Toni Brell (DE) and Lawrence McGuire (BE/NL)

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Hands caress ceramic bodies. Fingers tap, drag, press and rub; vessels ring, fragments chatter, beads rattle and grains crunch against one another. This touch-based percussion work moves between resonant bell tones and the small, dry sounds of friction and material contact. Objects are shaken, rolled, poured, gathered, scattered and held, listening through the skin as much as through the ears. Borrowing from the logic of granular synthesis, the work builds larger sonic textures from tiny events: a click, a scrape, a tremor, a collision. Sounds collect, tumble over one another and spread out, leaving room to hear their edges. Developed through exchange between artist and percussionist, the work approaches ceramics as fragile, unpredictable bodies activated through touch, attention and care.

Toni Brell works across installation, sound, sculpture, and performance. Their work often engages Central European sonic traditions, folk music, and horn-blowing practices, asking what forms of togetherness they create, which landscapes shape them, and what exclusions they contain.

Credits:
Toni Brell, Klára Van de Ketterij

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McGuire attempts a monophony of streams between piano and voice (natural, synthetic) to create a flattened polylogue (<==> schizophrenic monologue). His own ideas of Gertrude Stein’s concept of ‘insistence’—which boils down to saying each voicing means something only because it differs from the one before—are used to lend seemingly gibberish forms and asyntactic structures a temporary, non-linguistic meaningfulness. 

Initially planned as an attempt to write a libretto plus opera solely made up from Arias, of which only the text remains: for each of the three voices it is sourced from poems/plays in R.D. Laing’s “Knots.” The seam created between the streams carries three comparisons simultaneously: a voice against the voice before it, a piano shape against the piano shape before it, and a voice against a piano sound.  —  the death, alive and death, alive and death, alive. 

Lawrence McGuire is an artist working in text and sound, presenting them as text-sound compositions, as situations, or as texts on their own, with voice, in both its production and reception, always at the centre of his work. His work investigates how digital tools can enrich our relationship to language and voice.

Credits:
Lawrence McGuire, Reinier Van Houdt

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“touch, tuck, tick, ting, thing” and “Insistunits, Vox, Vox, Piano” were commissioned by Modelo62 through 1+1, an open call for makers (first edition, 2026). With support from Fonds Podiumkunsten.

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→ Supported by

Sound or Not is made possible with the generous support of Fonds Podiumkunsten NL, Gemeente Den Haag and Konrad Boehmer Foundation