iv project space

Event: أحمد [Ahmed] at Artefact Sound

Bringing heavy rhythmic music based on repetitive patterns and swinging syncopations, أحمد [Ahmed] delivers a powerful punch in the stomach that subsequently transitions into a deep feeling of ecstasy. The foundation for the quartet is the music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, a now deceased New York bassist and composer who introduced Arabic and East African influences into jazz music. His thoughts and melodies shine through in the music of أحمد [Ahmed], which is formed by some of the best European improvisational musicians: Pat Thomas (piano), Antonin Gerbal (drums), Joel Grip (double bass), and Seymour Wright (alto saxophone). Their albums, released from 2017 to the present, are unparalleled journeys that excel in technique and endurance, but are still at their best performed live.

This event is part of Artefact Sound and highlights the release of a book compiling writings by and about حمد [Ahmed], published by In vitro in collaboration with Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts).

Edited by Stoffel Debuysere, Jef Lambrechts and Will Holder

It will be preceded by an extensive conversation with the members of the quartet—discussing improvisation as investigation and music making as a medium of thought; the music and ideas of Ahmed Abdul-Malik and the Arabic and Muslim roots of Jazz; the importance of probing in and into ‘jazz’ and the possibilities of new jazz notation. أحمد [Ahmed] as an accommodating and radical vision of synthesis, open structure(s) and a shared
space of (re-)imagination and (re-)interpretation.

Moderated by Stoffel Debuysere

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STUK
Sat 14 February 2026, 20h00
Naamsestraat 96
3000 Leuven

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Event: Second Sundays #64 with Jef Lambrechts

Second Sundays is a monthly series initiated by Q-O2. Each session a new guest is invited to share an insight into their own listening, playing and speaking about a selection of sound and music that is important to their thinking or practice. The sessions try to put value on listening to recorded music in a social setting as a space for discussion.

Jef Lambrechts is an organiser of sound. He is convinced that music remains to be discovered—that it’s still hidden. By cultivating organising as an art form, he seeks to evoke new ways of study and nurture an artistic community often overlooked within commercial and institutional contexts. He has been tied to several organisations, including Les Ateliers Claus and Meakusma, and is the co-founder of In vitro, a project space and event series dedicated to promoting contemporary (experimental) music and sound art through live performances and occasional discursive events.

For this 64th edition of Second Sunday’s listening session, Jef will share influences that stem directly from his drive to set up such events—a short history, if you will, perhaps uncovering a few answers to the “why” along the way. Or not.

Cocktail of the month: Pisco Sour

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Q-O2
Sun 9 November 2025, 17h00
Koolmijnenkaai 30-34
1080 Brussels

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Event: Max Eastley & Rie Nakajima listening session

Preceding their live performance at STUK on October 15th, Max Eastley and Rie Nakajima will host a listening session the day before at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts & Conservatory of Ghent (KASK).

Both artists have long-standing individual artistic practices centered around sound and sculpture.

Max Eastley is an internationally recognized artist who combines kinetic sculpture and sound into a unique art form. His sculptures exist on the border between the natural environment and human intervention and use the driving forces of electricity, wind, water and ice.

Rie Nakajima creates sounds using combination of motorized devices and daily objects, either in installation form or during performances. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others. Both artists have performed with numerous other artists and musicians, and started playing together in February 2025.

The research cluster The Art of Resonance — The Resonance of Art is organizing a series of informal listening sessions with international artists and researchers, with an eye (and ear) to cultivating a sonic sensibility and relationality.

This event is a collaboration between KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent and In vitro, supported by Flanders State of The Art.

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Herculeslab
Tue 14 October 2025, 16h00
Campus Bijloke, Cloquet
Godshuizenlaan 4
9000 Ghent

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Video: Conversation with Fred Moten & Brandon López

An extended conversation with Fred Moten and Brandon López at Pianofabriek, Brussels, on April 29th, 2025—discussing their thought and practice, music and language, improvisation and politics, jazz and study.

Organized in the context of Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 7), a collaboration between KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent, Courtisane and In vitro.

With the support of the Flemish Government, Flanders State of the Art, KU Leuven Commission for Contemporary Art and The Royal Conservatory of Brussels (EhB).

