Onze Ambassade Festival #6
Program 07.09.2024
20:00 till 02:00 hrs
Entry: 5 euro
Tickets: https://tinyurl.com/OA-festival-6

With exhibitions, concerts, events, and DJs, along with a sound portrait by Guido Spring, we open our doors wide to a diverse audience. From art academy students to city residents: everyone is welcome. For this evening, we are organizing a continuous special program with challenging music performances, exhibitions, films, and DJs.

Exhibitions

At West Den Haag in the former American embassy you get to know contemporary art. Through exhibitions, events and guided tours we initiate conversations to make room for the imagination together. We would also like to welcome you! Wander through the special national monument that once stood for diplomatic ideals and power. And ask yourself, what is art anyway? — This evening all exhibitions are open for free!

1. JOTA MOMBAÇA - A METHOD/GRIEVING TIME
A site-responsive exhibition in which Jota Mombaça looks into the architecture and history of the museum’s building — the former US Embassy in The Netherlands — to unfold a questioning of imperial tools of temporal control and migratory legislation enforcement. This is Jota Mombaça's first solo show in The Netherlands.

2. RUDOLF HERZ - DUCHAMP. LA PATTE
The conceptual artist Rudolf Herz from Munich had 17 street artists on Montmartre in Paris create drawings based on a photographic portrait of Marcel Duchamp. This was an ironic response to Duchamp’s decision to stop being a ‘painter in the professional sense’, a decision he made while staying in Munich in 1912.

3. CHARLES VAN OTTERDIJK - BOILER ROOM
For his new project, Charles van Otterdijk immersed himself in the world of synthetic drugs for many years. During this time, he withdrew from the art world to fully concentrate on this project. This was necessary because he entered an illegal and potentially dangerous world, but it is also an inalienable part of the project.

Music Program
Curator: Alex Andropoulos


MEGABASSE
Megabasse is French born, Brussels based Pierre Bujeau’s solo guitar project exploring alternative tuning and long form composition through the use of a double neck twelve and six string guitar. Granted by his friend who had the instrument lying in his parents’ attic for years, Pierre uses the guitar in an unorthodox manner, strumming both sets of strings simultaneously as if playing a harp, while also forming chords with unique resonances due to his precise alternative tunings. The result is a light fog of extremely melodic and hypnotic drone music, reminiscent of the tuning and durational experiments of La Monte Young and the physicality of guitar exploration of Pierre Jean Croset, though in his case always keeping to his main interest of melody. The music becomes almost sculptural, its existence seeming almost void of time, with the start and end of each performance being a matter of practicality more than of compositional intention. After a few releases of recordings of concerts, Megabasse released his debut album ‘Discorde’ in 2024, a two part documentation of such melodic structures and experiments.
▶ https://megabasse.bandcamp.com



JESSICA EKOMANE
Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. Her practice unfolds around live performances and installations, creating situations where the sound acts as a transformative element for the space and the audience. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect on the listener, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Her ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are formed by questions of the relationship between the individual and the collective, of the investigation of listening expectations and their social roots. The answers are always very immersive, compelling and musically beautiful, proving that apart from being a unique researcher in sound and sound technology, she is also an incredible composer of great emotional power.
▶ https://portraitsgrm.bandcamp.com



SALENTA + TOPU
Salenta Baisden and Topu Lyo, both based in New York, met in 2019 through mutual friends and conversation led to them agreeing to meet to play music together on their respective instruments of piano and cello. Once the initial improvisation at the studio of a friend some months later finally took place, the two were so enthralled by the experience they made it common habit, often doing so in Salenta’s apartment with her imperfectly tuned piano, and making sure to record it all on a range of different recording equipment. The result of their musical activity led to the release of the album ‘Moon Set Moon Rise’, consisting of a selection of 17 recordings from the aforementioned improvised sessions. The album greatly encaptured their playfulness as musicians, their ease with each other’s musicality and character on their instrument, and expressions of musical melancholy, resulting in a beautiful, melodic, timeless album. Their concert at West will be one of a handful of first European concerts they will be doing.
▶ https://salenta-topu.bandcamp.com



SC’ÖÖF
Sc’ööf are a Lucerne based quartet consisting of drums, electric guitar and two saxophones creating acoustic glitch music through the use of extended technique on their respective instruments, atonal melodies tightly woven in and around strict rhythmical structures, and by juxtaposing many vastly diverse musical ideas in to a single piece. They blend jazz, rock, metal, punk, and experimental music into a sound that is uniquely their own. Their performances are technically very impressive, relying on their individual musicianship and years of collaborative playing, hypnotic due to the long form repetitive and highly rhythmical nature of their compositions, and abrasive due to the physicality and high energy of their playing.
▶ https://youtu.be



MUN SING
Mun Sing is the solo project of Harry Wright, one half of the Bristolian noise techno duo Giant Swan. Although the music is heavily beat driven, making for very abrasive and physical concerts, the music is greatly abstracted and contorted, creating surreal experiences of space and time, and blurring the lines between dance music and sound scape. The result is a dreamlike experience where one loses sense of space around them while experiencing multiple narratives simultaneously, intimidated by the malevolent percussion and soothed by the benevolent ghost like voices / melodies. Wright attempts to challenge the conventions and aesthetics of modern-day club culture, experimenting with ideas of inclusivity and positivity by employing aesthetics and narratives form outside the serious, austere club world. Flashes of pop music, choreographed dance and childlike aesthetics flash up and around his live set, juxtaposing the intimidating rawness and aggressiveness of his beats.
▶ https://munsing.bandcamp.com/
▶ https://youtu.be



JUDGITZU
Julien Hairon is a French born ethnomusicologist who has spent most of his adult life traveling, searching for and documenting the music cultures he finds all across the globe. Field recordings made of performances he has either come across or instigated of local musicians have been released as part of his collection "Les Cartes Postales Sonores". Besides this, he has searched for and collected a huge number of cassettes of local music from the places he has visited, spanning many decades of releases, which he has digitalized and made available online as part of his "Petpets' Tapes" series. In line with his travels and exploration of and in music, Hairon participated in a residency in Tanzania in 2019. Discovering Singeli, the local modern dance music of the area, while also exploring his own musical roots and the experiences of over a decade of travelling, lead to the creation of his electronic, ultra-fast techno set Judgitzu. Extreme tempos of Singeli inspired rhythms mixed with ominous synth drones create imposing, almost ritualistic music that force the audience in to hypnotic and highly energetic dance. His music was soon discovered by the Ugandan ‘Nyege Nyege Tapes’, a unique label specializing and promoting unique dance music from around the world that has formed a tight network and community of similar spirited musicians, which spearheaded his beats back to his home Europe and internationally.
▶ https://nyegenyegetapes.bandcamp.com/
▶ https://lescartespostalessonores.bandcamp.com/
▶ https://petpetstapes.bandcamp.com/