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19 & 20 June at Flagey
Tickets: €15/concert – Day Passes: €25 (early bird) / €30
Why "Tectonics"? For over a decade, artists from around the world have gathered in Glasgow with a shared goal – to push the boundaries of their art form, often challenging its basic ground rules. An earthquake, while destructive, also brings renewal and change. Despite being a beautiful, old-fashioned musical structure, I know that an orchestra still has much to offer - and exploring this has been at the core of my journey with Brussels Philharmonic. The logical next step was to bring Tectonics to Brussels: together with Brussels Philharmonic, Ictus and Flagey we will present a festival focused on the profound act of listening and the potential of collaboration. Embrace the music with openness. Trust the composers, performers… and yourself! It often leads to exciting and transformative experiences.
17:00-23:00 |
SOUND INSTALLATION: SONIC HARVEST |
free |
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17:00-23:00 |
EXPO: BAUDOUIN OOSTERLYNCK |
free |
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17:00-23:00 |
SOUND INSTALLATION: FABIO MACHIAVELLI |
free |
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19:00 |
ICTUS & TAREK HALABY |
free |
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20:00 |
BRUSSELS PHILHARMONIC: |
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21:00 |
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22:00 |
ICTUS: INTERFERENCE |
17:00-23:00 |
SOUND INSTALLATION: SONIC HARVEST |
free |
||
17:00-23:00 |
EXPO: BAUDOUIN OOSTERLYNCK |
free |
||
17:00-23:00 |
SOUND INSTALLATION: FABIO MACHIAVELLI |
free |
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17:15 |
ICTUS: MICRO BREATHS OF A BLUE LUNG |
free |
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18:00 |
VLAAMS RADIOKOOR: |
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19:00 |
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20:30 |
BRUSSELS PHILHARMONIC: |
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22:00 |
FOR THOSE WHO LIVE AT THE SHORELINE |
free |
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22:00 |
ICTUS: MICRO BREATHS OF A BLUE LUNG |
free |
music by Frederic Rzewski, Coming Together / Attica
by Ictus (ensemble), Tarek Halaby (narrator)
(free)
Frederic Rzewski (1938–2021) created, with this 1975 diptych, one of the most powerful works for narrator in modern music. The piece is rooted in the Attica prison uprising (New York, 1971), where inmates demanded to be treated as human beings. The repression cost more than forty lives. Rzewski based the work on a letter by Sam Melville, one of the victims. In a sharp mix of exhaustion, resilience, and irony, he describes how self-discipline helps him reclaim his dignity. Over a modal bass line, Rzewski builds a strict structure based on the numbers 7 and 49. He ‘locks’ the text in place, while the music’s irrepressible energy pushes against those limits.
music by Øyvind Torvund, Symphony for Kunstnernes Hus
by Brussels Philharmonic, Ilan Volkov (conductor), Signe Emmeluth (saxophone), Jørgen Træen (synths), Jennifer Torrence (percussion)
(€15) (more info & tickets)
Øyvind Torvund’s Symphony for Kunstnernes Hus is a symphony that presents itself as an artwork—and an artwork that takes the shape of a symphonic concert. An immersive experience unfolds throughout the building, with simultaneous musical moments inviting the audience to move freely and fully immerse themselves in the sound.
music TBC
by Farida Amadou (electric bass), Heather Leigh (pedal steel guitar)
(€15) (tickets)
The duo of Farida Amadou and Heather Leigh brings together two singular voices in contemporary experimental music. Working in the realm of free improvisation, they weave dense, visceral soundscapes where Amadou’s heavily processed electric bass collides with Leigh’s expansive, emotionally charged pedal steel guitar. Their music unfolds as a raw dialogue of texture, tension, and fleeting lyricism, constantly shifting between abstraction and deep sonic immersion. Their collaboration carries the spirit of their dearly belated friend and mentor, Peter Brötzmann, whose uncompromising approach to sound and improvisation continues to resonate through their work. Amadou and Leigh first performed as a duo at Cafe OTO in 2024, as part of the Brotz Festival honouring Brötzmann’s legacy. They later brought their collaboration to Summer Bummer Festival, further developing their intense and exploratory sonic language in a live setting.
improvisation, and music Leonie Strecker, Interference / chroma accuracy
by Leonie Strecker (electronics), Pak Yan Lau (prepared piano), Anita Cappuccinelli (percussion), Dirk Descheemaeker (bass clarinet), Alexandre Fostier (sound)
(€15) (tickets)
Improvised music is, by definition, spontaneous – but it also draws on experience, reflection, experimentation, and personal taste. Over the years, Pak Yan Lau has developed a distinct sonic language using prepared pianos, toy pianos, synths, electronics, and a wide range of sound objects. For this set, she invites percussionist Anita Cappuccinelli (Ictus, TUUM). Together, they explore the unpredictable: what keeps shifting, what resists being fixed – music without a past, created in the moment.
Two works by Leonie Strecker complete the programme: Interference and chroma accuracy. She explores presence and absence, and the tension between memory and experience. Both pieces play with interference tones and shifting sonic layers: chroma accuracy leans into rhythm, while Interference focuses on the space between sounds.
music by Fabio Machiavelli
by Fabio Machiavelli (live electronics), Maris Pajuste (voice), Eva Reiter (sound devices), Tom De Cock (sound devices), Alexandre Fostier (sound)
(free)
“First we shape our tools and then they shape us.”
