Nikola H. Mounoud (• • •) | 2022 Residency
Mainland China | Music
July 3-end of Aug, 2023 — Music
Nationality: Switzerland
Residency location: mainland China, Hong Kong, Taipei
• • • is the moniker of Nikola H. Mounoud. Composer, performer, improviser, musician, noisician, sound artist, sound actionist… All are fine words and yet they lack something to really fathom the extent of his sound works. For more than a decade he dedicated his work to live performances, touring worldwide as much as possible while he kept developing a custom electronic instrumentation. Using an analog audio mixer, a laptop with modular software and an audio interface to play his music with different types of audio feedbacks, nothing pre-recorded, all in real-time, live… This original set-up gives him the ability to play a large variety of sounds and get limitless access to audible frequencies at a great and rare velocity. No style or genre is out of reach.
Aside from live performances and tours, he also co-curated festivals, booked tours and organised live events in Switzerland and abroad. He coordinated international exchanges such as LUFF does Tokyo (2012) and LUFF does Hong Kong, both events were supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In 2017 he started to build sound-based and/or sound inspired permanent installations, sculptures and other fine art based works, two were built in Vietnam (HARSHHOLE 2016 & HARSHWALL 2019) and the latest one (HARSHTHUNDER) is currently being build in Buthiers, France and will be unveiled in early winter 2022.
In the electronic music field, a particularity is that almost every performer has their very own custom set-up, suited for their unique need and are often fruits of years of research, trial and error. For this residency, Nikola H. Mounoud will go meet, work and spend one week with one artist, for a total of eight weeks. Not only they will exchange on their respective works, ideas and philosophy behind their approach but ultimately and literally exchange their instruments, teach each other their technics, how to play and perform with the other set-up and, at the end of each week, record one studio track of maximum five minutes. This residency will be a great challenge to all involved and also be a fairly unique opportunity to test their skills and for the audience to hear if the “style” of one electronic sound artist can be easily recognised when he has no access to his original instruments.
At the end of the residency, eight tracks recorded by different musicians with • • •’s instruments and eight tracks recorded by him with eight different instrumentation/set-up will be proposed online and in the physical format as restitution and remembrance of this 2022 residency.
(Portrait of•••aka Nikola H. Mounoud, Photograph by Charlotte Aebischer)
