After thirteen festival years and a comprehensive book and online publication (shut up and listen!, edition sp ce, 2019), the upcoming fourteenth edition of shut up and listen! offers an extended time frame and cooperations with the neighbouring social-profit organisation Zeit!Raum and the schule für dichtung (vienna poetry school).

Under the motto LAUT.SPRECHER we focus on electroacoustic ’sound transformers’ as well as the human voice as a sound source and musical instrument. The latter leads into realms of concrete poetry as well as voice-based electroacoustic sound works, i.e. the threefold borderland of literature, music and sound-based art, as well as genre-defying positions. The other end of this year’s spectrum features multichannel compositions and acousmatic performances. Many presented works combine both fields of interest. In addition, we present selected sculptural and conceptual positions as well as contributions from other realms of creativity: the loudspeaker as an art object, visual poetry, text-based mosaics, or the intermedium text-sound-art, a term connected to the Swedish music and art network Fylkingen.

Being a site-specific adaptation of Christian Tschinkel’s Akusmonautikum, a twelve-channel array of loudspeakers will be installed at echoraum. We will listen to multichannel performances resp. spatialisations of works by three generations of Austrian composers (Martina Claussen, Dieter Kaufmann, Katharina Klement, Christian Tschinkel, Wiener ARP Ensemble, Wiener Geräuschorchester) as well as selected international positions (Annette Vande Gorne, Trevor Wishart).

The Viennese ‘co-articulation collective’ onophon (Werner Nowacek & Rainer Deutner) presents excerpts of their new programme Einzelpaare. Swedish composer and sound poet Johannes Bergmark presents text-sound art-pioneers from the Stockholm music and art collective Fylkingen (including Sten Hanson, Åke Hodell, Bengt and Emil Johnson) as well as giving a solo performance. Bergmark will also hold a workshop about text-sound art resp. sound poetry at the vienna poetry school (schule für dichtung). Presenting their first duo performance, Franz Hautzinger and Petr Vrba will not only make their trumpets sound, but also experiment with another ancient ‘loudspeaker’, a gramophone funnel. The last day begins with an ‘acusmatised’ listening session concerning Morton Feldman’s composition Three Voices and concludes the festival with the traditional brunch.

The accompanying exhibition programme includes a new sound sculpture by the German sound artist Ulrich Eller where sound waves are not made audible but rather visible, in a very poetic manner. Working with voice recordings of Viennese teenagers speaking in their mother tongues,  Bernhard Gál presents a new series of voice sculptures, realized in cooperation with Zeit!Raum. The visual artist Anna Khodorkovskaya shows a selection of her text-based mosaics and paper works. In Wolfgang Müller‘s work Hausmusik - Stare von Hjertøya singen Kurt Schwitters, birds allegedly whistle fragments of Kurt Schwitters‘ Ursonate. The sound poet and transmedia artist Jörg Piringer presents three examples of his highly imaginative visual noise poetry improvisations.

Once again, let’s shut up and listen!