A Concert Unframed: ‘SEISMIC’ Makes the Ground Beneath Listening Shift

How strange, when you think about it, to demand that an audience experience music just in one way: sitting politely, fixed in their seats, facing the stage. In ‘SEISMIC’, those conventions collapse. What remains is a space where sound, movement and light converge, and where performers and audience search for one another.

- text and interviews by Sue Somers

Not every artist feels at home in uncertainty. For Belgian director Aïda Gabriëls, it is the very core of her work. In her projects, she weaves classical and contemporary music together, constantly seeking new forms of freedom. She has already taken the concert out of the concert hall. But with ‘SEISMIC’, she pushes her exploration of listening even further.

“Together with Ictus - a contemporary music ensemble from Brussels - we invited the Swedish composer Maria W Horn, who wrote a piece in which acoustic sounds and electronic textures flow into each other. The music revolves around drones, long sustained tones against which other sounds leave their trace.”

These slow sound fields stretch time, precisely what Gabriëls wants to examine. “I wondered what happens when sound is not only heard in time but also felt in space. Sound is always temporal: it moves us from one moment to the next. But sound also consists of vibrations that create pressure, and therefore energy. From that physical force, you can start to think architecturally, of sound that doesn’t fill space, but shapes it.”

Listening Becomes Movement

When sound defines space, listening becomes movement. Air trembles, walls reply, bodies resonate. That seismic activity sets the audience in motion. “I want people to walk through the space during the performance”, Gabriëls says. “It’s almost a game: by creating confusion, artists and spectators are placed on equal ground. A concert experience becomes a shared responsibility.”

In ‘SEISMIC’, the boundaries between disciplines dissolve. A trombonist, percussionist, electronic musician, string trio, and a movement artist step into the same arena. Matteo Sedda, who embodies movement, acts as a bridge between movement and audience. “My body is a conduit”, he says. “At first, that connection feels soothing, but gradually tension creeps in. It becomes a game of attraction and resistance.”

This tension becomes visible too. Sedda and percussionist Rubén Orio cross the space at the start of the performance, each holding a cymbal. They test the acoustics, stretching time and expectation. When will the cymbals collide, sending a singe crack through the air?

It’s characteristic of Sedda’s practice, which continually breaks the so-called ‘fourth wall’. “It may seem natural, but it requires real technique”, he says. “When you move among the audience, you have to open yourself up while remaining grounded. Otherwise, they’ll devour you.”

His secret? Radiate trust and let go. “You’re not there to shine. Only when you realise that, something real can happen between people.”

Resistance

At the heart of ‘SEISMIC’ lies Maria W Horn’s composition ‘Time Variables’, created in close collaboration with the musicians of the Belgian Ictus ensemble. In her work, time becomes fluid. There’s no fixed tempo, no measurable metre. The musicians follow not a metronome, but the duration of a bow stroke, a heartbeat or the blink of an eye.

“The piece demands a lot from the performers”, Horn says. “They only have a few cues to know when to change pitch. If they want, they can linger in a single chord for minutes. ‘Time Variables’ can last up to three hours, or three weeks for that matter.”

This openness demands not only concentration, but also surrender, from both musicians and audience. “I wanted to write a piece that calls for radical listening. Our society is obsessed with time: everything must be efficient, digestible, complete. I wanted to break from that and create space for something immeasurable.”

Horn is aware that such an approach can provoke resistance. “Some people may find it confronting, but I don’t want to dictate emotion. My music is an invitation, not an instruction. Composing, for me, is an act of individuality: I make the music I want to hear, and hope others might want to listen along.”

Horn is also a co-founder of Sthlm Drone Society, a Swedish collective devoted to slow, gradually shifting soundscapes. “Sometimes our performances last up to twelve hours. A concert becomes a form of mediation, you have to enter the sound to experience it.”

She still remembers her first encounter with drone music. “I was playing bass in a punk band when I first heard slow electronic music. I instantly knew: this is it. I felt truly present, inside the moment. It’s like a gate you step through, the reward lies on the other side. The only way to reach it, is to surrender to time.”

A Space That Keeps Moving

And what of the audience’s role? “Don’t worry”, Gabriëls laughs. “You won’t be forced to do anything. There’s no spotlight on you, no expectations, only an invitation to immerse yourself in sound. It’s actually easier to be there, rather than watch something unfold in front of you.”

Friction remains a driving force for Gabriëls. She considers the concert hall as a place where one can disappear, or emerge. “It’s exciting to seek confrontation there. I don’t work with text, but with sound, image, space and presence. That makes it fragile, but alive. The risk is part of the work.”

In an age of ecological and social instability, ‘SEISMIC’ inevitably carries symbolic weight, Gabriëls acknowledges. “It’s impossible to separate it from what’s happening around us. My work is always political, but never didactic. I don’t want to impose a vision. It’s more about asking yourself where you stand in this shifting landscape. The sense of something larger than us… I think we all feel it.”

That sense of precarity makes ‘SEISMIC’ a performance in constant flux. “There’s no fixed script, no predictable ending”, Gabriëls concludes. “With every audience, in every space, we rewrite the work anew. That may be the most seismic thing about it: it keeps vibrating, changing, breathing.”