TURNS x Synthie Lovers Festival: Sonic Kinships – Patch, Plug, Mod

This event stages a performative dialogue between analog circuitry, embodied sound practice, and expanded notions of instrumentality. Drawing on Harald Bode’s pioneering legacy in modular synthesis, Afrorack and Siri Thiermann activate a sonic terrain where DIY-electronics, rhythmic structures, and tactile exploration converge. The event unfolds within TURNS, a ZKM I Hertzlab series that probes sonic thresholds and immersive listening formats.

Afrorack and Thiermann share an artistic ethos grounded in material engagement with sound—an insistence on the physicality of sonic production in an age of digital abstraction. Their practices emphasize the performative agency of hardware: oscillators, knobs, cables, and drums become extensions of the body, enabling sonic gestures that are as sculptural as they are rhythmic.

Through Afrorack’s integration of self-built synthesizers and acoustic percussion, and Thiermann’s multisensory "synth swarm", the concert proposes new ways of listening that are situated, affective, and corporeally charged. The encounter between analog circuitry and human touch transforms the soundscape into a dynamic field of relations—between body and machine, repetition and disruption, control and chance.

»Sonic Kinships – Patch, Plug, Mod« invites us to witness (and inhabit) a shared sonic ecology—an interdependent system of resonances where the boundaries between tool, performer, and listener dissolve. This is an embodied speculation on the futures of analog practice, community-driven design, and the politics of frequency.

Will you attune with us?