Footage by Martijn Van de Wiele
Moderated by Stoffel Debuysere

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Article: Alice Notley (1945—2025)

We note with great sadness the passing of renowned poet Alice Notley, who died on Monday, May 19th, in Paris, where she had lived for the past several decades. She was 79. Her death marks a tremendous loss of a unique and deeply inspiring voice—one that has been profoundly influential among both literary and sound practitioners.

Notley was one of America’s greatest poets. She wrote across narrative and epic and genre-bending modes to discover new ways to explore the nature of the self and the social and cultural importance of disobedience.

In vitro will present a musical rendition of Notley’s work as a homage on Thursday, May 22nd, during the book launch of Andrea di Serego Alighieri’s 'Know how to now it’s that you’re learning the segments. That aren’t sentences at all and converse with each other.'

The book’s title is derived from one of Notley’s poems; she also contributed to the publication, which features additional mentions by Will Holder. Other contributors include Phil Baber, Chloe Chignell, Nicola Masciandaro, Angela Xu, Snejanka Mihaylova, Paul Abbott, and Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro.

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De Zaak
Thu 22 May 2025, 18h00
Grote Pieter Potstraat 12, 2000 Antwerp
With music by Johanna Gratzer, Jef Lambrechts (In vitro), and Will Holder

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Event: Lukas De Clerck at Blank Forms

Originating in ancient Mesopotamia, and remembered best for its preeminence in classical Greco-Roman vase paintings, the aulos is a double-reed double pipe, which produces a sound likened to the buzzing of wasps or a “shrill, roaring lotus.” The aulos went extinct over a millennium ago, but in its time, the instrument was often characterized as the dark, Dionysian foil to Apollo’s sweet, harmonic lyre. Its microtonality and rough timbre were out of place in an era that ascribed the highest aesthetic value to mathematical perfection; accordingly, Horace derided the instrument as vulgar and impetuous, while Pratinas said it was fit to accompany “only door-to-door carousels and the brawling of drunken young men.” Though distant descendants persist, including the oboe and the bassoon, there are only fifteen extant aulos pipes or pipe sets remaining.

Lukas De Clerck, a musician and sound artist based in Brussels, has spent years on the archaeo-musicological project of reviving the aulos. But while classicists and luthiers have often been interested in conserving auloi as historical artifacts or creating exact replicas, De Clerck has focused on designing a living instrument, liberated from traditional expectations about how it should look, sound, or be played. By doing so he is crafting a new context for his chosen instrument in contemporary music.

This event is a collaboration between Blank Forms and In vitro, supported by Flanders State of The Art.

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Blank Forms, 1D
16 April 2025, 20h00
468 Grand Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11238

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Article: 'In Fred Moten’s Music, Theory Is Put Into Practice' by Nate Wooley

In the introduction to his 2003 essay collection In the Break, Fred Moten lays out the importance of sound in his theoretical writing. He refers to a short parenthetical embedded in a scene from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in which the author recounts being forced to watch his Aunt Hester being whipped. Douglass describes witnessing the brutality as the event that opened his eyes to slavery’s innate cruelty. His mercilessly frank retelling refers to Aunt Hester’s “heart-rending shrieks.” It was those shrieks—specifically what Douglass heard—that stirs Moten to explore the bridge between the solidity of text and the ephemerality of sound. In his own words, he’s trying to get at “the implications of the breaking of such speech, the elevating disruptions of the verbal that takes the rich content of the object’s/commodity’s aurality outside the confines of meaning.” In my reading, Moten wants his work to tap into the moments when words aren’t enough, and when sound—a shriek, a note—is the only way to express the complexity of being human.

The Nation, Books & the Arts / March 26, 2025

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Event: Oscillation festival 2025 ::: The Weather

The 2025 edition of the festival Oscillation ::: The Weather will depart from practices around field recording. Field recording can be thought of as the registration of one's listening environment. This registration may happen through microphones and a device, but might also include registration via the ear to memory or language. The field might be inside, outside, urban, rural, or domestic. Field recording can be intended as archival observation, as material for musical composition or radio emissions, or as listening practice. With such a broad scope of practices, it can raise questions from authenticity to ethics of authorship and appropriation, to geographies and changing environments.

