In Gonzo (circus) #125 you can read an 8-page special about Sonic Acts Festival 2015. One of the highlights will be the opening at Stedelijk Museum with Florian Hecker. You can read all about in the special. And don’t miss it!

The official opening of the Sonic Acts Festival at the Stedelijk Museum features Reformulation of A Script for Synthesis, a multisensory performance by Florian Hecker. The first iteration of this work was presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and is specifically adapted for Sonic Acts. The piece is the climactic third chapter in the trilogy of text–sound pieces that Hecker created in collaboration with Reza Negarestani. It follows their collaborations Chimerization, for dOCUMENTA (13) and also released on Mego; and Hinge, which featured legendary vocalist Joan La Barbara. The piece Hecker will perform at the Stedelijk is, in his own words, an experimental drama, which recalls Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty as much as Beckett’s minimalist narratives. Reza Negarestani wrote an experimental libretto, which provides Hecker with the text–sound materials for his sound composition. On their earlier collaboration Chimerization, Pitchfork wrote that: ‘Hecker layers, bowties, refracts, reverses, and otherwise disrupts the voices reading the work. Syllables careen into unseen voids or sublimate into sudden glitches. Phrases chase one another in unsettling antiphony, and sentences jerk to seasick rhythms.’
Florian Hecker’s works have been released on labels such as Editions Mego, Pan, Rephlex and Warner Classics. He is well known for his long-standing research, with Russell Haswell, into the musical legacy of Iannis Xenakis. He has also collaborated with Aphex Twin and Cerith Wyn Evans. The Iranian writer and philosopher Reza Negarestani is known for his ‘theory-fiction’ Cyclonopedia, Complicity with Anonymous Materials, and is closely associated with the Speculative Realism movement.