sound crystal
sound system / sonic sculpture
2020
SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin
sound crystal is an interactive sonic sculpture developed to encourage spontaneous emergence of sonic and performative rituals and music concerts, collectively exploring the de-colonial potential of listening. The sculpture synthesises pragmatic concerns of a sound system while exploring the basic geometrical forms and auditory hallucinations like Doppler Effect. The work is a semi-autonomous, futuristic vessel suggesting sound and listening as an aesthetic, technological, and collaborative project for outer and inner-space explorations. Occasionally activated by ILYICH through a series of performances and performance-lectures the Sound Crystal is an open-ended enquiry projecting itself from the future as an infrastructural connection between transmission and reception.
ILYICH is a space traveller of an ambiguous origin. Musician and storyteller ILYICH occasionally re-appears at the core of music performances, sonic rituals and project activations. Mysteriously entangled with this world, yet clearly not from here, ILYICH’s stories are identity slippages and anecdotes of struggle told from the multiple first-person narratives. Oscillating between recognisable electronic music and abstract sonic improvisations ILYICH can be often found at the core of an intimate listening session, a sound ritual, gallery or museum gathering, or on a larger club and festival stages around the world. In the framework of the exhibition and the Untraining the Ear Listening Sessions at SAVVY Contemporary, ILYICH has contributed a performance lecture “Sound and Thoughts” and an improvised electronic music set “Grounded Outer Space People”.
The work is a contribution to the RAUPENIMMERSATTISM exhibition at SAVVY Contemporary. The exhibition confronts the endless consumption of our societies and the affluence many hold at the expense of others’ poverty, a collective exhibition is composed as a result of ten months of research, grapplings, and reasonings together. The show unfolds as a choral questioning to challenge structural inequalities and stand alongside positions of vulnerability.
Sound Crystal contributors:
Anastasia Pilepchuk – ILYICH’s space helmet
Anna Simakova – ILYICH’s space suit
Byron Kalomamas – co-conception of the installation and structural design
Daria Zorkina – foto-documentation
Igor Kritskiy – foto-retouching
Jared Meier-Klodt – sound engineer
Maria Korovkina – project management
Raisa Galofre – foto-documentation
Rey Domurat – installation set up and live sound
Sonja Stadelmeier – foto-documentation
The project is supported by:
