Techno feminism and voices from the beyond. For years, the music agency Proton has surprised the Danish audience with cutting-edge music from around the globe, and this year the team have put together the last night on G((o))ng Tomorrow. Here you can discover new works from Danish-Honduran Xenia Xamanek, Chinese object blue and Italian Marta De Pascalis.

The people behind Proton have their roots in the groundbreaking and award-winning Phono Festival in Odense, and they are behind several experimental club shows in Copenhagen over the past five years. In 2018, Proton also became a booking agency, aiming to bring creative music from Denmark to an international audience.

Xenia Xamanek

Danish-Honduran Xenia Xamanek is a composer, sound artist and musician. She creates electronic compositions in her idiosyncratic style that contains distinctive sounds and beats, and often with the voice as the starting point for the works.

In her own words, she has “a soft spot for what falls slightly outside the lines”, and her works involve, among others, androgynous and artificial voices, ASMR and collaborations with people with voices whose integrity the community calls into question.

On G((o))ng Tomorrow, Xenia Xamanek presents a newly composed quadrophonic piece for voices, horns and synthesizers with accompanying video projection. Here, too, what falls slightly outside the lines, or even hovers around in space, will play into the musical expression.

– At the moment I’m pretty drawn by the paranormal and think a lot about ghosts. For example, the idea that one will be able to hear a voice from a deceased – being able to catch a voice that does not have a body is exciting. At the same time, I have a great love for science-fiction and experiences that challenge our usual perceptions of how things are connected.

The new piece is a form of poetry concerning Latin American legends and myths about ghosts such as ‘La llorona’, the tale of a woman abandoned by her husband whose children disappear. She looks after her children until she dies of grief, doomed to go restless, crying around and looking for them forever, calling “donde estan mis hijos?”.

Xenia Xamanek debuted in 2015 under the name Equis with the cassette ‘Men’s Health’ and has subsequently toured in Japan, among others, as well as being part of several cross-artistic constellations on site-specific sound art and audio-visual performances. Last November, she debuted under her own name with the album ‘Envase’.

object blue

London-based, Beijing-raised object blue is a producer who combines experimental sounds with techno, focusing on their potential as live performances.

Named as one of the 10 techno/house producers to watch in 2018 by FACT magazine, she continues to perform a diverse range of music across the UK, including live techno, experimental installations and DJ sets.

She has been referred to as a ‘technofeminist’ several times, and as she said it herself in an interview with the Cuntemporary art magazine last year:

– To put it simply: I love techno and I love feminism. To go even further, the term also encompasses a vision of the world in which technology is a tool for our liberation.

Her debut EP ‘Do you plan to end a siege?’ was released on Tobago Tracks in March 2019.

Marta De Pascalis

Marta De Pascalis is an italian composer living and working in Berlin. Her solo works employ analog synthesis and tape loops, incorporating free playing into steady, repetitive patterns inspired by a series of paintings from her father which date back to the 1970’s.

She creates densely layered collages of glowing melodic shards and growling bass lines, her hypnotic minimal synth figures warping and whirling around each other before dissolving into entropic oblivion. For her compositions she uses improvisation on a tape-loop system, in which patterns of repetition create a sense of a dense, dynamic and cathartic distance.

Her latest piece ‘Her Core’ was published in spring 2018.