shut up and listen! 2025: PAST_20 → NEXT_∞ Transdisziplinäres Festival für Musik und Klangkunst

Donnerstag, 16. bis Samstag, 18. Oktober 2025: echoraum (1150 Wien) sowie Livestreaming Sonntag, 19. bis Samstag, 25. Oktober 2025: SP•CE (, 1190 Wien)

In Kooperation mit sp·ce – Verein zur Förderung von Kunst und Transdisziplinarität

In 2025, the transdisciplinary festival shut up and listen! will celebrate its twentieth anniversary with a particularly extensive anniversary edition. Under the artistic direction of composer and curator Belma Bešlić-Gál, the title PAST_20 → NEXT_∞ unfolds a transgressive structure between archive and speculation, memory and still-unheard spaces of possibility. The festival once again transcends the character of a mere concert series and moves through time as a resonant space, unfolding both backward and forward. In addition to the established echoraum venue, the SP•CE audio gallery will also be used in 2025 – an addition that should be understood not only as a physical expansion but also as a conceptual extension. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, a large portion of the performative contributions have been presented both via livestreaming and in the tried-and-tested format of collective experience on site.

Across nine festival days, sual! connects the festival’s diverse audiences. 2025 will feature concerts, performances, audiovisual works, sound installations, and exhibition contributions within an open structure in which historical positions not only engage in dialogue with new works, but also challenge each other. The media archive SUAL ARCHIVES #20 documents interdisciplinary diversity through selected artistic contributions from 20 festival editions.

sual! 2025 includes twelve performative contributions, including numerous premieres and new works by Petra Sandner, an installation by Kolektiv ПROSTORЪ, and discursive formats. The SP•CE listening gallery will present a multi-channel listening room and a comprehensive media archive with contributions from 20 festival years, as well as a new quadraphonic sound installation by Berlin-based composer-performer Kai Fagaschinski, created as part of the artistic research project AUDIO GHOSTS.

The musical program expands the concept of composition toward processual, intermedial, and auditory-theatrical formats. The opening at echoraum brings together works by Gertrude Moser-Wagner | Ulrich Kaufman and Radu Malfatti, and the Ensemble Zimt (extended) featuring Franz Hautzinger create sonic structures that oscillate between reduction, micro-interventions, and condensation. The second day of the festival is dedicated to current developments in the post-Yugoslav space, featuring an electroacoustic performance by Svetlana Maraš, a lecture by Damjan Jovičin on sound and social engagement in Belgrade, and a collective sound action by the formation metacounterpoint. The festival continues with a sound projection by noid and performances by Ensemble echo_von_nichts and Manuel Pessoa de Lima, which explore the boundaries of sound, language, and body as semiotic carrier structures.

With the relocation to the SP•CE listening gallery, the focus shifts from performance to space-related sound research. In addition to Kai Fagaschinski’s premiere of a sound installation for a virtual clarinet quartet, the multi-channel listening space SHUT UP AND LISTEN! 2006-2025 forms an immersive acoustic topology of the festival’s history.

shut up and listen! 2025 is not a retrospective look back, but rather a dynamic reconstruction of temporality through sound – a festival that sees itself not as a closed edition, but as an open resonance structure across time.

Belma Bešlić-Gál, Artistic Director