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Tangible Music Club #9: Obi Blanche+ Federico Visi+Yuri Landman
2025-12-17 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Vienna) | Stadtwerkstatt Linz, Kirchengasse 4, Linz, 4040
Yuri Landman is a musician and renowned inventor of musical instruments. He rose to international attention in the early 2000s by designing radical instruments for Sonic Youth, Liars, Half Japanese, Einstürzende Neubauten, Micachu, and many other pioneering experimental musicians. Since 2009, Landman has expanded into teaching, serving as a guest lecturer at numerous European academies, where he focuses on instrument building, sound design, microtonality, and the history of modern musical instruments.
As a performer, Landman combines his handcrafted string instruments with kalimbas, found objects, phone mics, amplified coke bottles, and noise synthesizers. The result is rhythmic, droning noise music—somewhere between the raw, textural force of Sonic Youth and the experimental spirit of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Federico Visi is a musician and researcher based in Berlin whose work investigates the interplay between human and non-human agency in music, embodiment in networked performance, and interactive machine learning. He is particularly interested in the societal and artistic implications of curating personal datasets. Visi works as a researcher at Luleå University of Technology and performs with the TCP/Indeterminate Place networked hyperorgan quartet.
Visi will perform using the Sophtar, a networkable feedback string instrument with embedded machine learning that he has recently designed. Through actuators, digital signal processing, and algorithmic models, the instrument responds to both human and computational gestures, enabling electroacoustic human–machine co-improvisation.
Featuring controlled feedback, a pressure-sensitive fretted neck, two sound boxes, and bespoke interface elements, the Sophtar integrates tactile musical traditions with embedded machine learning and DSP. These elements are not auxiliary but central to the instrument’s behaviour and sonic identity, shaping how it is played and how it evolves during performance.
Obi Blanche (FI) is an experimental guitarist, instrument builder, and music producer known for blending brutalist béton brut aesthetics, somatic performance practices, and forward-thinking sonic explorations. Working with prepared, modified, and augmented guitars, he bridges DIY-inspired building methods and technological innovation under the concept of #postdigitalpunk, in collaboration with researcher Kristina Tica.
His extensive artistic path includes over 500 performances at venues and festivals such as All Tomorrow’s Parties London, Berghain, Boiler Room Berlin, Istanbul Jazz Festival, and Lowlands, alongside collaborations with Thomas Azier, Anika, Isabelle Wenzel, and Yuri Landman. Currently pursuing an MA at the Tangible Music Lab (Kunstuniversität Linz), his research project From Prepared Guitar to Post-Digital Guitar explores gesture-controlled instruments, movement sensors, and innovative sound manipulation.
For this performance, Blanche appears with RAKE, a self-built guitar that resists traditional technique. The instrument responds to bodily shifts—torso tilt, shoulder arcs, weight transfer—creating sound from posture, acceleration, and resistance. At the intersection of guitar signal and latent space, a continuous somatic feedback loop emerges, moving through dissonance, resonance, and the unstable zones in between.
