Rodina-Set Festival / Friday, 20.11.2020

Kazan is the capital of the semi-autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, lying a good 800km east of Moscow, on the Volga. The Russian word ‘Smena’ translated into German means ‘Wandel’ or ‘Veränderung’ (English trans. ‘change’). A fitting name for the centre for contemporary art and culture in Kazan. For the occasion of the German Year in Russia, Smena and Shemyakin invited the Berlin based musician and cultural worker Guido Möbius to join them in curating a festival for unusual music, art and theory from Russia and Germany.

Due to the current and unforeseeable situation with the covid-19 pandemic, the organizers decided to do the RODINA-SET Festival from 19.11.20 til 29.11.20 decentralized and in part online. At various locations in Kazan and of course at the festival center Smena one will experience exhibitions, concerts, lectures and film screenings as live stream. Since international travel is hardly possible under the current conditions, another focus of the program will be on an intensive evening of concerts streamed from Berlin on 20.11.20 and featuring artists resident in Germany.

Musician and sound artist Jasmine Guffond unfolds abstract digital sound structures which are interpreted perfectly by the “visual artist” Ilan Katin. Thereby the language of sound and images are inseperably entwined so that an audio-visual Gesamtkunstwerk comes about. In this way categories like space and duration seem to be negotiable and moving. The one blends into the other and ultimately is dissolved.

Producer Julien Deblois aka Debmaster has over many years and with an enormous output managed to develop a completely unique sound aesthetic. For Rodina-Set he will produce a new show using industrial sounds and field recordings from Kazan. The Kazan resident musicians Radif Kashapov, Timur Khadeev, Bayaru Takshina and Sergey Kostyuzhov collect and edit the most varied urban everyday sounds. From building site alarms to scraps of conversations and church bells, all of which creates a kind of Kazan-Sound-Library. Using this material Debmaster has built new tracks.

Gordan join traditional Serbian singing with abstraction, energy and minimalism. Their music is marked by radical reduction, seemingly endless ascension and a passion for experiments. The Serbian singer Svetlana Spajic is an internationally recognized and acclaimed artist. She, like almost no other contemporary singer, is a master of all the complex local stylistic variations of singing from Balkan music. Guido Möbius plays bass and various electronic sound generators. Additionally he uses guitar amps, microphones and effects to provoke feedback which either harmonize or are juxtaposed with the song. It is a dialogue between sound and noise which is accentuated or fragmented by means of Andi Stecher’s extremely expressive drumming.