Akusma Forum is a project initiated by a renowned Polish composer, former artistic director of Musica Electronica Nova Elżbieta Sikora. Its aim is to present the audience with a diverse panorama of new music by composers from different countries. This year, it will be France, Canada, and Greece.

Filippos Sakagian is the curator of this year’s Akusma Forum – Greece series. The composer and transmedia artist has invited local artists associated with the electroacoustic music scene to participate in the project. Among them is Maria Pelekanou, whose works combine electronics, electroacoustics and spatial sound technology with visual elements. In Nach der Stille A, she uses moving sound objects to evoke images of the war and bombing of Syria. The author used a recording and a sketch of a shooting simulation as her material – appropriately transformed, they create reverberations that shape the content that unites and builds the poetic nature of the work.

As the title suggests, Panayiotis Kokoras’ Qualia explores the experience of music absorption by the listener: from perception to an individually shaped sensation, during which our sensory organs – particularly hearing, touch and vision – respond to sound stimuli. The combination of sound, space and human presence makes the listener involuntarily take part in a multidimensional undertaking. Spatiality is also the core of Sakagian’s In Digital Ecstasy. His composition aims to disorient the listener with various impulses, in order to better control their experience. In an “unstable” environment, most of us absorb external content much more attentively, searching for some kind of guiding thread to follow. This spatiality creates a vibrant sound environment, bewildering the listener. The chaos is intensified by the artist’s use of strobe lights, which prevent the listener from keeping their eyes fully open – allowing us to delve into inner listening.

Nikos Stavropoulos’ Khemenu references Egyptian mythology and specifically to Ogdoad – eight primordial deities worshipped in ancient Egypt. This group symbolises the balance between the basic elements of the cosmos. Eight is also the number of channels in a second-order ambisonic recording. Khemenu is part of Stavropoulos’ cycle exploring the concept of auditory micro-space – an area of ​​acoustic space that is difficult to fathom due to physical limitations. Its auditory perception is only possible when it is mediated by recording technology.