– John M. Culkin
At the heart of Fabio Machiavelli’s work lies the idea of (re)formation. In recent years, his artistic practice has centred on new lutherie, DIY compositional practices, and the development of new instruments—much like many composers of his generation. Micro Breaths of a Blue Lung explores large marine mammals: their resonances, and their vocal and percussive dimensions. Machiavelli investigates their timbral qualities and lets them resonate through his instrumental devices. The work unfolds as a 45-minute sonic architecture built from a multitude of miniatures. During the performance, the instruments come to life through their interaction with the performers. Before and after, they can also be experienced as a sound installation, with each object inhabiting its own sonic world.
music by Iannis Xenakis, Serment / Nuits and Giacinto Scelsi, Yliam per coro femminile / Tre Canti Sacri
by Vlaams Radiokoor and James Wood (conductor)
(€15) (more info & tickets)
Nuits is Xenakis in his purest form. Returning to his long nights as a political prisoner—haunted by the cries of guards and the screams of tortured fellow inmates—he strips vocal music of any trace of language. Nuits is not a narrative, but an intense sonic exploration of darkness, fear, and the raw force of the human voice, rooted in Xenakis’s personal history and mathematical imagination.
In Serment, based on the Hippocratic oath, Xenakis weaves a rich fabric of refined vocal textures: solo voices, shifting sound masses, and broad repetitive gestures form the framework of a work that is austere yet strikingly powerful and direct.
The music of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi was only discovered in live performance in the late 1980s, shortly before his death. Convinced that each listener experiences the same note differently depending on position and distance, Scelsi considered performance itself superfluous. In Yliam, he applies his characteristic focus on a single tone or sonic core to a vocal mass. The result is a living sound sculpture, constantly breathing and transforming. The earlier Tre Canti Sacri already explores this approach: shaped by spiritual and transcendental themes, it unfolds as an acoustic meditation, with the human voice as a medium for sacred intensity.
improvisation and music by Walter Zimmermann, Riuti
by Jennifer Torrence (percussion)
(€15) (tickets)
Jennifer Torrence approaches music through ‘physical movements and principles of motion’. In a one-woman ‘dance band’ setup, she performs on a set of ‘naive’ instruments including whirly tubes, an Orff marimba, fidget spinners, handbells, foot-played melodicas, and spinning microphones attached to a cymbal. These instruments also appear in Øyvind Torvund’s Symphony for Kunstnernes Hus, heard at Tectonics on Friday. Here, movement becomes sound—and sound, in turn, sets movement back in motion.
music by Maya Verlaak, Sci-Volo Palla (world premiere) and Cassandra Miller, Dad goes to the mountain (world premiere)
by Brussels Philharmonic, Ilan Volkov (conductor), Sarah Saviet (violin), Jasmijn Lootens (cello)
(€15) (more info & tickets)
Saturday brings two world premieres: Maya Verlaak and Cassandra Miller each present a new work for the Brussels Philharmonic. In her characteristic way, Maya Verlaak sets convention aside and stages a social experiment through new rules of play, electronics, and the classical orchestral apparatus.
Cassandra Miller’s intimate and deeply immersive compositions take existing melodies as their point of departure—melodies she deconstructs, repeats, magnifies, and radically transforms. ‘Music from a deep-tissue perspective’: that is how she describes her work on her website. After the premiere of I cannot love without trembling by the Brussels Philharmonic and Ilan Volkov, The New Yorker wrote: ‘This is music that reminds us how to cry.’
performance by Hoda Siahtiri and Shaahin Peymani
(free)
For Those Who Live At The Shoreline is a ceremonial performance—an experience shaped around the duality of light and darkness. Its title is drawn from Audre Lorde’s poem A Litany For Survival: ‘for those who carry fear like a faint line within themselves’. Created in Tehran in January 2026, the work speaks to those living in a climate of fear, and feeling the urge to break free from it.
Hoda and Shaahin weave electronics together with the sounds of mountains and landscapes. The sonic structure is built on repetition and gradual transformation, evoking the movement of tides: a cycle of pulse and decay in which patterns emerge, shift, and dissolve again.
The Brussels Philharmonic commissioned young audio makers to create new sound works for the Tectonics festival, inspired by the LAB-SERIES concerts.
Before, during, and after those concerts, they went on a kind of ‘wild sonic foraging’, collecting voices, sounds, and sonic traces—with active or passive input from the audience. The result is three unique audio installations, premiered at Tectonics.
Baudouin Oosterlynck has been developing a singular artistic practice around sound, silence, and listening since the 70s. For the very first edition of Tectonics in Brussels, he brings together a selection of his remarkable listening instruments in Studio 3.
These are not conventional sound-producing instruments, but objects that shift the way we hear. They emerge from intriguing questions: what would the world sound like with differently shaped ears? How can the hidden sonic qualities of an object be revealed in silence? And how do form, space, and air influence our perception?
Instruments such as Prothesen, Étant-donnés, Ad Libitum, and Étui-donnés invite you to listen differently — more attentively, more slowly, and with an open ear for the unexpected.
“First we shape our tools and then they shape us.”
– John M. Culkin
At the heart of Fabio Machiavelli’s work lies the idea of (re)formation. In recent years, his artistic practice has centred on new lutherie, DIY compositional practices, and the development of new instruments—much like many composers of his generation. Micro Breaths of a Blue Lung explores large marine mammals: their resonances, and their vocal and percussive dimensions. Machiavelli investigates their timbral qualities and lets them resonate through his instrumental devices. The work unfolds as a 45-minute sonic architecture built from a multitude of miniatures. During the performance, the instruments come to life through their interaction with the performers. Before and after, they can also be experienced as a sound installation, with each object inhabiting its own sonic world.
With the LAB-SERIES, the Brussels Philharmonic brings together musical experimentation, interaction, and total experience. Expect bold and eclectic concert nights with unique programmes, pre- and post-concert talks, interactive installations, and immersive listening sessions.
"The diverse electronic influences in both programmes I captured have been a really lucky coincidence; I’ve really enjoyed blending techniques I use for club photography with a more institutional setting.”
