This new collaboration between two internationally renowned and experienced artists—composers and improvisers: pianist Elisabeth Harnik and vocalist Irena Z. Tomažin —weaves together the tensions of multiple voices of improvisation, composition, folk melodies, and silenced voices. The duo speaks in the multi-genre language of contemporary jazz, new and experimental music, sound poetry, free improvisation, folk songs and performance art. Through their persistent physical presence in the sound, Tomažin and Harnik break through the boundaries of genre conventions and established approaches, embodying the voice as a body and the piano as a sound object. The duo’s music exists both outside and within history, present in the immediacy of the moment, structured through the sonic heritage of the avant-garde while remaining firmly rooted in something ancient. Their sound sculptures are built from a rugged wisdom and a sense of the sediments of tradition, with a fractured syntax of the meanings of language, voice and instrument(s). In the free interplay between the two musicians, spectral sounds, intense dissonances, swirling pulses and rhythms, laments and poems unfold. Two physical and sounding bodies with a bare sound on the edge of noise and tone. They stand on the foundations of sensual beauty and convulsive noise, in which we can hear the contemporary state of today’s world.

(Luka T. Zagoričnik) 

Links:
https://www.sploh.si/en/about-sploh/artists/irena-z-tomazin

https://koreografski.info/en/irena_tomazin_zagoricnik/

www.elisabeth-harnik.at

https://catalyticsound.com/musician_cs/elisabeth-harnik/

Video Whispering Walls (Kunsthaus Graz 2025):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGhfZx_OQsI