free flow festival
14 to 17 July 2022

Like in a round robin in table tennis, the musicians pass the ball to each other, introduce themselves, set the tone for the next musician, and get the music moving and creativity flowing. This is where free flow festival starts.

with all artists involved in free flow festival

Social media and Zoom conferences, Google instead of an encyclopaedia, concerts via videostream – digitisation is no longer a trend but has long since become normality. What happens to classical piano music when you expand the resonance space of the grand piano, digitally reproducing the sounds with loop machines? Shaped and yet liberated from classical conventions, these mutate into virtual co-players of themselves, can be endlessly repeated, transmitted or alienated. Is this still a classical concert, an electronic set in the club – or something else entirely? 

with
Simon Bucher – piano
Mischa Cheung – piano
Simon Häni – sound

After pursuing long and fulfilling studies in classical singing trying to find the "perfect" sound, mezzosoprano Anna Nero realized that her own timbre would just sound green to her ears and that she should accept that.

Timbre is very personal, as it is formed by the anatomy of the resonance chambers, the condition of the pharynx, the oral cavity and the nasal cavity. But also the position of the teeth, tongue size and lip shape are effecting the sound.

In this project together with Huguette Tolinga, Thomas Niggli, Sekou Keita and Saliou Kouate the artists will celebrate their very own sounds, a blend of different cultures and identities.

with
Anna Nero – mezzosoprano
Sekou Keita – dance
Saliou Kouate – percussion
Thomas Niggli – sitar
Huguette Tolinga – percussion

Congolese music archives revisited.

An ode to compromise, the uninterrupted song for the city traverses the history of musical and cultural dispersion, which began with the slave trade in the Kongo kingdom and its surroundings and continued later with the colonial destructuring of traditional Congolese societies. The city is the supreme place of what the colonial authorities called an extra-customary zone, to signify that individuals living there had left the local socio-political and economic frameworks and were therefore embracing the new order of things carved out according to the catechism of modernity. The city thus becomes the place of compromise which, with time and the hold of the new political order and its economy, will be the reason for everything.

Kinshasa, the city of Congolese cities, is thus a vast entity that is both fiercely centred on itself and largely turned outwards. This is the heart of the compromise set up as a fertilising principle. This is where things, goods, people, rhythms, words, sensitivities, minerals, songs will leave from now on, and this is where everything will return transformed, to continue the process of transformation of oneself and the world. Compromise is positive and becomes a ferment of renewal of the imaginary.

This work, which is part of The Improbable Memorial, a commemorative fiction that the artist has been building for two years, revisits songs and scores produced according to the culture and pre-colonial knowledge of the different regions of Congo. Selected from the sound collection of the Africa Museum in Brussels, they are the traces of practices and performances that have almost disappeared, having not resisted the development of the cities, while some of them were forbidden by the colonial authorities. They are then confronted, through an artificial intelligence, with the forms of music developed later, with the contact between the rhythms of slaves from Congo Square in New Orleans and composers of European classical music, Afro-American culture and contemporary urban cultures. The result is a symphony of synthesis and expansion that can be played live with musicians.

with
Sinzo Aanza – creation & installation
Vincent Glanzmann – percussion
Huguette Tolinga – percussion
Vladimir Petrov – AI Art

curated by Sinzo Aanza & Hiromi Gut

Sevdalinke could be described as the classical music of Bosnia. The melancholic love songs originated under the influence of the Ottoman Empire in this region in the 15th century.

There is an everlasting tension in the unfulfilled desire of these songs, like the young woman who longingly stretches out her arm to reach her unreachable lover.

Singer Jelena Dojčinović and accordion player Nermin Tulić wondered how this bittersweet tension could be expressed through elements other than music - and turned to dancers Graciela Martinez and Neel Jansen, who themselves have experienced what it means to be far away from each other. With their bodies, they tell the stories of these lovers and transform the music into a new experience.

with
Jelena Dojčinović – soprano
Neel Jansen – dance
Nermin Tulić – accordeon
Graciela Martinez Arribas – dance

A plucked strings player, a singer, and two sensor-musicians rendezvous for the first time to perform „Float Inside". They create a fusion of drone music, Chinese folk, Swiss folk and contemporary ambient. An intense experience which will hypnotize you and make you peacefully loose your mind. As you float inside you'll be more deeply and soundly relaxed than ever before.

with
Luc Gut & Rolf Hellat – OSZILOT
Michaela Unsinn – mezzosoprano
Chengyi Wang – Yangqin

Welcome to a night with Black Pitch & guests. Exile frequency resonance. The amplitude of decoded voices. The amplitude of voice decoders. An experience of listening to a safer space.

with
tracy september – electronics, voice
siavash namehshiri – electronics, voice
guests to be announced

Surprises are hard to come by in times when we know months in advance what we're having for dinner with whom, when an algorithm decides what we’ll listen to next on Spotify, when dates and Tinder matches fill the white spaces in our agendas. We want to invite you to break out of the whirlpool of the planned, to venture into unknown territory for three hours and to engage with something new. Together we will board a bus that will take us to various places in and around Zurich. What happens where, what sounds, what interventions, what artists await you, remains a surprise until the end.

guerillaclassics is teaming up with the association Essen und Zuhören. The performative cooking workshop invites a female protagonist to talk once a month. Women of our mothers' or grandmothers' generation share stories and insights that are not listened to often enough – participants cook, listen, talk along. We take listening to the next level, not only listening to the stories of the duo grassblues, but also listening to Saadet Türköz' and Julian Sartorius' songs after having dinner together.

with
Julian Sartorius – percussion
Saadet Türköz – vocals