Marking default’s four-year anniversary, the series for experimental music and sound-based practices is setting up another mid-week get-together on the 18th of November at The Grey Space in the Middle with performances by Ege Şahin, Mario de Vega and Jean-Luc Guionnet.
Jean-Luc Guionnet is a French multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, and visual artist whose contributions to electroacoustic music and free improvisation have had a remarkable presence among several generations of creative peers, while retaining a practice which ‘divides itself into as many ways as occasions arise’. Guionnet’s rigorous enquiry into getting at, and beyond, the saxophone as technology is bound together by a thorough engagement with musical and philosophical traditions. With two distinct solo works recently released via Empty Editions and Potlatch, Guionnet will perform an alto saxophone solo, ‘L’Épaisseur de l’air’ (the thickness of the air), at default#27.
Mario de Vega is a Mexico City-born artist, who lives and works between Germany and Mexico. Active for more than 20 years, de Vega’s practice unfolds through spatial interventions and durational performances in which vibrational phenomena become a medium for activating sensory encounters. In recent years, those lucky enough to witness a solo performance by de Vega with his custom-built mixer could notice how its processes can produce both intensity and detail, while investigating thresholds of our sensory perception.
Ege Şahin is an experimental musician (born in Turkey, based in The Hague), who often works with common, known, and available materials, coupled with amplification and communication technologies. At default#27, he will present a rework of Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson’s text score ‘Paper Piece’ (1960), treating microphones, his own body, and any text or images found on the papers as material just as important as the papers themselves, for a somewhat cranked-up, re-envisioned actualisation of the piece.
default den haag (short ‘default’) is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in The Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound-based practices since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and conversations.
Previous editions were held at Korzo, The Grey Space in the Middle, iii, and 3345, all in The Hague.
The current season of default den haag is financially supported by The Municipality of The Hague, Cultuurfonds, Fonds Podiumkunsten, and the Konrad Boehmer Foundation.