PROJECTS
tekhnē is a collaborative project in which six European organisations aim to explore the emancipatory potential of technology in music and sound art. By engaging critically and creatively with technology, and by putting the focus on the user rather than the developer, technologies and methodologies can be demystified and lead to more autonomous mindsets towards […]
TRACKS is an app designed for soundwalks. Soundwalks are guided walks thoughtfully combined with the sensory attention of listening. They offer stories, music, and sound experiments, overlaid onto the experience of moving through the city. Each walk is made for a specific location or trajectory, giving familiar places an unexpected character. With TRACKS, you […]
Oto-date is a project by the Japanese artist Akio Suzuki in which he invites the audience to stand still on specific spots in the urban space. These places are marked by a pictogram which shows a hybrid of human footprints and ears. The project seeks to get people listening to the sounds that surround them […]
21 Tracks for the 21st Century is a series of playlists organised as a collaboration between Glean and Q-O2. Each time, we invite one artist, thinker or musician to prepare a playlist of those sounds, songs and pieces of music that will best equip their listeners to approach what is left of this young century. […]
AirBag/14Holes consists of a large central air cushion with 14 bulging cones. By improperly using this attraction, the air cushion becomes part of an instrument, which looks like a gigantic children’s bagpipe. The huge flow of air makes it possible to activate the Recorder Flute Asylum. A mass of abandoned, unused recorder flutes donated for […]
During the lockdown we have started a series of (live) radio transmissions, which highlight the work of specific artists, seeking through radiophonic practices to mix music, sound, and talk. So far have been our guests: Lukas De Clerck, Pak Yan Lau, the Oceanographies Institute, Myriam Van Imschoot. All sessions are available on our […]
The project Agripuncture / Sore Spot Songs is inspired by traditions of postwar victory gardens, Vedic mantras, and botanical healing. During performative “Agripuncture” workshops, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Esther Mugambi and Raoul Carrer invite local guests to feel the sore spots in our city and think how can we collectively care for them. Transposing the neighbourhood map […]
Since 2020, we are having a bi-monthly residency at LYL Radio, listen to all session HERE. LYL has been operating in Lyon since 2015 from Les Ateliers SUMO, and has opened a second outlet in Paris in November 2016 (now located at La Caboteuse), then Brussels in 2020 and Marseille in 2021. The native […]
Oscillation is an annual festival situated between sound, music and experimentation. The festival occurs at the beginning of May and embraces a diverse range of formats including concerts, talks, broadcasts, installations, workshops and works in public space. It is organised by Q-O2 werkplaats in collaboration with local and international partners, and builds on the thematics […]
Each year STUK, Q-O2 and Musica present a sample of new Belgian sound art. Four performances by young makers are presented in a parcours through the STUK building. This showcase shows the diversity of the Belgian sound landscape, from audiovisual creation over live radio work to spatial music, meant as a little push for the […]
Alice Pamuk’s proposal is to develop a sound installation in which short phrases of pop music are looped and broadcast in the space. For Pamuk, the proposal arises out of several years of research around pop music (for example a previous project of analysing interviews of American rappers and hip hop producers). Despite this fascination […]
The one-day symposium and reflection day From Split Sheets to the Streets: how we credit, share and collect for intellectual property today and tomorrow will examine the worlds of intellectual property and ownership of music – beginning from the present and extending into models for the future.
