The seventh edition of Seanaps Festival will take place from 21-24 September 2023 in Leipzig.

Under the title Composing Future, the festival highlights transdisciplinary approaches in experimental music, art, and culture. Over four days and across six different locations in the west of Leipzig, Seanaps Festival will offer an open, experimental, and evolving forum of concerts, installations, interventions, film screenings, workshops, listening sessions, label market, club night, talks, DJ sets and an onsite radio station.

Festival Opening: 21. September • Techne Sphere Leipzig, 18:30

The festival begins on Thursday with the opening of the Composing Future exhibition in Techne Sphere Leipzig. As part of the opening, Anna Schimkat will present her work A Timeless Movement in Socks for the first time after a yearlong research residency in the USA. Over the course of three hours, the installation will become an instrument and starting point for performance.

The exhibition also includes Plant Music, a four-channel sound installation by the Düsseldorf-based Japanese artist Miki Yui. The sound work was initially created as a radio piece as part of beuys21, an exhibition series commemorating the 100th birthday of Josef Beuys. The work was developed into a multi-channel installation for Manifesta 2022, which Yui has adapted for the site of Seanaps Festival. »The plant music subtly blends with the surrounding soundscape and invites visitors to listen contemplatively and discover the musical qualities of their surroundings.«

The sound sculpture Decay 2022 – 22424 by the Leipzig artist duo Hauptmeier|Recker thematizes the unimaginably long decay process and lifespan of radioactive materials.

In South Korean artist and director Jane Jin Kaisen’s film Burial of This Order, a group of people come together to perform a burial ritual in an abandoned tourist destination on Jeju Island, with the goal of overturning an unbearable world order governed by hierarchy, division, and destruction.

Concerts: 22. – 24. September • Westflügel, 18:00 – 23:00

Concerts will be held in Westflügel on three consecutive nights, beginning on Friday with the Australian sound artist Felicity Mangan. Mangan performs her interpretation of »bio-acoustic music« through a four-channel composition fed by the timbres and bio-rhythmic patterns of her field recordings. Next, the London-based multi-instrumentalist Damsel Elysium will use a range of tools including contrabass, violin, piano, field recording, and anti-colonial practices to explore alternative communication and connections with physical space and nature. The performance is presented in cooperation with the French label Latency. The first concert night will conclude with Wild Terrier Orchestra, the latest project from Dimitris Papadatos aka Jay Glass Dubs. The performance is structured through contributions from a large cast of musicians and artists, incorporating surrealistic techniques, unconnected musical ideas and fragmented splinters of sound, delivering a musical discourse on the effectiveness of improvisation.

Saturday’s program will open with the USA-born composer and radio artist Wilted Woman’s mix of noise, club sounds and electroacoustics. This will be followed by the Egyptian musician Maurice Louca, who searches for calm amidst avant-garde jazz and complex rhythms in his performances. Afterwards, the Belgian musician and instrument builder Jochem Baelus will present Slumberland, his project exploring the dynamic cosmos between krautrock abstractions and post-punk.

The closing concerts of Composing Future are once again dedicated to close listening, with two additional premieres suited to the title of the festival. CV & JAB is the duo of Christina Vantzou und John Also Bennett. Using acoustic instrumentation and an extensive sound genealogy, CV & JAB compose ambient musical auras which reconfigure the tri-dimensionality that surrounds us, creating comfort to connect us emotionally. During Seanaps they debut the live performance of their third collaborative album Κλίμα (Klima). Afterwards, the electronic musician Stefan Schneider and the bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer join forces as So Sner in a musical dialogue between deep frequencies and minimal rhythmic aesthetics. The festival ends with the premiere of the new collaborative project by tenor saxophonist Damian Dalla Torre, who already worked together with twenty musicians on his debut album Happy Floating.

For the first time, the light design for the entire concert program in Westflügel will be developed by the Wisp-Kollektiv for intersectional and digital art and culture in Leipzig.

The concert program is embedded in a transdisciplinary and multidimensional supporting program of workshops, interventions, a film program, talks and a label market by Fachmarkt für Kulturgut.

Interventions: 22. – 24. September • Westwerk, 14:00 – 18:00

During the festival, the sound artist Yun-Chu Liang will continue her interventionist research IN-Between / Dazwischen 眾聲相 at the big hall of Westwerk on the question of mutual care work. Her journey to exploring care in daily life began in 2022, by engaging the local community in Berlin in listening sessions in public spaces. Liang thematizes the urban environment and the ways in which people encounter and interact with each other in high density areas. For her intervention, she will invite the public to drink tea together and listen to each other.

Screenings: 22. – 24. September • Techne Sphere Leipzig, 14:00 – 18:00

The film Burial of This Order by the South Korean visual artist and director Jane Jin Kaisen will be screened several times over the course of the festival. It is a sonorous and pictoral 25:30 minutes film, which questions the current conditions poetically and activistically. On Sunday, the documentary films FLUX from Miki Yui and Nathalia Favaro as well as El sonido de un valle / The sound of a valley by Selu Herraiz will be shown as part of the discourse format Beyond Labelwork. In a discussion moderated by the Danish musicologist Jacob Eriksen, the artists will share insights into their artistic work and the interwoven ideas of sound, territory, environment, listening as cultural practice and community.

Workshops: 23. September • Luru Kino

Felicity Mangan will offer insights into her recording process, methodology, and compositional styles on Saturday in the workshop Compos’ting Future. At noon, the Spanish curator and artist Selu Herraiz will host Rumor, a poetic active listening session. On Sunday, the musician, producer, and label manager Lieven Martens will offer an interactive and experimental workshop session on forms of listening and expression with Mo(ve)ments and Memories, listening and connecting IRL.

Label Market: 23. – 24. September • Temporarium, 14:00 – 18:00

Over the weekend, Temporarium, a collective atelier in Westwerk, will host a Label Market featuring local and international labels from the festival’s orbit such as Pointless Geometry, Kasual Plastik, Morphine Records, TAL Records, Ana Ott, IN:EX, Shell Tapes & Recordings, Interceptor Editions, Aquarium, Prepaid Records, Golden Doom Records and more. On Sunday, the Spanish musician and performer Don The Tiger and the new performance duo of US-American artist Julia Santoli and Leipziger artist Lorenz Lindner will temporarily transform the Temporarium into a participatory soundspace.

Radio: 22. – 24. September • Online & UKW, 12:00 – 17:00

Seanaps Radio accompanies the festival’s diverse program from Friday to Sunday with talks, live recordings, radio concerts and interviews forming the creative on-air counterpart to the off-air goings on. It will be broadcasting daily from 12:00 to 17:00 from Westwerk. Seanaps Radio can be heard online via Sphere Radio and on the FM airwaves of Radio Blau in Leipzig (99.2) and Radio Corax in Halle/Saale (95.9).

Club Night: 23. September • Txpx, 23:00 – 04:00

Strange beats, rushing patterns and eccentric sounds can be heard during the festival club night at T×px on Saturday with (live) sets from artists including Weird Dust, GAŁGAŁ, and more.