NICA live: Sophie Emilie Beha presents Membran & Kravchenko / Weyand

For her last NICA live concert, curator and NICA artist Sophie Emilie Beha is taking a bold step further. She is not only curating two recently formed Cologne duos, but is also venturing into the spotlight herself. The new compositions created for the evening are dedicated to the theme of the membrane, which Beha works on for both ensembles from an artistic writing perspective.

Sophie Emilie Beha and Vincent Stange build three-dimensional spaces out of sound. They layer what they have experienced, heard and felt on top of each other. They make recordings in public places - squares, old military sites, field chapels -, edit the sound material and add their own texts and recordings of a piano playing itself. What began in 2023 as a research project on Heinrich-Böll-Platz above the Cologne Philharmonie is now a fragile and flexible nucleus in constant transformation.

Ukrainian singer and composer Kateryna Kravchenko and Sophie Emilie Beha met last year as part of a joint scholarship. Their first collaboration was spontaneously born just a stone's throw from the beach on the Baltic Sea. Sophie Emilie Beha wrote a poem for Kateryna Kravchenko, which the singer set to music in the same week and performed in a quintet. Now Beha invites the composer and singer to perform as a duo with pianist Philip Weyand. Based on membranous texts, they create improvisations, flows of language and musical poetry.