On June 30th, Callie’s will present Nine Lives (아홉번의 삶), a sound installation being developed by resident Jan Urbiks alongside collaborators Enyang Ha, Gerriet K. Sharma, and Ricardo Domeneck. This work in progress combines live electronic music with pansori—a genre of Korean folk opera—and represents the group’s first-ever composition for the IKO: an icosahedral-shaped instrument that generates immersive, 3D sound fields.

In Nine Lives, Urbiks and Sharma will rely on the IKO’s 20 separately driven speakers to create a sonic sculpture activated by live vocals and visuals. Ha will further physically activate the installation through a performance that includes excerpts from the four-chapter opera Medusamorphing: A PANSORI (메두사로 탈바꿈하기: 판소리). Written by Domeneck, the libretto explores the stories we tell about our own mutable identities. Through voice, costume, and movement, Ha will interact directly with the IKO speaker and create a layered, multidimensional soundscape, reflecting on ideas of rebirth through transformation.

Enabled by the group’s ongoing collaboration, Nine Lives offers a chance to consider the compositional possibilities of the IKO-as-instrument and invites us to perceive sound not as something projected into space, but as a space itself in which instrument, performer, and audience fluidly interact.

Jan Urbiks was born in 1990 in Weinheim, Germany. Working predominantly in experimental electronic music, the composer, spatial audio engineer, and percussionist completed his masters thesis, Spatiality in Electronic Music: Effect of Immersive Sound and Rhythm in 2018. Alongside Enyang Ha, he co-founded and runs URBIKS, a studio for audio mastering and sound at the Funkhaus, a former GDR broadcast center in Berlin. Urbiks lives and works in Berlin.

Enyang Ha was born in Seoul, South Korea. Known primarily as a musician and performer, she is also recognized for her work as a mastering engineer and producer. Alongside Jan Urbiks, Ha co-founded and runs URBIKS, a studio for audio mastering and sound. Ha lives and works in Berlin.

Gerriet K. Sharma was born in 1974 in Bonn, Germany. He is a sound artist, composer, and artistic researcher who specializes in sound spatialization, ambisonics and wave-field synthesis. His work has been presented at institutions, universities, and festivals around the world. Amongst them, the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthaus Graz; and the HAU, Berlin. Sharma lives and works in Berlin.

Ricardo Domeneck was born in 1977 in Bebedouro, Brazil. He is a poet, visual artist, and critic whose practice includes publication, video, performance, and music. He has published eight collections of poetry and two of prose, and his work has been translated into English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Slovenian. Domeneck is the co-founder of Gully Havoc, a Berlin-based artist collective. He lives and works in Berlin.