EXIT’23 – International Festival of Experimental Arts

International Festival of Experimental Arts in Montevideo [UY], EXIT aims to create spaces of exchange and experimentation in the Southern Cone music scene.

In its second edition, running from 21 to 26 March 2023, the event features a few Swiss-based artists and collectives. y-band presents the concert «Concepts of Flow», an immersive experience oscillating between the worlds of new music and pop culture through the incorporation of lighting and video design. A member of y-band, Joan Jordi Oliver also participates with a solo performance. Miguel Ángel García Martín and Stanislas Pili stage individual installations and, together, conduct a workshop for percussionists.

y-band consists of a team of polyhedral performers, grouped by the common denominator of their age (and generation) and their individual artistic research. The group is made up of: Roberto Maqueda (percussion & idea), Felix Nagl (keyboards), Andreas Eduardo Frank (live-electronics), Thilo Ruck (e-guitar), Joan Jordi Oliver (saxophone), Georgia Koumará, and Fernando Manassero (composers). Starting from composition, they integrate technological, aesthetic, and artistic research into their practice, which includes conventional rehearsal work as well as video, sound, and setup design. Their goal is to make tangible how technological resources and digital communication influence human perception in concert situations. The projects are reactions to a changing society, to networking in digital space and to the shifting of communication structures. In collaboration with composers and artists of all disciplines, they reflect on these upheavals and relate them to music, sound, and multimedia tools of Generation Y.

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Joan Jordi Oliver is a saxophonist, composer and electronic musician from Spain based in Zurich. His multifaceted musical practice merges performance, composition, improvisation, and electroacoustic elements into an eclectic but individual musical expression. A permanent obsession with the rediscovery of the possibilities of his instrument, enhanced by the electronic medium, leads to sonic explorations that combine acoustic elements, synthesizer sounds and digital processes. His broad musical interests result in a work that rejects stylistic borders and craves its own identity at the intersection of ambient, minimalism, free improvisation, contemporary classical music, and experimental electronica.

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Miguel Ángel García Martín is a Spanish percussionist, performer, and improviser based in Basel. He is active in a variety of contexts such as contemporary classical music, multidisciplinary performances and experimental. Miguel has participated in the creation and rendition of productions for ECLAT, Spielart Festival, Staatsoper Berlin, Biennale di Venezia, Origen Festival Cultural, Münchener Biennale, Les Jardins Musicaux, Festival Musica Strasbourg and Neue Musik Rümlingen. In the contemporary classical music field, he has worked together with composers such as Simon Steen-Andersen, Kathy van Eck, and Ondrej Adamek. In the experimental field, with Lê Quan Ninh, Julian Sartorius, Strotter Inst., Zimoun and Myriam Bleau.

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Stanislas Pili is based in Bern and dedicates himself to projects in the context of contemporary music, experimental music theatre, sound installations and improvisation. He works as a performer and composer without putting any barrier between the roles he takes on. In his work, sonic and visual elements are composed in parallel and freely used as tools for the creation. On stage there is no hierarchy between the media: prepared objects, electro-acoustic devices, video projections, lights, natural and industrial materials are protagonists together with the performer. Parallel to his artistic activity, he works as director of the Concours Nicati and he is a member of the board of IGNM Bern.