Following the success of Xosphere earlier this month, together with Moe Mustafa PUBLICS is co-curating another live event of ambient music in its many awkward guises. This time we have invited internationally renowned New York-based artist James Hoff (PAN) to join Helsinki-based Atheer Soot on stage at PUBLICS in a dialogue between two artists whose variant sonic practices operate at the intersection of social critique, aural pleasure, and the emergent publicness of music. Each artist will play new works in relation to the other in a public listening session. Please note that corona pass is checked at the door.

James Hoff extends his investment in distributed parasitic forms in a presentation of new audio works composed from earworms and tinnitus frequencies biographical to his own interior experience. Both are auditory phantoms antagonized or created by ambient sounds facilitated by social, economic, media, or labor structures. Whereas Atheer Soot will explore the looping pre-recorded sounds with improvised theremin and mangled with live processing through granular device. The sound of Atheer Soot veers from soothing to melancholic sonic worlds as commentary on the age of social media, glitched subjectivities and emotional detachment.

Atheer Soot (أثير صوت) is a Helsinki-based visual artist and theatre-maker. Moe Mustafa was born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, moved to Amman-Jordan after the Gulf War. Alongside art and theatre, he has been honing his skills in sound design and composing for the past several years. Atheer Soot, an Arabic phrase, means a sound that resonates in the void. The project focuses on creating an interconnection between memories and sound, where Moe goes back in time to explore the past, his childhood. And translate these memories into an atmospheric and drone sound. Moe sees the process of sculpting the sound as a therapy, where you open up to your devices and instruments and dive deep into the subconscious and let the mind and intuition wander around.

James Hoff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, N.Y. His work encompasses a variety of media, including painting, sound, and performance, as well as a publishing practice with the organization Primary Information, which he co-founded and edits. In recent years, his work has focused on language and ambient media at the intersection of developing technologies and networked communication in relationship to social/political space. He has released two records on PAN (How Wheeling Feels When the Ground Walks Away and BLASTER) as well as the audiovisual project HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl). His most recent work, a collaboration with DeForrest Brown, Jr. titled HOBO UFO (v. The New World), debuted at Unsound Krakow 2020. A forthcoming record is due out on PAN in 2022.

This event is being held as part of the Open Up, a project that has been co-funded by the European Commission under the Creative Europe Programme.