In 2024 Unsafe+Sounds is celebrating its ten-year jubilee! Almost 80 international and local artists and 30 speakers can be experienced in a total of nine days, on seven stages across the city. AIL hosted the opening night.

Program:
Inou Ki Endo

Inou Ki Endo’s preference lies in infernal and cerebral sounds, obscure dilettantes and professional borderliners beyond the musical mainstream. Shilla Strelka curates Unsafe+Sounds Festival, hosts concerts in Vienna as Struma+Iodine, is part of the Elevate Festival team of curators and active as a music journalist for various magazines. As Inou Ki Endo, she is filtering communal sounds and rhythms from the past and the present, drawing from experimental, hybrid, harsh, rhythmic, and ambient sounds from around the globe.

Mira Mann

Mira Mann works transdisciplinary in the fields of poetry, music and performance. She deals with sex, illness, motherhood and violence in a radically personal way. In this context, she makes common role clichés and social attributions resonate. She creates connections between actors from a wide range of genres and consciously crosses the boundaries of so-called high- and subculture.

Mira Mann's curatorial and artistic practice explores the boundaries of closed systems and searches for unexpected feedback loops. Together with Daniela Schroll, she has been organizing the workshop and concert series “Intimacy Quarterly” at the Blitz Club and the Habibi Kiosk of Kammerspiele Munich since 2022. Here she presents powerful positions of contemporary experimental pop music and creates space in the workshop format to make them available as community practice. 

Yoh Morishita & Marija Jociūtė

Performance ‘Chrysalis’

A body, constantly mutating. A body infested with a variety of materials: mussels, horns, tentacles, synapses, eluding oppression by altering its shape or slipping away from it, and leaving behind only skin. Like a pupated insect about to hatch. In Chrysalis, Yoh Morishita embodies a process of metamorphosis that perceives life as a dynamic equilibrium. Different types of movement appear simultaneously, creating a fatuous coherence of the animated and the inanimate. Existing orders are being dissolved and created anew. If change is the essence of life, how much do we allow ourselves to change? Lithuanian artist/composer Marija Jociūtė creates an electronic soundscape for the piece that inspires communication between all those involved.

Miriam Adefris

Currently living in London, Austrian-Ethiopian sound artist, harpist and composer Miriam Adefris is an active part of a musical scene that is forming between jazz, experimental electronics and club sounds. Adefris regularly performs with musicians such as Shabaka Hutchings, Valentina Magaletti, or Floating Points. As a solo musician, she develops impressionistic, immersive atmospheres that are reminiscent of Alice Coltrane's Afrofuturistic soundscapes and draw on the artist's East African musical heritage. Its aetheral beauty even led FKA Twigs to invite her to perform at her private birthday party this year.

Dorian Concept

Over the past two decades, Dorian Concept has successfully carved out a niche for himself. The virtuoso keyboard & synth player and multi-instrumentalist layers dazzling melodies to colorful, fascinatingly polyphonic tracks. With releases out on Ninja Tune and Brainfeeder, he presents dense arrangements that can get even orchestral in their complexity, while his improvising skills tell about an affiliation for jazz. Dorian Concept's latest track ‘Hide’ went viral. It was to become the official soundtrack to the Dark Fantasy trend online, covered hundreds of times by fans worldwide. For the festival opening Dorian Concept will present a special live set.

As our bodies can only inhabit one actual world at a time, we tend to become ignorant to the uncountable, the many possible worlds, the multiple dimensions that surround us - that we are embedded in and that live within each individual, that are created by collectives, communities, societies, species.

Speculation, imagination, myth-making, fantasy, memory, dreams, and fiction – the virtual sides of reality – offer ways to alternate and altered states of consciousness and perception. Fiction is just a differently perceived form of reality, and it plays a crucial role in shaping it. "Of Many Worlds" is not a call for escapism, but an invitation to encounter a kaleidoscopic, crystalline world made out of many worlds. To enter passages, portals that lead from one time and place to another, on a private, collective, or even cosmic scope. It aims to offer multiperspectivity, and polyvocality, in an attempt to find common grounds in politically precarious times, and tries to point a way out of the grand narratives of capitalism, of the hegemonic orders of dominant knowledge systems, and to guide us towards personal, imaginary, speculative microcosms; a parallel universe filled with sounds.