Resynthesising the Traditional. Unstable Hallucinations
curated by CTM
with:
Stefan Fraunberger
Dania
Marcin Pietruszewski
Lukas de Clerck
Saturday
12.09.2026
20:00–22:30
Doors open 19.30
Free entry
Betonhalle
CTM Festival has curated an evening threading elements of its long-term project Resynthesising the Traditional, which aims to explore how musicians can critically engage with traditions and heritage while confronting conservative views of culture as something resistant to transformative practices.
This evening brings together works that oeuvre along the gaps – in distortion, uncertainty, and narratives omitted within idealised versions of the past. Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerk explore the ancient Greco-Roman aulos that epitomises an exalted and unraveled state; Dania’s speculative research sonically reanimates Mesopotamian museum artefacts to imagine a soundscape of southern Iraq without colonial interference; Stefan Fraunberger’s long-term research on Transylvania’s relic pipe organs highlights material processes that have stretched beyond the instruments’ convoluted histories and nature-culture battlefields. Here, idealised versions of the past are distorted into unstable hallucinations.
20:00
Stefan Fraunberger
Quellgeister #4
Quellgeister (roughly translated as source spirits) is the name of the musical cycle that the composer Stefan Fraunberger has been developing on dilapidated pipe organs in abandoned fortress churches in Transylvania for over 25 years. Once built by German communities who subsequently fled the country during Romanian communist rule, the organs were left to the wilderness like stranded spaceships. Fraunberger sees these instruments in the liminal areas beyond nature and culture. His recordings focus not on preservation, but rather on speculation and the possibilities of new beginnings, as he considers the identity of objects as they become less tied to human significance. Each number of Quellgeister refers to a different deteriorated pipe-organ in a different transylvanian village – for this performance we will hear the newest iteration Quellgeister #4: Kuruzenauftstand accompanied by images of the decaying interiors and frescoes of the churches, morphed by machine learning.
20:45
Dania
Replica – Relic
With Replica – Relic, Dania explores an alternative approach to repatriation. Without consent from the British Museum, the artist surreptitiously took 3D scans of several Mesopotamian artifacts – items acquired from her homeland of southern Iraq. These scans became the blueprints for a series of reconstructed sculptures, enhanced with interactive sensors that allow her to reanimate the sonic memories embedded within each object. During her performance, Dania activates these sculptures as instruments, creating a long-form composition that spectrally resurrects the voices, resonances, and ecological memory of a landscape that has been systematically erased. Working with an ancient Mesopotamian tuning system that was documented on cuneiform tablets, alongside years of field recordings gathered from a distance, she imagines a sound world of southern Iraq unadulterated by colonial interference.
21:45
Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerck
Oto Aulos
Oto Aulos by Marcin Pietruszewski and Lukas de Clerck is a new composition for aulos and computer, using machine listening and machine processing techniques to transform the aulos’s live signal into a dynamically spatialised hybrid real-time environment. The aulos is an ancient Greco-Roman double-reeded pipe instrument, extinct for over a millennium and for which we have no sonic records. Through years of reconstruction through obsessive reed-making and experimental design, de Clerck has been seeking a contemporary reinvention of the instrument that turns historical speculation into sonic research, where microtonality, psychoacoustics, and shifting textures form a living vocabulary. Plugging into these acoustics, Pietruszewski sculpts precise yet volatile architectures of tone, probing how synthetic form translates into physical vibration. The aulos is thus reimagined as a shifting, contested sound technology whose mythic legacy resonates with today’s fractured sonic landscape.
Credits
Curated by CTM Festival and Stas Shärifullà on invitation of Körber-Stiftung’s Transgressive Memory Festival.
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Credits
Curated
by CTM Festival and Stas Shärifullà on invitation of the Körber Stitfung.