2024 Sonic Shaman: TheCube Forum Music Festival

Nataša Grujović & Steve Moore（LU/ US）

 The duo of Nataša Grujović and Steve Moore first performed together in 2022, as part of a tribute to the late Luxembourgish artist and composer Steve Kaspar. By 2023, they had begun the process of composing their first original works which would eventually become Event Horizon, a series of pieces premiered at Casino Luxembourg and performed later at KulturFabrik in Esch. While there are many shared elements with electro-acoustic music via synthesizers and digital processing, the duo’s primary force comes from its use of resonance in acoustic spaces and in the instruments they play—accordion and trombone—to create harmonic fields into which melodic elements are introduced, encompassing spiritual jazz, ritualistic drone, and western classical traditions.

Dankwart（LU)

Sam Erpelding (*1992, Luxembourg) is a sound engineer, sound artist, and eco-acoustician. As an electric guitarist he performs in various formations, including the trio “ARGON”. Under the pseudonym “Dankwart”, Sam has been publishing his compositions since 2014.
He completed his bachelor studies in sound engineering at SAE Vienna. In 2018 he completed the course in Computer Music and Electronic Media at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. In 2019, he completed the master’s program in Digital Media Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten (Au).
Since 2018, he has presented his sound art and research at venues such as the Casino Luxembourg, the Donau-Auen National Park Visitor Center, and at festivals such as Ars Electronica, Luxembourg Art Week and the 5th Ecoacoustic Congress in Madrid.
In 2020, he won the ORF-Ö1 Radio Art Competition together with the language artist Elif San. He is co-founder of the Luxembourgish art collective D’Kréiennascht and since 2021 member of the radio art network Radiôme.
He is currently doing his PhD at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz in cooperation with the University of Salzburg, the Donau-Auen and Kalkalpen National Park (Au). As part of his current research, he received a research grant from Nationalpark Austria.

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (IS)

Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir (b. 1987) is an artist, composer, and poet. A graduate of the Iceland University of the Arts, she is the author of five books. Her work has been exhibited and performed at the Reykjavík Art Museum, Kling & Bang, the Living Art Museum, Hafnarborg, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, the Nobel Prize Museum, Kulturhuset in Stockholm and Kulturhuset in Oslo and more. She received the poetry prize Ljóðstaf Jóns úr Vör in 2017 and was nominated for the Bernard Heidsieck–Centre Pompidou Literary Prize in 2021.
Sigurðardóttir’s practice evokes the transience of dreams, blending multiple worlds and artistic disciplines into one. Her works simultaneously appear and disappear, their results often evading one’s grasp as different perspectives, timelines, and storylines come together in a multifaceted whole that envelops the viewer in a familiar yet alien way. Like the surface of water, Sigurðardóttir’s works embody unseen depths while also reflecting the vastness above in a momentary glimmer. Only an afterimage seems to remain floating there, but an undercurrent looms, hidden, intangible like a nod or a wink from a stranger in the distance.
Through her innovative interdisciplinary practice, Sigurðardóttir addresses spiritual, esoteric aspects of human experience on personal and societal levels. She explores ways of moving closer to our intuition at a time when technology continues to isolate us from one another and close us off from ourselves. As such, her work often touches on the abstract and the surreal.

Umeda Tetsuya（JP）

From capturing environments, architectural structures, sound, light and human behaviour, the source of Tetsuya Umeda’s work ranges widely. Working actively both in and outside of Japan, Umeda remodels installations out of daily products, engages viewers with his interactive performance pieces, and collaborates with musicians using his own originally produced implements.

Tetsuya Umeda was born in Kumamoto, Japan in 1980.He studied in Osaka, where he is based today. He has held a number of significant solo exhibitions including “Umeda Tetsuya: On the origin of voices” Fukuoka Art Museum, Japan (2019), “See, Look at Observed what Watching is” Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, U.S.A. (2016), “0sai -Age0-” Breaker Project, Osaka, Japan (2014)

Bani Haykal (SG)

Bani Haykal experiments with text + music. As an artist and musician, Bani considers music as material, and his projects revolve around human-machine intimacies through various forms of interfacing and interaction. He is a member of b-quartet.

Manifestations of his research culminate into works of various forms encompassing installation, poetry, and performance. In his capacity as a collaborator and a soloist, Bani has participated in festivals including MeCA Festival (Japan), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Media/Art Kitchen (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Japan), Liquid Architecture, and Singapore International Festival of Arts (Singapore) among others.

Clara Emery＋徐嘉駿（US/TW）

Clara Emery (b. 1997; Seattle, WA) uses large format photography and experimental film to capture fragments along the continuum of visible and invisible realms. Drawing from tales inherited from the Gila Wilderness, and traditions adopted in childhood from the Pacific Northwest and Taiwan, she weaves together history, memory, and superstition. Emery graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2019 with a degree in Photography, and received her MFA in Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. She recently completed a Fulbright creative arts fellowship in Taiwan.

