Murcof, Hassan Khan: The Infinite Hip-Hop Song Live!, PYUR & Beam Team

Egyptian artist and musician Hassan Khan is presenting The Infinite Hip-Hop Song, a playful concert based on algorithmically generated music. We will continue with the immersive AV show The Etna Sessions by Mexican producer Murcof, one of the most respected names in ambient music, and close the night with the premiere of the SONICA x SHAPE+ residency 2025, a unique AV performance by the adventurous German producer PYUR (SHAPE+) and Stella Ivšek and Urša Čuk from the local multidisciplinary artist collective Beam Team.

Murcof: The Etna Sessions (MX)

Mexican-born Spain-based artist Fernando Corona aka Murcof has become known as the ambassador of minimalist electronic music from inner space. »In his work as Murcof, Fernando Corona has long shown a talent for drawing beauty out of bleakness,« wrote Philip Sherburne for Pitchfork. Many of his compositions are founded on abstract, glitchy, sometimes complex electronic percussion. Harmonic and melodic influences come from classical music (modern classical music, musique concrète, holy minimalism, micropolyphony, baroque music, etc.), ambient music, drone music, Berlin school synthesizer music, ethnic music and free improvisation. Rhythms are derived from minimal techno, dub, glitch, industrial music and IDM, and are often aligned around a 4/4 beat. The more recent works, such as his latest album The Etna Sessions (Facade Electronics, 2024), no longer include electronic beats. The album, which contains field recordings made in situ in the Parco dell'Etna and later processed and complemented with an array of analog and digital tools, exists at the intersection of cosmic drone, dark ambient, vaporous dub and minimalist techno. For the live show, a rework of the images captured at Mount Etna by Manu Ros and Murcof was made using a variety of old and new video editing techniques such as AI augmentation and analogue video effects to create a completely new narrative

Hassan Khan: The Infinite Hip-Hop Song Live! (EG)

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician, writer and Professor of Fine Arts at Städelschule in Frankfurt. He is the winner of the 2017 Venice Biennale Silver Lion. Recent major solo exhibitions include The Keys to the Kingdom (2019) at Reina Sofia, Madrid, and Blind Ambition (2022), a large survey at Centre Pompidou, Paris. He has been making adventurous music since his 90s debut in Cairo, and is considered one of the pioneers of experimental and contemporary approaches in the region. With tabla dubb (2001), he began developing sets that offer unique takes on various genres like new Shaabi, Arabic music, string quartets, live electronics as well as hip-hop in his currently touring set The Infinite Hip-Hop Song Live! – fire bars and rhymes, shifting bass-lines, mutating beats, elastic melodies all put together live into one evolving set using a custom-made digital interface. Developed from Khan's forward looking algorithmic music installation of the same name, the set relies on a vast database of original beats, melodies, bass-lines as well as vocal units from ten specially written songs recorded in the studio with eleven rappers of diverse backgrounds.

PYUR & Beam Team (SHAPE+, DE/SI)
Premiera SONICA in SHAPE+ rezidence 2025

PYUR is the burgeoning solo endeavor of Berlin-based electronic artist Sophie Schnell. With a foundation rooted in classical composition and vocal artistry, her works are born from the fusion of her synesthetic experiences and her upbringing within a lineage of shamans, resulting in her unique and boundary-defying sound. PYUR first appeared in 2016 with the full-length audiovisual album Epoch Sinus (Hotflush Recordings), which eschewed distinctions between the visual and the sonic to reveal their underlying energetic substrate. Shortly after PYUR performed on Stockhausen’s Oktophonie for Berlin Atonal, earning a return to the iconic Kraftwerk months later for a Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester commission with PAN’s Valerio Tricoli. She was then entrusted with the grand opening performance for MONOM 4D Sound System at Berlin’s Funkhaus. She’s since opened for Autechre at Tasmania’s Dark Mofo Festival and presented a new spatialized piece for Berlin's Zeiss-Großplanetarium in November 2018. Her second album Oratorio for the Underworld (Avant Garde, 2019) came out in 2019 on Avant Garde, and her follow up album Lucid Anarchy (Subtext, 2024) brought forth nine prismatic, nebulous and emotionally raw electronic pieces.

BEAM TEAM is a multidisciplinary collective of artists working in the fields of audiovisual installations, video mapping, light installations, music production, video animation, intermedia techniques and the design of concert, club and festival spaces. The residency, whose key theme will be the interplay of sound and visualisations that react to it in real time, features the work of Stella Ivšek and Urša Čuk, members of the collective.

SONICA 2025: -STREAM
15.─18. April 2025
Ljubljana, Slovenia
www.sonica.si