takingthingsapart

It feels like a different landscape when I think of initiating this specific occasion of coming together. That was then, this is now. There have been multiple shifts – both macro and micro – the last two years as waves swelling and calming at different moments in different parts of the world with different alignments to time. It’s no longer clear how to negate what this was supposed to be and what it has become.

Taking Things Apart:

Over the course of a three day period in ausland, a collaged group of individuals and collaborations present new sound works. Each day is shaped with micro-themes that hope to hold a shared space together: from the fine tuned balance between improvisation and composition to the physical form of the record and what it means to keep record, from ways to detect a language to ways to detect a space to navigating the ways that we find one another. It’s a glimpse of how to access sound, it’s a sharing of sonic practices.

I guess I’m speaking of a landscape that continually shifts and negates muddy waters of uncertainty. An uncertainty of how to articulate something while it’s still happening. How to anticipate the volume of waves when they are still pulsing.

Listening to. Tending to. Monitoring. Signaling. Casting. Remembering.

This festival brings together people whose artistic practice is continual and finds microcosmic pockets of navigation through the macrocosmic ebbs and flows. On the following pages is an introduction to varied processes in making when composing, recomposing or reimagining.

Somewhere I read that the deepest sound in the world ever to be recorded was caused by ice breaking off of a glacier: an ice quake.
The sound is named Bloop.
It was far louder than any whale noises, it’s distance measured approximately 4,800km.
These wavelengths were felt in different parts of the world with different alignments to time.
What a resonance.

my hope is to host a safe gathering shaped by listening and play.
Thanks to everyone who made this possible – above and beyond – and enjoy.

sincerely,
gretchen blegen

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Taking Things Apart is a microcosmic festival format meeting between different artists who work between practices of sound art, experimental music and the sonic. The festival is home to ausland, a collectively run space and venue in Berlin. Its first edition was in 2018 and was co-curated by Christina Ertl-Shirley, its second edition is still to come in November 2021. Taking Things Apart has been made possible with the support of Hauptstadtkulturfonds (2021); Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin – Amt for Weiterbildung und Kultur – Fachbereich Kunst und Kultur (2018); and Musikfonds e.V. (2018).

https://ausland-berlin.de/taking-things-apart