Geiger September Fest – Atlante
4/9/2022
Geiger September Fest – Atlante
9 April 2022
For several years, GEIGER had been in conversation with Berlin-based artist, researcher, and label manager Cedrik Fermont about collaborating on one of his projects. Following more than two decades of research into alternative electronic, experimental, and noise music in and from Asia and Africa, Cedrik has published several compilations and essays dedicated to these fields.
With the release of the compilation CD Alternate African Reality – Electronic, electroacoustic and experimental music from Africa and the diaspora in 2020, GEIGER invited Cedrik to curate this festival together with them, using the CD as a conceptual starting point. The history of electronic and experimental music in Africa began roughly in the 1950s (with the notable exception of Halim El-Dabh in 1944), and today this musical landscape is rich, diverse, and evolving.
Alternate Africa
A new reality — or perhaps better, another reality. Alternate Africa seeks to challenge how music in and from Africa and its varied diaspora is perceived, moving far beyond familiar clichés.
This is neither Afrofuturism nor a speculative future of music. It is not an exceptional or exotic outlier. Rather, it represents one of many present realities: music from Africa and its diaspora is vibrant, innovative, and travels as fast as anywhere else in the world — with one crucial difference: its persistent lack of representation outside the continent.
Electronic, electroacoustic, and free improvised music no longer belong to specific geographic places; instead, they belong to an era. Our contemporary world is hyper-connected, and over the past two decades the music ecosystem has deeply embraced digital culture. If a new geography exists, it is embedded within this networked world — imperfect, sometimes elitist, yet continuously reshaped through rhizomatic connections.
Some artists fully embrace digital technologies, while others work with archives blending language, culture, ancient and modern tools. Cut-up techniques meet turntablism; journalistic exploration merges with cinematic electroacoustic composition; free improvisation intersects with sound art. Shared technologies become sites of cultural exchange rather than division.
These networks extend in all directions. The goal is an experience shared collectively — not a one-way gaze. We build bridges, not cabinets of curiosities.
Electroacoustic, experimental, and electronic music have long histories on the African continent: from Halim El-Dabh’s proto–musique concrète experiments in 1944 Egypt, to June Schneider’s multimedia installations in 1970s South Africa, to today’s young composers across the continent. A vast sonic world has been sidelined for too long. This festival hopes to invite deeper conversations, listening, and collaboration.
Cedrik Fermont, festival co-producer
Artists
Duma (KE)
Formed in 2019 by Martin Kanja (Lord Spike Heart) (vocals) and Sam Karugu (guitar, production), Duma emerged from Nairobi’s underground metal scene. Their debut album fuses hardcore punk and thrash metal with noise, pushing African metal into experimental territory. Lyrics explore everyday life — love, hate, drugs, precarity — alongside apocalyptic imagery such as Pembe 666, which incorporates passages from the Book of Revelation in Swahili.
https://nyegenyegetapes.bandcamp.com/album/duma
FRKTL (EG)
FRKTL is the solo project of British–Egyptian interdisciplinary artist Sarah Badr, now based in Riga. A classically trained multi-instrumentalist, she integrates live sampling, improvisation, vocal manipulation, field recordings, and generative rhythms. Her recent work explores visual sound spatialisation and mixed-reality world-building through CGI, augmented capture, and sound design.
https://sarahbadr.com/
https://frktl.com/
Cedrik Fermont (BE)
Born in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), raised in Belgium, and now based in Berlin, Cedrik Fermont (also known as C-drík, cdrk, Kirdec) is an artist, activist, curator, DJ, label owner, and author. He has conducted over two decades of research into alternative electronic, experimental, and noise music from Africa and Asia, publishing numerous compilations and essays and co-curating this festival.
http://syrphe.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedrik_Fermont
Farida Amadou (NE/BE)
Farida Amadou is a self-taught bass player based in Liège. Her work spans blues, jazz, hip-hop, and improvised music. After playing bass for Belgian punk band Cocaine Piss in 2017, she shifted focus to solo improvisation and collaborations with artists including Steve Noble, Thurston Moore, Peter Brötzmann, and Mette Rasmussen.
https://farida-amadou.bandcamp.com/
Aurélie Lierman (BE/RW)
Born in Rwanda and raised in Belgium, Aurélie Nyirabikali Lierman is an independent radio producer, vocalist, and composer. Her work centres on field recordings from contemporary East Africa, transformed into what she calls Afrique Concrète. She has released albums with Nurse With Wound, collaborated with Vincent Meessen, toured the US, and performed leading roles in experimental operatic works.
Cobi van Tonder (ZA)
Born in South Africa, Cobi van Tonder worked in Johannesburg’s music scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Her practice explores expanded listening, microtonal drone music, beating patterns, sonic illusions, and acoustics as a compositional parameter — leading to the development of Acoustic Atlas, where architectural interiors function as instruments of resonance and echo.
Robert Machiri / Pungwe Listening (ZW)
Robert Machiri is a sound worker born in Harare and currently based in Berlin. His practice operates between curatorial work and embodied critique, engaging sound, music, and image-making through processes of learning and unlearning. His project PUNGWE investigates sound in Africa within broader contemporary arts discourse.