Music Current, the contemporary music festival produced by Dublin Sound Lab, has announced its 2023 programme.

This year’s event takes place over four days at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin, from 12 to 15 April, and includes world premieres by Francis Heery, multimedia artist Jaki Irvine and Italian composer Alessandro Massobrio, as well as a host of Irish premieres.

The festival will also feature the Schallfeld Ensemble from Germany, Nadar Ensemble from Belgium, American composer Natacha Diels in a one-person show, and the Irish premiere of German composer Michael Maierhof’s micro-opera Cold Sweat / Kalter Schweiss (2019).

Re_sett_ing_s
Music Current’s opening concert by Dublin Sound Lab, on Wednesday 12 April at 8pm, will include Irvine’s Re_sett_ing_s (2022) for mixed chamber ensemble and live video, a resetting of her recent two-person show of the same name with added flute, violin, piano and drum kit. Heery’s Towards a Soteriological Theory of Bog Bodies for piano, synthesiser and electric guitar, and Massobrio’s Calanchi for piano and electric guitar, are sister pieces, both composed for this concert for Izumi Kimura (piano) and Shane Latimer (electric guitar). The concert will also feature works by Simon Steen-Anderson, Johannes Kreidler and Martin Matalon with performers Cora Venus Lunny (violin), Paul Roe (clarinet), Ilse de Ziah (cello) and more.

On Thursday at 6pm, Diel’s solo concert will feature the Irish premieres of her 2022 works Somewhere Beautiful, Untitled Piece for Drawing Machine and The God-Fearing Woodsman, which imagine musical performance as multimedia music theatre with electronic sounds and video. Diel gave a workshop at last year’s Music Current, and also had her music performed, but this is her first solo performance in Ireland.

Schallfeld and Ciciliani
Later that evening at 8pm, Schallfeld Ensemble will present a programme of works by long-time collaborator Marko Ciciliani. His work references game culture and integrates competitive and interactive elements from computer games into his compositions. They will perform his Tympanic Touch for two performers and a game system (2017), Chemical Etudes for Monome and SuperCollider (2018), Time Machine for sensor-equipped bass clarinet, live electronics and video (2013) as well as works by Davide Gagliardi and Christof Ress.

Friday will see the Irish premiere of Maierhof’s mini-opera Cold Sweat / Kalter Schweiss (2019). Each of his mini-operas is intended to be performed in domestic spaces, living rooms or public places and at Music Current it will be performed at the library of the Contemporary Music Centre on Fishamble Street. Cold Sweat / Kalter Schweiss is based on the 1970 gangster movie of the same name starring Charles Bronson. The opera focuses on a single scene showing James Mason being shot, threatening the villain with a gun, and protecting Bronson’s wife.

The final concert on Saturday, titled Doppelgänger, will see the Nadar Ensemble present an adventurous multi-layered musical and visual performance with works by Georges Méliès, Jessie Marino, Pierre Jodlowski, Stefan Prins, Michael Beil, and the Marx Brothers’ famous ‘Mirror Scene’ from the film Duck Soup (1933).

Commenting on this year’s festival, Festival Director Fergal Dowling said:

Music Current festival has always focused on the experience of live music, and this year we have put together a programme that is rich in multimedia, video, interactive electronics and new performance practices. Music creation is also always central to the festival and this year we have three new works written especially for Dublin Sound Lab, three workshops directly dealing with music creation, and every piece in every programme is an Irish premiere. So this really is music that has to be experienced, not just heard.

The festival includes three workshops for audiences, musicians and composers, focusing on composing for synthesizers (Wednesday, 2pm), composing with video (Thursday, 2pm), and composing in real time (Friday 2pm), plus a panel discussion on new music composition methods featuring composers from Germany, Japan, Ireland and the USA (Wednesday, 6pm).

For further details on Music Current and booking, visit www.musiccurrent.ie/2023.