The festival will link field recording to the weather as phenomenon, as metaphor, and as concept, able to cause poetic and beautiful effects but also to manifest radically destructive events. In both field recording and the weather we are reminded that environments are in perpetual change. They are affected by outside influences, and much of the surprise and interest in a place is the way it constantly throws up new constellations of events and impressions.

There are patterns to weather, seasons and weather systems, but it remains impossible to fully predict and still more impossible to control.

Exploring weather as a general condition, informed by climate, temperature, humidity, pressure, and changes in atmosphere, the festival will present and discuss various practices of field recording and their use in art and science.

Performances, walks, on-site workshops, and talks will provide the opportunity to experience different modes of listening to the environment, permeated by the various and varying phenomena that weather comprises.

The festival takes place over four days and six locations, and will be broadcast via a continuous radio stream.

Oscillation ::: The Weather
1-4 May 2025

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Event: Hear Here — a sound art festival

Hear Here takes you on a wal­king tour of sound art in Leuven. Fifteen art­works about sound or silen­ce rever­be­ra­te through Leuven’s his­to­ri­cal heri­ta­ge sites. On the occa­si­on of KU Leuven’s 600th anni­vers­a­ry, this edi­ti­on focu­ses on his­to­ri­cal uni­ver­si­ty buil­dings. With a map in hand, you shall walk from a medie­val water­ga­te, past an emp­ty school, to an impo­sing baro­que cha­pel. At each site, a sound instal­la­ti­on enters into dia­lo­gue with acous­tics and archi­tec­tu­re. Historic works by gre­at sound-art pio­neers are fea­tu­red alongsi­de new instal­la­ti­ons by Belgian artists.

Artists:
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Anri Sala, Adam Basanta, Rudy Decelière, Christina Kubisch, Jonáš Gruska, Mariska De Groot, Lucy Andrews, Franziska Windisch, Els Viaene, Aernoudt Jacobs, Dick Raaijmakers, Susan Philipsz, Anouk Kellner, Edwin van der Heide

Locations:
STUK (start & end) → Dijlepark → Hollands College → Justus Lipsius Tower → Sint-Agnes School → 30CC/​Chapel Romaanse Poort → BAC ART LAB → M Leuven → KADOC

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Publication: Reader X-Ray Hex Tet

Reader compiled by X-Ray Hex Tet in the context of Echoes of Dissent (Vol. 5).

What could it mean to practice politics by performing music? How could musical improvisation – as a process of collectively searching for sounds and for the responses that attach to them, rather than thinking them up, preparing them and producing them – reconfigure our sense of the world? How can we experience and understand music not simply as what presents itself in the context of sound-phenomena-organized-in-time-and-exchanged-for-cash within the factory of post/industrial capitalism, but also, as an aesthetic-poetic-political mode of enquiry, a mode of perception, a way of learning and sharing – in and outside of the vibrations of sound or the marks of language?

X-Ray Hex Tet — 19-20 October 2024 at Les Ateliers Claus, Brussels. Part of the research project Echoes of Dissent (KASK & Conservatory / School of Arts Gent).

This publication is a collaboration between Courtisane, Auguste Orts and In vitro, supported by Flanders State of the Art, VGC Brussels and Q-O2.

Edited by Stoffel Debuysere
Design by Ran De Vos
Printed by Risiko Press

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Video: @xcrswx live at IV13

Live performance of ‪@xcrswx‬ at les ateliers claus for IV13 on December 9th, 2023.

@xcrswx is the poly-intra-media duo of Crystabel Riley and Seymour Wright. It contrasts the LIVE (evolved sounds/patience/relentless-ness) and the ANDROID (cropped media [sounds+visuals]/impatience/edits). Previous releases include 'Call Time/Hard Out ' and 'Fixes', together with experimental musician Lolina (aka Inga Copeland) on Feedback Moves, and 'Lookbook Digital' which was released on Cafe OTO's Takuroku Imprint.

Footage by Crystabel Riley
Music by Crystabel Riley & Seymour Wright
Mixing by Arnaud Chamay

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