Wunderkammer #7
Hard and Tenderly

Wunderkammer, festival of adventurous music and more, will be collaborating closely with Needcompany for its 7th edition. This came about because they are passing through with their new performance Billy's Joy in Strombeek as part of PeriferiK, which this time is central to the festival programme.

For this edition, curator Jan De Vroede pressed his ear against the door of the artists’ house Needcompany. It was from here that the idea came to collaborate and base the line-up on recent encounters with and admiration for artists who can only be grasped in contradiction.

Hard and Tenderly is the title of this edition, but also of a track from the album ‘God in Three Persons’ by the iconic band The Residents – a perfect parallel with Needcompany’s most recent diptych ‘Billy’s VIOLENCE’ and ‘Billy’s JOY’.

In 2020, The Residents reworked ‘God in Three Persons’, their 1988 concept album, for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, into a theatrical live act and a video work; a long-dreamed-of project by The Residents and their fellow founder Hardy Fox, who died in 2018. Covid got in the way of a European tour. Now, in April 2024, they are touring as far as the UK – long Europe no more, and long not yet Europe. However, at The Residents’ request, Wunderkammer #7 will be screening ‘God in Three Persons’ as a tribute to Fox and in collaboration with Needcompany in 2013 for Grace Ellen Barkey’s ‘MUSH-ROOM’.

With ‘Richiamare’, Carlo Sampaolesi gives us a first glimpse of a new work for accordion and electronica. An instant composition based on the impossibility of remembering J.S. Bach’s ‘The French Suite No. 3’.

Maarten Seghers’ recent encounter with KASK students in the form of a workshop on music and performance has resulted in ‘Al MaNaMa’, a one-off song that sings of a song that is being sung.

‘On To Somewhere Near’ by Gert Aertsen is a sound performance that constantly reinvents itself in encounters with different artists. A reconciliation between the elegance of the object and its relentless search for the limits of acoustics.

Seldom has a video work essentially been a piece of music in the way that ‘La mano que canta’ by Alex Reynolds and Alma Söderberg is. The inexorable translation of every movement into music and every form into the score, with a sensory aversion to hierarchy. 

‘The Low Life’ by Simon Lenski and Nicolas Rombouts embraces the confusion between musicality and performativity, this time in an improvisation with special guest Chantal Acda.

As radical as it is cautious is the poetic intensity of ‘The Telescopic Aulos of Atlas’ by Lukas De Clerck, a next step in his visualisation of the Aulos, a Greek-Roman double-reeded double pipe. A fundamental contemporary exploration of sound in a generous gesture towards a history that carries within it the beginning of theatre.

‘Billy’s Joy’ is the next step in Needcompany's response to that history. After 'Billy’s Violence' this is the new play by Victor Afung Lauwers, based on his personal reading of the entire comic oeuvre of Billy Shakespeare. Misery and entertainment in an inseparable stranglehold, to the beat of new music by Maarten Seghers.

Drummer Nicolas Field hits logic just as hard until it disappears. As a fellow improviser, he obstinately unravels virtuosity and wrings the biggest output out of the smallest input. 

The introspective video concert ‘can’t say no to a bruised peach’ resonates like a sensory conversation. The intuitive voice artist and percussionist Fritz Welch loses himself in the décor of his past and sings for the spiders who inhabit it.

The sound work ‘The Act of Touch - A Resonance of World’s Ends’ is constructed by Shatha Afify out of sounds that 22 artists from 22 places in the world collected within the same 24-hours of 31 March 2022. One of the many steps in Afify’s work that constructs an archive of suggestions into a language and into a song of the world. A gigantic gesture that results in an almost invisible work.

Myrthe van der Mark works on the cutting edge between visual art and performance. Her exhibition ‘Girl lives in the village. Sculptress. If you must know.’ Is currently running at Studio S, the exhibition space in the basement of Cc Strombeek. She activates her work with a performance together with Solina Lapsus (Jan Laroy & Dieter Durinck).

Palmbomen II is the Amsterdam-based music producer and DJ Kai Hugo. He has a predilection for 60's psychedelic pop, Italodisco, antique synthesizers and tropical temperatures. Together with singer and multi-instrumentalist Kaito Winse, griot from Burkina Faso, who previously appeared at Wunderkammer with Avalanche Kaito, he rounds off this Wunderkammer with a serious party.