Summer & fall 2020
July 29–November 3, 2020
Extra Extra is pleased to announce the release of a first online programme of sensuous listening, coinciding with the arrival of our redesigned website. The programme emerges from Extra Extra’s commitment to offer creative makers and audiences the opportunity to reflect on the city in transition through new commissions.
As an open, multidisciplinary platform devoted to connecting people through culture and eroticism, Extra Extra is continuing its quest to find new ways of telling urban stories. As an extension of our live programme and magazine, extraextramagazine.com offers a topical form of distribution and production which aims to digitally titillate minds around the globe. In NTS Radio London, we found a partner to broadcast our first radio show. Our online programme explores which pleasurable feelings can be aroused by listening. Hearing particular sounds or voices can generate an experience of euphoria or relaxation. By digitally bringing together multiple disciplines and backgrounds around the topic of eroticism, surprising city tales arise, constituting a better understanding of the current, urban society in a transitional time.
This summer, Extra Extra will be making an online appearance by presenting four audio works and a radio show, reflecting on the current sensual city.
For the website, Extra Extra commissioned artists Mercedes Azpilicueta, Eglė Budvytytė, Christian Nyampeta and Geo Wyeth to create a digital audio work in response to eroticism as we know it today. Each artist reflects on sensuality, expressing their individual histories and current observations in a sonic exploration.
The audio work The Spinx of Milan: a dialogue with Leonor Fini by Mercedes Azpilicueta unravels as an imagined dialogue with the surrealist artist and costume designer Leonor Fini (1907–96). A mysterious narrator takes you by the hand, guiding you through time and geographical latitudes, whilst Fini’s voice cascades through the winding streets of Milan with unruly sensuality. In this synth-laden landscape, unexpected narratives are evoked, compelling us to embrace our lives with fearless flair.
Eglė Budvytytė is interested in the voice and song, exploring the potentials of rhyme, repetition, sonic alteration and the voice to induce audiences into collectivity and singing. In the new audio work Stones and Cyborgs, her alter ego Lazy Larva guides us through slow and tender melodies, featuring the soothing promises of bacteria, stones and nonlinear time. Imagine yourself moving slowly through the city, in and out of sight and focus, celebrating the impurity of a symbiotic relationship.
In the mixtape Body Double, Christian Nyampeta presents a new composition and readings complemented with a selection of sonic explorations from musicians around the globe. The work extends on the idea of multiplication or multi-carnation of the “self,” exploring a gathering of voices as locus of the erotic.
In dialogue with artist duo Johanna and Vanita Monk, Geo Wyeth’s No, That River Means More is a voyage along the Maas River, tracing the industrial shoreline. The narrators entice the listener with spoken word and soundscapes revealing inside erotics.
Also in this online programme, we present our first radio broadcast at NTS Radio London. Writer Dan Fox and performance artist Michael Portnoy wrote a witty script that plays with the tropes of a classic radio show, interweaved with music selected by Loes Verstappen. A late night DJ in an undefined city listens to the stories of phone-in callers sharing their specialist fetishes. Studio guests recounting unexpected experiences of the city are followed by yoga exercises, a weather forecast and pillow talk, no touching permitted.
These formats present stories of the now for an audience of the now, centralising the interaction between cities worldwide, and the possibilities and impossibilities of physical proximity. The online programme forms an alternative vocabulary for listeners to experience the city, moving from lust and ecstasy, to dirt and danger to playfulness.
The online programme is supported in part by Mondriaan Fund, Creative Industries Fund and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. The programme will continue to grow through commissioned contributors.
