by the center in Brussels, smaller and more operational budgets, focus on one artist or group…
In the implementation of the EFFEA project, in this particular case, three European festivals, three prestigious manifestations when it comes to new music, electronics, electroacoustics and avant-garde jazz will collaborate: Music Biennale Zagreb (Croatia), then 180° – Laboratory for Innovative Art (Bulgaria). and our Ring Ring festival.
The idea of the partnership of this part of the EFFEA program is to support the project of the young Croatian composer and double bass player Ivar Roban Križić, called IRK Performing Reflection.
This thirty-two-year-old artist will present his project first in Croatia, in Zagreb (April 17), then in Serbia, in Belgrade (May 18) and finally in Bulgaria, in Sofia (July).
In Belgrade, this IRK Performing Reflection line-up will perform: Ivar Roban Križić (double bass), Nikola Vuković (trumpet), Bojan Krhlanko (drums, percussion, electronics) and Thomas Grill (electronics).
It is an international team, made up of musicians from Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Austria. The last-mentioned country, which regularly provides great support to artists, is also the meeting place for members of the IRK Performing Reflection project. Ivar Roban Križić himself is currently attending doctoral studies in Vienna, at the University of Music and Performing Arts.
In 2021, Ivar released his debut album “Sound” for “Cantus d.o.o.”, and the trumpet player Nikola Vuković also collaborates on the album. What could be extracted as the basic characteristic of Ivar’s artistic activity is sound and improvisation, even without that “and”.
“Both the musician-improviser and the listener should leave aside previously formed aesthetic judgments and institutionalized forms of knowledge in an attempt to reach a transient state of existence, an almost ritual connection with subconscious elements that open the way to improvised expression” – emphasizes Ivar – “In this sense, improvisation reveals openness to otherness, externalization and continuous self-transcendence. Through this process, we are in constant communication with ourselves, the tradition of our ancestors and the progress of our contemporaries. The sounds that arise as a result of these interactions fulfill a special need that goes beyond the purely musical: the sense of occasion and the ritual function associated with it are an attempt to create a microcosm”.
The performance of IRK Performing Reflection, at the 27th edition of the Ring Ring festival, will be held on May 18, 2023, at the Jewish Cultural Center, from 8 p.m. Information about tickets for this evening as well as for the entire festival will be available soon.
