For our final Kiezsalon of the year, we head to the Akademie der Künste in Tiergarten for some musical edification. Making their first collaborative appearance in Berlin are vocalist extraordinaire Sofia Jernberg and cellist Judith Hamann, presenting their commissioned work from MADEIRADiG last year. They will be joined by Berlin-based composer and psychoacoustic researcher Ben Glas and American contemporary folk performer-composer Sheherazaad.

Born in Ethiopia and raised in Vietnam, Stockholm-based Sofia Jernberg is an exceptional singer and composer. With a background in jazz, she focuses on unconventional techniques and sounds such as non-verbal vocalisation, split tones and toneless singing. Music theatre and contemporary opera also play an important role in Jernberg’s artistic oeuvre. In 2023, she made her debuts with the Collegium Novum Zurich, Ensemble Resonanz and the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra.

Originally from Melbourne, Judith Hamann is a cellist meanwhile based in Berlin whose process-based creative practice encompasses electroacoustic music, site-specific generative work and microtonal systems. The Wire posited that Judith “destroys the fiction of the musician who lives and works outside conventional parameters and puts in its place a series of compositions that are fundamentally humane.”

Judith and Sofia premiered their new collaboration last December at our MADEIRADiG Festival and are now offering an encore performance.

Ben Glas is an experimental composer who moved from Portland to pursue Sonic Studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. Through ephemeral compositions, he questions preconceived notions of passive hearing versus active listening. His works focus on the realms of subjective perception and cognition via the use of acoustics, psychoacoustics and space as tools for sonic composition.

Sheherazaad is an American performer whose contemporary folk synthesis joins the new wave of South Asian diasporic soundscapes. Native to the San Francisco Bay Area and brought up second-generation in an immigrant household, Sheherazaad gleans from Western classical and South Asian sonic lineages. Her contemporary voicing, though inherently genre-defiant, may be described as alternative folk or experimental ballad. The original lyricism modernises certain existing Hindi-Urdu poetic forms, channelling questions of displacement, mother tongue, imagined homelands, and beyond.

Founded over three centuries ago, the Akademie der Künste is one of Europe’s oldest cultural institutes. Designed by architect Werner Düttmann, Hanseatenweg is a generous, yet modest ensemble of three different buildings encompassed by courtyards and gardens, a proper site to ring out the year before we take our winter break.