ARTéfacts ensemble - Ventus ensemble

Oton Project

14-15 JUN 2018
21:00

Athens School of Fine Arts
9th Painting Studio
256 Pireos str, Rentis, Athens

With open ears, composers are restlessly wandering through the city, collecting its sounds. Two Athenian music ensembles invite a Turkish composer, Tolga Tüzün, to carefully listen together to the sounds of Athens and its historic centre. How is a city turned into music?

Free admission with entrance tickets, on a first come first served basis.
Prebooking: infotickets@sgt.gr.

The distribution of entrance tickets begins one (1) hour before the event.

During the concert the audience will be standing (there will be a limited number of seats).

Oton Project is a sound-print of the historical centre of the city, processed either by composers who live and work in Athens or those who explore it for the first time. The combination of the ensembles ARTéfacts and Ventus produces quite an unusual timbre: it comprises all the wood and brass wind instruments, conventional percussion and drums, electric guitar, violin, bass and synthesizer.

Manos Ventouras and Kostas Tzekos, members of both ensembles and composers, combine acoustic and electric sounds with the sounds of the city and the listening experiences of the other members of the ensemble to create a soundtrack with unexpected admixtures. The guest composer Tolga Tüzün who participates in the project lives in Istanbul, but came to Athens to feel it, hear it and work with Athenian musicians. Where will his own ears take him? What will impress him most about the urban fabric? How different will his response be to the one of his indigenous counterparts?

Tolga Tüzün’s works are heard alternately with those of Ventouras and Tzekos and, with the collaboration of 10 students from the School of Fine Arts (ASFA), they create a dialogue between tunes that reflect first impressions and the ones that convey a sense of familiarity. The audience is taken on a musical ramble through specific Athenian routes, so that they too can audit their own city with different ears!

credits

Works by Tolga Tüzün, Kostas Tzekos and Manos Ventouras

With ARTéfacts ensemble - Ventus ensemble
Musical direction: Stathis Soulis
Director: Louizos Aslanidis
Space, installations, video: Athens School of Fine Arts' students
Lighting design: Valentina Tamiolaki
Moderated by Esthir Lemi (Athens School of Fine Art)
Project Manager: Lorenda Ramou
Production / Stage Manager: Maria Kakaroglou
Sound engineer: Giorgos Kostopoulos, Alexis Chatziioannou

Produced by: Onassis Cultural Centre-Athens

Oton Project is a collaboration between the Onassis Cultural Centre and the Athens School of Fine Arts.

We thank the ASFA professor Nikos Navridis for the use of 9th Painting Studio, the architect Takis Koumbis and the sound designer Kostas Bokos (Studio 19st) for kindly allowing us to use the Athenian soundscape presented as part of the Greek participation in the 8th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2002 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

ARTéfacts ensemble - Ventus ensemble: Manos Anagnostopoulos (electric bass), Dimtris Dakovanos (bassoon), Alexandros Drymonitis (electric guitar), Guido De Flaviis (saxophone), Kostas Giovanis (oboe, cor anglais), Dimitris Gkogkas (trumpet), Othonas Gogas (flute, piccolo), Giannis Gounaris (horn), Laertes Kokolanis (violin), Dimitris Marinos (keys), Menelaos Moraitis (tuba), Kostas Seremetis (percussion), Giannis Stavropoulos (drums), Kostas Tzekos (bass clarinet, saxophone), Spyros Tzekos (clarinet), Thodoris Vazakas (percussion), Spyros Vergis (trombone, bass trombone), Fanis Vernikos (trumpet), Manos Ventouras (synthesizer)

Students of ASFA: Eugenia Antoniou, Mina Archontaki, Alexandra Damirali, Kallirroi Kostikoglou, Sofia Kremmida, Irini Mantinaou, Artemis Orfanidou, Yukari Sakata (Tokyo University of the Arts), Panagiotis Skalkotos, Antonis Vasilakis

Born in Corfu, Kostas Tzekos studied in Athens (UoA Music Studies, Philippos Nakas Conservatory) and in Paris (École Normale de Musique de “Alfred Cortot”). He has taken part in numerous festivals such as: Akbank Jazz Festival Istanbul, KunstFestSpiele Herrenhausen Hannover, International Music Day in Hyde Park-London, Suså Festival, Documenta14 Kassel etc. He is particularly active in the field of contemporary music and a founding member of Ergon Ensemble. He has also appeared in all the Athens scenes as a member of an ensemble or as a session musician. He is a member of the Athens State Orchestra and has collaborated with the Greek National Opera, the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and all Athens orchestras. He is interested in the relationship of noise-sound-music, as it is created in the urban environment and in the way it can be organised in living space/in the way one can accommodate it in one’s living space.

Manos Ventouras was born 1981 in Corfu. He began playing the horn in the Mantzaros wind band of Corfu. He then studied horn in the Orfeion Conservatory of Athens (prof. Ev. Skouras) from which he graduated in 2006, as well as the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (prof. Peter Hoekmeijer/Herman Jeurissen – modern horn, Teunis van der Zwart – natural horn), where he studied with a scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation. In 2014 he composed the score to the documentary "Palikari: Louis Tikas and the Ludlow Massacre", for which he received the Music Award in that year's Halkida Documentary Film Festival (Docfest).

Tolga Tüzün (Ph.D.) is an electro-acoustic music composer and a performer. After receiving his BA in Political Sciences, he studied composition at the Istanbul Technical Uni-versity, Center for Advanced Music Studies. During his studies for a Ph.D. in Music Composition at CUNY Graduate Center, he studied composition with David Olan and Tristan Murail in New York, and with Philippe Leroux in Paris. He participated in master classes with Roger Reynolds, Rand Steiger, Edmund Campion, Mara Helmuth, Horacio Vaggione, Hughes Dufourt, Joshua Fineberg and Brian Ferneyhough. Tolga Tüzün participated in the composition and computer music course at IRCAM during 2005-2006. Along with his compositional output, he also performs within experimental, jazz and elec-tronic scenes, solo or with other artists. Tolga Tüzün is an associate professor at Istanbul Bilgi University where he teaches composition and electronic music and serves as Head of Department since 2010.
Click here to read composer's note.

Louizos Aslanidis was born in 1974 in Athens. He studied lm at Southampton Institute (Solent University) and the London College of Printing (London Institute). In the year 2000 and since then, he founded and managed the Ekso Productions, lm production company and post-production. As a producer, he has to his credit three feature lms (Evil - 2005, The evil in the age of heroes – 2009, Charisma - 2009) and many other short lms (including the award-winning The House of the Olives), which most of them nanced by the Greek Film Center, or ERT. As a director, he signs the short lms The absolute time – 2004 and Rectum - 1998, commercials for television and corporate videos. Since 2005 collaborates with the group dance Yelp, in production video projects highlighted in the group.