Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts

Ziúr & Elvin Brandhi are in a studio residency at BEK 13–18 March preparing for their performance at Borealis – a festival for experimental music. After a week writing new material in Inkonst in Malmö, they’re refining their live show by experimenting in BEK’s project space.

Fusing free-spirited vocal acrobatics with punk electronics from the dimly-lit heart of Berlin, Ziúr & Elvin Brandhi are poised to debut their brand new soundsystem destroying live collaboration. Attacking dancefloor traditionalism with unwieldy compositions that juxtapose precarious rhythms with guttural shrieks, they’re creating a vital new language that’s truly without borders. 

On 18 March they will perform live as Borealis and Bergen Kunsthall join forces to present a night at Landmark blending experimental music and club culture. 

Ziúr is an experimental producer and musician, and a fixture in Berlin’s rich musical scene. She produces music that is expansive, rich and diverse in texture, with sounds that are simultaneously machinistic and deeply anthropomorphic, toying with mechanical isolation and the chaotic spectrum of human emotion. Unlike a soundtrack or score, there is no film to which one can turn to give narrative to the music – there are only evocative sounds reaching from each song towards the cybernetic. In 2021 she released her third album, Antifate, after two earlier EPs: Blur, and Now Now, all to critical acclaim. 

Elvin Brandhi is an improvising lyricist, producer and sound artist from Bridgend, Wales, who builds aberrant beats from field recordings, tape, vinyl, instrument and voice. Using sound and voice as an expansive language transgressing deep-rooted systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes, her live shows are unyielding bursts of erupting animation where her caustic stream of consciousness vibrates with restless, glitched out heaviness.

Part of New Perspectives for Action – a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.

Photos: 1) Elvin Brandhi (left) and Ziúr (right) at work in BEK’s project space. 2) Portrait of Ziúr: Mai Nestor. 3) Elvin Brandhi, press photo.