Transmissions

Soundwalk Collective is the contemporary sonic arts platform of founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli. Working with a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, they develop site- and context-specific sound projects through which to examine conceptual, literary or artistic themes.

Evolving along multi-disciplinary lines, Soundwalk Collective has cultivated long-term creative collaborations with musician Patti Smith, late director Jean-Luc Goddard, photographer Nan Goldin, choreographer Sasha Waltz, and actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg, among others. In doing so, their practice engages in the narrative potential of sound across mediums such as art installations, dance, music and film.

A unique artistic approach to sound ties together the different forms in which Soundwalk Collective work. Whether in original composition or the use of archival recordings, they treat sound as material that is both tactile and poetic. This allows them to create layered narratives that address ideas of memory, time, love and loss.

Their original score for ‘All The Beauty and the Bloodshed’ (dir. Laura Poitras) won the Golden Lion at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. More recently, they have scored ‘Stendhal Syndrome’, the latest moving-image work by photographer and artist Nan Goldin for her exhibition at Gagosian NYC. In 2024, they are showing ‘Correspondences’, a new exhibition and performance with Patti Smith at the Onassis Foundation in Athens, the BAM in New York, and the Medellin Modern Art Museum, that weaves an audio-visual journey through literature, art, philosophy and the current state of our planet in reaction to the impact of climate change.

A Song For You is a vocal ensemble project made up of around 50 vocalists and a revolving band. The project was formed by singer Noah Slee and creative director Dhanesh Jayaselan, with an intent to amplify the talent that lies within Berlin’s neo-soul, R&B and hip-hop scenes and to create a space and platform for under-represented voices to be heard at the forefront of their own artistic medium.

Since exhibiting her groundbreaking 1985 photo series, “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” Nan Goldin has become one of the most eminent and influential photographers of our times. Her autobiographical documentation of the New York’s late 1970s and early 1980s downtown avant-garde and post-Stonewall gay subculture would become a benchmark for confessional photography.

Pan Daijing is a Berlin-based artist and composer who primarily engages with performance, installation, sound and moving images in her practice. Drawing on the capacity of music to exceed the limits of language and distort the passage of time, Daijing’s work seeks to communicate physical, psychological and sonic depths, and to invoke a collective experience of solitude. Alongside her three studio albums, Daijing has developed and exhibited a number of performance artworks and installations, including the five-act opera “Tissues” at Tate Modern, London.

Jana Winderen is a Norweigan artist with a background in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology. Her practice pays particular attention to audio environments and to creatures that are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear. Her activities include site-specific and spatial audio installations and concerts, which have been exhibited and performed internationally in major institutions and public spaces. Recent work includes “The Art of Listening: Underwater” at Lenfest Center for the Arts, Colombia University, New York, “The Art of Listening: Underwater” for Audemar Piguet at Art Basel, Miami and “Ultrafield“ for MoMA, New York. In 2011 she won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica for Digital Musics & Sound Art. She releases her audio-visual work on Touch (UK).

Growing up singing in choirs, Lyra struggled to conform to the images and expectations of her small Pennsylvania town, creating a deep and complex internet-fueled interior world in response and presaging her view of digital worlds as extensions of our embodied consciousness, liberated from real-world notions of presentation and acceptable knowledge. A diligent student at the Eastman School of Music, she later found communal ecstasy in the temples of choir and rave, learning that her skills lay in breaking with and reinterpreting the traditions of the academically-pure classical music that she was expected to uphold.

Composed and arranged entirely from the sound of her own voice, “Fountain,” her debut on Bedroom Community, was hailed as “a potent religious text in praise of human vocality’s promise” (The Quietus). “Fountain” integrates the intimacies of the club, the emotional multitude of trans experiences, and the forbidding possibilities of social and physical technologies into “an excavation of her own body’s resonant possibilities” (Pitchfork), envisioning a post-human queer futurity. Her forthcoming compilation “Delta” showcases a global interpretation of Fountain’s psyche, through reworking, recomposing, and reconstructing the source material, projecting them through the many lenses of her colleagues and collaborators.