In the last part of a work composed as a trilogy, Fast Darkness III: Moonwords, Chaya Czernowin masterfully explores the unknown. Fast, radical gestures, loaded with powerful energy give us a sense of the existence of a far-reaching, encompassing universe of sound into which only our imagination can enter.

Two poles: on the one hand there is fusion, unison, and on the other the emancipatory appearance, dissonance. And in-between there is a percussive secret, a different, new order. In an allegory for the social atmosphere of our times, Katharina Ernst dedicates her world premiere to overcoming binary poles and showing us the power and potential of the in-between.

grey cloud is a triptych reflection on the struggle that is living with depression and anxiety. Natural imagery such as the sky, the sea or the movement of leaves in the wind become a vehicle through which emotional shifts are explored. grey cloud also acknowledges how mental health struggles are frequently misread, particularly in Black women, whose pain is often minimised or dismissed. Aligning with a growing recognition that therapy and emotional openness are not signs of weakness, but essential acts of care and self-preservation, grey cloud seeks to challenge the stigma surrounding mental health.

Claude Debussy’s Le Palais du silence was a thought experiment that was never realised about translating silent landscapes and absence into sound. Lucia Ronchetti picks it up as a theme in her work of the same name. She fills the compositional space with a timbre that oscillates between touching fragility and multi-layered intensity and at the same time lets her work ask about how we as a society deal with absence, transience and death.

sugarcoating is the first piece from the series of works of the same name by Sara Glojnarić, which readapts and reshapes pop musical sound fetishes based on data in the collection Million Songs Dataset. In an impressive piece that symbolises the digital expansion of our self between intoxication and addiction, the musicians are flooded with various sound parameters. Overwhelmed with sound, there emerges a new, dense and unknown connection that opens a space for conscious togetherness.