K O - H U M is a Berlin based company which curates, develops and promotes stimulating projects by artists working across sound, music, visual and performing arts.
Through close dialogue with a range of collaborators, the company supports artists in releasing their works, facilitating performances and establishing authentic ventures with cultural institutions, bookings, media outlets and venues.
At the heart of the company's practice is a process-based relationship between artist and audiences, which seeks to give the projects space to find their own rhythm, public outputs, and discourse.
Founded in 2017, K O - H U M ’s core aim is to foster a dialogue between a range of disciplines by providing a platform where adventurous minds can encounter art that contextualizes, interprets, educates and expands culture, leading us to the edges of the contemporary experience.
[SUB033] ECKER & MEULYZER - CARBON [SUBTEXT RECORDINGS]
DIGITAL MARKETING & COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT
Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer make their Subtext debut with Carbon. Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank located on the island of Spitsbergen, Carbon grapples with the many contradictions that lie at the heart of our shift into the capitalocene. The project began in 2017, when Ecker and Meulyzer scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannesen.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was conceived of as an effort to preserve copies of seeds from key crop varieties, ensuring their persistence in the event of large-scale crises. Yet the area is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the permafrost to melt and putting the seed vault at risk.
Across from the Seed Vault lie the decrepit remnants of Svalbard’s mining activities of the early 20th century; Carbon wrestles with the incongruities nestled in the town’s landscape. Reflecting on dissonances of stasis and change, closeness and distance, enclosure and expanse, as well as cynicism and hope, Ecker and Meulyzer consider the urgency of our situation while trying to sidestep all-too popular depictions of dystopia. In Ecker’s own words, “we don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.”
© Geert Goirislineu
From close, supple sounds to cold, brutal sonics, Carbon meditates on the many challenging questions and contradictions raised by the Seed Vault and its surroundings—a landscape that embodies and makes visible the many intertwined phenomena that shape our current predicament.
Ecker and Meulyzer, formerly known as Stray Dogs, have released works such as Wasteland, recorded in deconsecrated church in Antwerp, and Kalkar, recorded in the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany. Koenraad Ecker works in the fields of electro-acoustic music, field recording, radio plays, stage performance and text. Together with Andrea Taeggi, he is part of the Opal Tapes-affiliated duo Lumisokea. His output encompasses studio albums, audiovisual installations, texts, performances, and sound design for film. Frederik Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.
The ecological impact of the production of this record will be compensated through a carbon offsetting program.
“In 2016 we got the chance to visit the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, thanks to Zero Visibility, a Norwegian dance company led by Ina Christel Johannessen. There, we made hours of field recordings, which would become the basis of the score for Zero Visibility’s dance performance “Frozen Songs”, on which the music on “Carbon” is based."
- Koenraad Ecker & Frederik Meulyzer
Video credits
Music: “Growth” by Ecker & Meulyzer, from the album “Carbon”,
Video edit : James Ginzburg & Lukas Feigelfeld
Photography by Koenraad Ecker
CD cover design by Alison Darby
Release date:
November 18. 2019
Format:
album, digital & CD
Publishing:
Multiverse Music
'Carbon' is available on
Subtext Bandcamp, iTUNES, Spotify
More info
