Interfacing Rituals: bela, okcandice, WAG5

In the organizer's words:

EOS is an independent platform for contemporary, sound-based practices with a focus on electronic and experimental music, founded in 2020 and operating between Berlin and Frankfurt. The project Interfacing Rituals is dedicated to sound as a material for artistic approaches to rituality. In their practice, the participating musicians take up symbolic languages from various diasporas, among others, and trace the mysticism of sound as an energy field - in that state before language forms into meaning. It is also about the act of listening as a shared, situated listening experience in which ritual and performance meet.

bela is a Berlin-based South Korean musician and performance artist who combines elements of traditional pungmul music - a folk art closely linked to social movements - with vocal experiments inspired by death metal and screamo. Bela also draws on old performance practices from dance dramas or shamanistic rituals. Her performances, characterized by bass-heavy distortions and piercing screams, manifest queer rage and grief. The seven tracks on the album Noise and Cries, released in 2024 - five avant-garde sound experiments and two extended, atmospheric compositions - reflect on the precariousness of life in South Korea, queer identity, the loss of relationships and the power of perseverance. bela was nominated for the SHAPE+ platform 2023-2024 and received an honorable mention at last year's Giga Hertz Award for Electronic Music in the PopExperimental category.

Behind the pseudonym okcandice is the interdisciplinary artist, musician and writer Candice Nembhard, who works between Birmingham and Berlin. Her sound-based practice explores methods of coping with grief through layering live sound, vocal experimentation and looped meditations on love and loss. Oscillating between soul, jazz, ambient poetry and electronic fragments, she released her debut EP BREATH TAPES in 2024 - a collection of demos and one-take recordings from 2019 to 2021.

WAG5, a rotating collective of like-minded artists working between visual and sound-based practices from different locations. Following a multi-perspective approach, individually or collectively produced pieces are put together in different times and places, in which authorship as a category is suspended in favor of an interdisciplinary and collaborative process. Stylistically, their productions range between drone, breakcore and bass-heavy music, which, while recognizing its roots in club culture, seeks moments of manifestation outside of it.