Second Sundays is a monthly series initiated by Q-O2. Each session a new guest is invited to share an insight into their own listening, playing and speaking about a selection of sound and music that is important to their thinking or practice. The sessions try to put value on listening to recorded music in a […]
Two days of conference and three days of workshops will present and unpack the shapes and possibilities of participatory sound art and music practices today. As an inherently relational phenomenon, sound has a privileged set of possibilities within so-called social practice. In or outside of musical structures, sound vibrates against the distinction between producer and […]
Interfaces is an international, interdisciplinary project focusing on bringing new music to an extensive range of new audiences. It involves a partnership of organisations from a wide range of European countries having a broad spectrum of experience in fields such as performing, multi-media exhibitions, new media, acoustic and electro-acoustic research and education. This trans-sectoral approach […]
Visit the blog of the ongoing project here. Caroline Claus designed the project L_28 Urban Sound Design. The undeveloped open space along the Western ring railway L28 has long been marginalized in Brussels planning processes. Thanks to its natural, historical and ecological richness the site is an excellent research object, especially in the context […]
Gender, voice, language and identity are connected. They are fluctuating and complex notions, strongly determined by and being fundamental to tradition and culture. Voice is sound but also information, dialect, identity. Voice is political. Gender is expressed, if not exclusively through the use of voice, and is one of the first elements to identity. Language […]
Under the heading of Live House the audience is invited to enjoy live presentations of recorded musics selected by experienced listeners. Discovering and enjoying recorded musics while re-evaluating and further shaping the aesthetic experience of listening to them is central to these sit downs. The time available to any individual for listening to musics recorded […]
Alongside the creation of a new opera by Mark Grey at De Munt in June 2016, Q-O2 will, together with De Munt and Bronks, give the opportunity to a group of youths to make their own version and present it during the European Opera Days on May 7th and 8th of 2016. The book […]
SoCCoS is a residency and research network engaging with exploratory music, sound art and culture. It provides residency opportunities via exchange of artists, cultural workers and theorists. Through the residencies, SoCCoS offers time and space away from known environment and everyday routines, to discover new sites, different cultures of sound art and source materials, to […]
Finding Song Home is the new sonic bike opera made for Brussels by Kaffe Matthews and the Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI) with tech development by Tom Keene. It is a work that explores the injustices of birthright and the power of nations governments to enable or prevent the free movement of its citizens. […]
Festival & winter school Is all art interpretation? A translation into yet another shape, frame or context? Could editing be a contemporary form of interpretation? How does memory filter our listening? Who is the author? An array of concerts, lectures and workshops will explore different aspects of the topic. Composition and improvisation, the […]
Over the course of a series of workshops, visits and lectures and the four day festival, Tuned City Brussels probes such urban frequencies through concerts, walks, installations and interventions in situ while at the same time focusing the theoretical framework around three core notions: 'Relational Noise', 'Situational Listening' and 'Operative Ambience'. A different theme will be explored each day in a corresponding 'zone' in the city, towards which the festival relocates.
FIELD FEST was the official launch of the ‘Sounds of Europe’-project initiated by Q-O2 (Brussels), MTG/Sons de Barcelona (Barcelona), IRZU (Ljubljana) and CRiSAP (London). ‘Sounds of Europe’ acknowledges and explores the increase of field recording activity in music, art and science.FIELD FEST presented an up-to-date sampling of the artistic use of field recording. The artistic use […]
Sounds of Europe is a project that acknowledges and follows the increase of field recording activity in music, art and sciences in recent years. By field recording activity we mean an artistic practice working with the accidental sounds of our environment. Our aim is to draw up an overall picture of the many different ways […]
The ‘BXL-NYC Spatialized’ Expo is an exchange between Brussels and New York, in which six audio artists (Mieke Lambrigts, Stefaan Quix, Ludo Engels, Barry Weisblat, Marina Rosenfeld and Michael Schumacher) show their work on sound spatialization in both cities. The Brussels’ leg of the exhibition was hosted at Koolmijnenkaai 30-34, in the Q-O2, okno and […]
The project //2009// – what do you make of what I say? started on 4th of january 2009 and ended on 13th december 2009. It was a succession of sound recordings made over the course of one year by ten artists who had each four weeks to respond to the recording of an unknown predessessor. […]
DoUndo/recycling G is a project initiated by Julia Eckhardt (viola) and Ludo Engels (recording). They have been collecting exclusively long viola sounds, rich in overtones and partly distorted. This ‘collection’ of sounds was then presented to other (sound)artists, proposing further processing. Invited artists and their contribution: Sergio Merce Sobre el nivel del mar (for tape […]
Displaced Sounds is a series of lectures, exhibitions and concerts that focus on the undervalued role of sound in our visually attuned culture. Displaced Sounds focuses on unexpected sounds and intense listening, in collaboration with STUK and KRAAK. Fri. 20 March 2009 : Steve Feld (US), Zoe Laughlin (UK), Aernoudt Jacobs (BE) Steve […]
In Zennestraat 17, the former laboratory of the Ministery of Economic Affairs, a temporary artistic hub was opened in April 2009. During BRXLBRAVO, a cross-over of contemporary work from all disciplines will be presented. Several workspaces will join forces with the resident organizations, to inject a supplementary dose of experimental art. The platform arts-lab.be will […]
In this programme for viola and new media, the four composers Anne Wellmer, Stevie Wishart, Chiyoko Szlavnics and Andrea Neumann created for this program for viola a few new works and rewrited some existing compositions. Besides being composers, they are also performers, and specifically improvisers. This obviously has a strong influence on their methodology. Similarly, […]
In March 2006, Q-O2 presented a three day music festival in Brussels in the scope of the exhibition A Room of One’s Own. Musicians and composers from Brussels and Berlin were invited to present new experimental work starting from the basic questions: “What does our everyday environment/space mean to us?” and “How does the space […]
Abstract Adventures presents during three consecutive days experimental and avant-garde music. The focus lies on the working process and on the relation between the different music styles and philosophical visions. The result of these confrontations is a ‘melting’ of diverse music scenes and the blurring of the demarkations between written and improvised music, between composer […]