AREPO: Gaps & Time

Tickets for AREPO: Gaps & Time

More info: New Ear’s website

Program:

According to the Hour – Harriet Steinke (2024)

d. 15min

Alice Down the Black Hole – Olivia Køppe (2023)

d. 14mins

to hold the sun in the palm of your hand – Arjan Singh Dogra (2024)

d. 8 mins

Portal – Ferdinand Schwarz (2022)

d. 22 mins

Additional Information:

to hold the sun in the palm of your hand – Arjan Singh Dogra

In January I was hiking in the hills near Berkeley when I met a magnificent tree positioned on an east-ward facing slope. This tree had 6 trunks emerging from its initial stem in a way that reminded me of fingers reaching up to grasp hold of something. As I came up to this tree, the sun was just about to set past the slope but had temporarily positioned itself perfectly in between the tree fingers, making it appear as if the tree hand was holding a small but bright ball of light. The sight was beautiful. The sun seemed so small in relation to this tree that had grabbed hold of it, but only for an instant. As long as it took me to admire how such an allignment flipped my of the marvelous heavenly body of the sun and the humble tree, one of many in a forest populated with millions, the sun had started to dip beyond the slope and only the memory of this experience remained. This piece is a tribute to those moments when forces beyond our reach naturally bring unattached elements from the periphery into focus, aligning them in a way that brings us new perspectives, and producing a temporary moment of clarity. –Arjan Singh

According to the Hour – Harriet Steinke

Written for AREPO as part of the 2024 Eighth Blackbird Creative Lab, this piece unfolds in sustained drone, with fragments of voice and interwoven melody. Its soundworld evokes the pull of midnight tides—patterns of waves rising and falling—while a slow, expansive melody emerges gradually from a single tone.

Alice Down the Black Hole – Olivia Køppe

“Alice Down the Black Hole is an audiovisual work for 4 musicians and video. Based on clips from film versions of Alice in Wonderland from 1903-1915, this work presents a fantasy of Alice’s journey into a black hole. The music starts as a faint and airy shadow, but as the work progresses, the instruments emerge both individually and collectively. Sounds and lines are established, interrupted, stretched, bent and woven in and out of each other until Alice reaches the bottom – if there is a bottom.” (O. Køppe)

Portal II – Ferdinand Schwarz
For four players and their voices, Portal is a cell-based work that cultivates constant interaction among performers while sustaining an intense, sculpturesque focus. The piece forms a swarm-like structure—not seeking forward progress, but instead revealing the full range of possibilities contained within the given material.