For the first time at the Romaeuropa Festival, OSMIUM is a project bringing together Icelandic composer and cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir (Academy Award winner for the score of Joker, and Emmy and Grammy winner for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl), James Ginzburg, Rully Shabara, and Sam Slater.
Born from the encounter between four musicians coming from very different trajectories, the work inhabits a threshold zone between sound performance, instrumental experimentation, and artisanal sound construction. More than a concert, OSMIUM is an electroacoustic device in which self-built instruments, body, voice, feedback, and technology continuously redefine the relationship between human gesture and mechanical response.
Guðnadóttir performs on the halldorophone, an electroacoustic instrument capable of generating unstable feedback loops; Ginzburg intervenes with a custom-developed monochord; Slater works with a self-oscillating percussion system; while Shabara, vocalist of Senyawa, pushes vocal emission into a guttural, pre-linguistic territory.
The result is a raw and magnetic sonic matter, made of metallic drones, pulsations, distortions, and friction, in which the stage does not simply become a sound laboratory, but a field of tension where sound continuously produces, alters, and destabilises action.
