Family program: a birthday, plays, short films and short performances

WHITE ROOM

Orange 'Ear is a Berlin concert and recording series created by Jo and Frank. Since its beginning, the project has invited musicians into an intimate setting and documented their live performances with a carefully built multi-camera recording setup.

For nine_days, Jo and Frank bring their stage, large screen and a selectable archive of earlier Orange 'Ear recordings into the WHITE ROOM. Visitors can choose what to watch and hear rather than follow a fixed screening order. The archive remains available on 27 September and may continue into the working day on 28 September if the room allows it.

MIKROPHONIE II

Philipp Hartmann and PHØNIX16   Germany 2021   Super8 and HD   14 minutes 50 seconds

An old Volkswagen Beetle crosses the Alps toward Italy, accompanied by Karlheinz Stockhausen and the voices of PHØNIX16. Built from Super8 found footage, MIKROPHONIE II turns a journey, a car and a piece of music into a compact music film with its own physical humour.

The film appears as a short intervention during the birthday rather than as part of a formal film block.

MADRASHA

Philipp Hartmann and Timo Kreuser  Germany 2022 Approximately 10 minutes

MADRASHA is a short music film based on Dieter Schnebel's vocal composition of the same name. Eight performers occupy separate fields within a vertical frame. Voices, faces and gestures pass between them; animals enter the image and answer the singers with sounds and movements of their own.

The strict division of the screen produces a playful succession of disappearances, echoes and unlikely correspondences. Like MIKROPHONIE II, MADRASHA enters the birthday as a brief interruption that can coexist with movement and noise around it.

Set shorts of music, children may move and speak, food may be served, and people may arrive or leave while a work is happening. Interruptibility is therefore part of the form rather than a disruption from outside it.

Frank creates sound in the passage between noise and music. Analogue samples, no-input mixing, electronic devices and hints of melody or rhythm form shifting structures. He also plays a modified resonator guitar whose strings are driven into continuous vibration by a motor, a coil and a closed circuit, changing both the instrument's sustain and the way it can be handled.

Jo constructs crooked-tone songs from field recordings and plays the glasambel, an instrument she developed for her live performances. She searches for sound in overlooked materials and situations: vibrating objects, electromagnetic fields, weather, mechanisms and technical errors. These recordings become a terrain of fragile detail, dirt, rhythm and unexpected pitch.

Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell   France and Germany 2024   213 minutes

In 2018, the planned airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes was cancelled after years of resistance. Between 2022 and 2023, Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell spent extended periods within the ZAD, the zone to defend that had formed around that struggle. Direct Action observes what collective life looks like after this victory and as new ecological struggles emerge.

The film stays with farming, building, baking, meetings, maintenance and the other repeated work through which a community continues. Its patient images resist reducing political action to scenes of confrontation, while the violence surrounding the movement remains present, most directly through Sainte-Soline and the struggle against water privatisation.

At 213 minutes, Direct Action is the first major durational commitment of nine_days. Its relation to commons does not need to be explained in advance; it can be encountered through the life, labour and organisation the film takes time to observe.

18:00 to 20:00   Maximum 15 participants   Registration required

Siko Setyanto leads the first of two movement workshops. The sessions are open to people with different kinds of experience and are not reserved for professional dancers. They work with bodily expression, freedom and the possibility of finding quiet through movement.

Siko is a dancer and choreographer from Jakarta whose practice moves between contemporary dance and multidisciplinary performance. He founded DRKR Kolektif and co-founded Dansity Dance Company, and has worked with the Eun-Me Ahn Company, Gabber Modus Operandi and Tianzhuo Chen.

After the workshop

29/30 is 20nine30's two-night live-recording format. The same two projects perform on consecutive evenings, and both performances are recorded. The first night can change the second: decisions about sound, duration, arrangement or attention can return in another form twenty-four hours later.

материја live recording I

материја begins a solo work made for two consecutive recording nights. The first performance is complete in itself, while also producing the knowledge from which the second can depart. The work is recorded live in THE CHAPEL and returns on 30 September.

Hilary C/B live recording I

Hilary C/B is a machine musician and sound artist who composes idiosyncratic, left-field sonic explorations in real time. For 29/30, Hilary performs on both nights and both versions are recorded. The return on the following evening allows the work to retain the risk of a live set while gaining a second encounter with the same room and recording situation.

in the lounge of the chapel

KATALIN is one of the eight forty-minute sound sculptures of radioPHØNIX, a project by Timo Kreuser and PHØNIX16. Its compositions were divided into forty-eight parts, distributed through radio stations around the world and reassembled through transmission, reception, interference, delay and dropout.

For nine_days, the finished KATALIN sculpture is entrusted to a new person at the faders and played in full through THE CHAPEL. Live diffusion becomes an interpretation: the person at the desk is responsible for how the work reaches the loudspeakers and moves through the room. Microphones capture the result so that the release also becomes a reamp and a new recording.

материја and Hilary C/B return to the same two-night recording process. Both perform again and both performances are recorded. The point is not to reproduce the previous night, but to let the first encounter remain active inside the second.

материја live recording II

материја returns with the solo work first recorded on 29 September. The second version can respond to what the room, the microphones and the first performance made audible, while remaining a complete performance in its own right.

Hilary C/B live recording II

Hilary C/B performs a second real-time composition in THE CHAPEL. The two recordings preserve related but non-identical states of the work, made one night apart under the same 29/30 principle.

WHITE ROOM   7pm   Live recording

PHØNIX makes a live recording in the WHITE ROOM with an audience present. The session keeps preparation to what the recording itself requires. It is not a concert format moved into the festival; listeners share the concentration, risk and immediacy of a recording being made in real time.

Alchemic Fiction 1 is an eleven-track collection of electroacoustic music and poetry assembled by the Berlin ensemble Alchemic Fiction. The material comes from a collective recording session at Cashmere Radio.

The compilation is a benefit for the Ulm5. All sales support legal fees and prison care for five activists held in pre-trial detention after a September 2025 protest at the Ulm facility of Elbit Systems Deutschland. Crow, a member of Alchemic Fiction, is among those detained.

PAULINE is played in its complete forty-minute form. Like KATALIN, it belongs to radioPHØNIX, whose sound sculptures emerged from compositions distributed in parts to radio stations and reassembled through the conditions of broadcast and reception.

A new person is entrusted with the faders. The finished sculpture passes through new hands, loudspeakers and the acoustics of THE CHAPEL before microphones record it again. This recording is not an incidental document of the release; it becomes another state of PAULINE. The work appears only on 1 October during nine_days.