Senyawa（ID）

Senyawa produce experimental practices by exploring tribal, primitive sounds with industrial music in the most powerful way. By weaving folkloric moods with various shades of modern genre hybrids, Senyawa has been navigating unexplored musical terrain for more than a decade. Their sound is comprised of Rully Shabara’s deft extended vocal explorations punctuating the frenetic sounds of instrument builder, Wukir Suryadi’s modern-primitive instrumentation.
Senyawa have performed at many notable festivals all over the world such as Primavera Festival in Barcelona to smaller but important venues such as Café Oto in London. Senyawa also won multiple awards such as the Green Room Award for Best Music Composition and Sound Design in 2018 and 2017 Ars Electronica Award for Digital Music and Sound.
They have collaborated and performed with many notable musicians such as Stephen O`Malley, Robert AA Lowe, Otomo Yosihide, Rabih Beaini, Damo Suzuki, Justin Vernon, Oren Ambarchi, and many others. In 2012, filmmaker Vincent Moon made a film about them entitled “Calling the New Gods”
During the pandemic, Senyawa released new album `Alkisah` with over 40 labels around the world and quoted by The New York Times as the new global jukebox for the future of international music industry.

Nuh Peace（TH）

NúÚ P3A☭3 [NUH PEACE], a Bangkok-based multidisciplinary artist, fearlessly pushes the boundaries of art and performance, crafting a unique blend of fashion, performance, makeup, video, and party settings. Their thought-provoking work depicts the soundscapes of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and draws inspiration from marginalized groups such as the working class and queer culture, ranging from deconstructed club music to Saiyor music.

In late 2018, NUH PEACE pioneered “Cyber Baptism,” a conceptual space blending themes of political unrest, queerness, and religious iconography, manifested as an experimental post-apocalyptic church party. In early 2022, they broadened their creative scope to engage with the emerging research field of “Resilience Discourse,” uncovering the way in which neoliberalism deregulates concepts like “diversity” and “multiculturalism” as widespread norms for the return of human capital, status, and other forms of recognition and recompense. They have been selected to participate in transmediale x CTM Festival 2023 night at Berghain, showcasing their cutting-edge collaborative project M3MBAP, which critiques contemporary pop culture’s recycling of cultural waste into new resources. Recently, NUH PEACE was selected to spin as one of the DJs at Boiler Room Bangkok 2023.

Asep Nayak（ID）

West Papuan producer, he has been redefining the local ritualistic Wisisi music using a cracked FL Studio of his home region Wamena. Like many other Wisisi music producers, he released his works on YouTube and shared them using bluetooth phones.

He performed for the first time at the Biennale Jogja in Yogyakarta 2021, followed with successful shows at Joyland’s Ravepasar Bali, Pestapora Jakarta in 2022-2023, CTM Festival Berlin in 2023, and Rising Festival Melbourne in 2023. His first full-length album was released by Yes No Wave Music in 2023. Asep Nayak is the main character in an award-winning documentary film Wisisi Nit Meke.

Wok the Rock（ID）

Wok The Rock is an artist active across the fields of visual, sound, and social. He is interested in developing collaborative, experimental, and interdisciplinary works to bring together diverse artistic practices in an equal, open-access, and sustainable way. Wok is a co-founder of artist collective Ruang MES 56 in Yogyakarta and runs the music label Yes No Wave Music. He was the curator of Biennale Jogja XIII in 2015 and Nusasonic 2019-2023.

Kamal Sabran（MY）

Kamal Sabran is a Malaysian artist-academic-researcher. He received his PhD in Art and Design (New Media) from Universiti Teknologi MARA. His work is interdisciplinary and exists at the intersections of art, science, technology and spirituality. His art-research work focuses on art-based interventions for mental health and well-being. Experimental music, performance art, and electronic installations are among his artistic endeavours. He received the Malaysian National Art Gallery’s “Best New Media Artist Award” for Young and Contemporary in 2004, as well as the “Best NOKIA Music Video Director” award in 2005. In 2005, he was an Artist-in-Residence at the Malaysian National Space Agency, and in 2015, he was a musician-in-residence at the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, California. In 2022, he has been invited to participate in the Venice Art Biennale in Italy. He is also the founder of the “Space Gambus Experiment,” an experimental music/sound art collective, and the Ipoh Experimental Art School, a creative space focusing on producing experimental art projects. He has scored award-winning films with directors such as Mamat Khalid, Shanjhey Kumar, Tan Chui Mui, Ho Yuhang, Pete Teo, among many others. He is currently an editor for Wacana Seni Arts Discourse Journal and a senior lecturer at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang.