KARLSRUHE.- U.S. Composer Laurie Spiegel is awarded the Giga-Hertz Award 2023 for lifetime achievement. The award ceremony will take place during the Giga-Hertz-Festival of electronic music and sound art: »Radical Polytronics«.

This year, the U.S. composer Laurie Spiegel will receive the Giga-Hertz Award for Lifetime Achievement, offered by the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe together with the SWR Experimentalstudio. The award is endowed with €10,000. The Production Awards of €5,000 go to U.S. composer and performer Lea Bertucci and French-born sound artist Jessica Ekomane. The Finnish-German trio This Machine! will receive the PopExperimental Advancement Award, endowed with €5,000 and donated by the Fördergesellschaft ZKM/HfG e.V., which for the first time after 2022 will be awarded in collaboration with the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg. On the occasion of the awarding of the Giga-Hertz Award, the ZKM | Karlsruhe is organizing a festival of electronic music and sound art for the first time this year, which addresses music enthusiasts of all ages. In addition to concerts, visitors will be welcomed to DJ sets, artist talks, and workshops.

The title of the Giga-Hertz Festival 2023 is »Radical Polytronics«. For five days, composers and musicians will celebrate the radical power and fascinating diversity of electronic music and sound art in concerts, artist talks, and workshops. Since its foundation, the ZKM | Karlsruhe offers artists the opportunity to compose and perform outside the mainstream in a radically open, artistic laboratory situation.

The festival will open on Wednesday evening, December 6, 2023, at the ZKM Cube with a double concert by Puce Mary and Oren Ambarchi. The Danish experimental musician and the Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer are well-known all over the world. On Thursday, December 7, 2023, the SWR Experimentalstudio will host the London-based Explore Ensemble and British composer Christian Mason at the Media Theater, who will premiere the piece »Hölderlin’s Madness«. This will be followed by compositions by Beatrice Dillon and John Croft. An acousmatic concert in the Cube by Ludger Brümmer, the longtime artistic director of the Giga-Hertz Award, will conclude Thursday evening.

PopExperimental concerts, including This Machine! and DJ performances, as well as a world premiere by Thomas Köner, winner of Ars Electronica’s Golden Nica for Digital Musics & Sound Art (2004), will take place on Friday, December 8, 2023. The highlight of the festival will be the presentation of the Giga-Hertz Award on Saturday evening, December 9, 2023. In the afternoon, the production award winners from previous years, Yvette Janine Jackson and Yu-Jung Chen, will present their new compositions in world premieres. The closing of the Giga-Hertz-Festival on Sunday, December 10, 2023, will honor Laurie Spiegel, this year’s winner of the Giga-Hertz Main Award for Lifetime Achievement. Workshops for all ages, artist talks, and a festival lounge complete the festival’s concert program.

The festival pass for the Giga-Hertz Festival 2023, which gives you access to all events, costs €25 (reduced rate €17.50). Day tickets cost €10 (reduced rate €5). The award ceremony on the evening of December 9 is free of charge, so is the supporting program in the festival lounge and the workshops. Presale starts on Monday, October 09, via the ticket portal Reservix; tickets can also be purchased at the Info Point in the foyer of the ZKM during opening hours.

Winners of Giga-Hertz Award 2023

Laurie Spiegel / Giga-Hertz Main Award for Lifetime Achievement

»Laurie Spiegel is one of those rare composers in whom head and heart, left brain and right brain, logic and intuition, merge and even exchange roles. Though she is one of the highest-tech computer composers in America, Spiegel is also a lutenist and banjo player, and sees the computer as a new kind of folk instrument. She makes her most intuitive-sounding and melodic music from mathematical algorithms, and her most complex computerized textures by ear and in search of a desired mood. Form and emotion are as difficult to separate in her music as they are in that of her idol, Johannes Sebastian Bach.« (Kyle Gann). Laurie Spiegel's interpretation of Johannes Kepler's »Harmonices Mundi« was part of the Voyager Golden Records and flew into space with the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes in 1977. Her piece »Sediment« from 1972 can be heard in the movie »The Hunger Games«.

Lea Bertucci / Production Award

Lea Bertucci is an artist, composer, and performer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-responsive interactions of architecture and acoustics.

Jessica Ekomane / Production Award

Jessica Ekomane is a French-born and Berlin-based electronic musician and sound artist. She creates situations where the sound acts as a transformative element for the space and the audience. Her quadraphonic performances, characterized by their physical affect, seek a cathartic effect through the interplay of psychoacoustics, the perception of rhythmic structures and the interchange of noise and melody. Ekomane’s ever-changing and immersive sonic landscapes are grounded in questions such as the relationship between individual perception and collective dynamics or the investigation of listening expectations and their societal roots.

This Machine! / PopExperimental Advancement Award

This Machine! is an audiovisual experimental pop project consisting of cousins Raili, Emilia and Kaspar Kuoppamäki. The trio draws inspiration from a wide variety of genres ranging from ambient to trip hop, club music and contemporary classical, they seek to create a unique style of etheral textures and hard-hitting beats. Rooted in pop culture but open to any kind of experimentation, be it sound-design, harmony or unconventional song structures, This Machine! creates music and videos which are at the same time inviting and emotionally immersive, but also intellectually stimulating and complex.

Honorary Mentions / Giga-Hertz Award 2023

Manuel Rocha Iturbide // Nyokabi Kariũki // Piotr Kurek

Honorary Mentions / PopExperimental Advancement Award

bela // Sophia Mitiku // Rashaad Newsome

Jury Giga-Hertz Award

George Lewis (Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music & Area Chair of Composition at Columbia University)
Małgorzata Płysa (Co-Director & Curator, Unsound & Ephemera Festival)
Diana Ferreira (Director & Curator, Arte no Tempo Portugal)

Jury PopExperimental Advancement Award

​​Hans Nieswandt (DJ, Music Producer, Author & Artistic Director Institute for Pop-Music 2014–19, Folkwang University of the Arts)
Pamela Owusu-Brenyah (Music Consultant, Program Curator Pop-Kultur & Afro x Pop)
Jovanka von Wilsdorf (Songwriter BMG Rights Management, Creative Consultant, Initiator DIANA AI Song Contest & Female*Producer Price)

Giga-Hertz Award

The Giga-Hertz Award, endowed with a total of €25,000, is dedicated to electronic music. It is awarded by the ZKM | Karlsruhe with the SWR Experimentalstudio and the Popakademie Baden-Württemberg as cooperating partners together with the Fördergesellschaft ZKM/HfG e.V. (Supporters Association of ZKM and the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe). The main prize is awarded to composers for their lifetime achievements, and there are two Production Awards for new pieces that have not yet been created. In 2022, the PopExperimental Advancement Award, endowed with €5,000, was added. This prize is donated by the Fördergesellschaft ZKM/HfG e.V. The award supports artists from the field of experimental pop and club music whose works combine electronic music, which tends to be more academic in character, with contemporary trends in popular music. With participants from over 40 countries responding per call for submissions and 676 registrations this year, the Giga-Hertz Award is one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. The name of the award honors the world-famous physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857–1894), who taught at Karlsruhe Technical University (now KIT), where he discovered electromagnetic waves. The establishment of the award was an initiative of the ZKM | Karlsruhe.

Radical Polytronics
December 6 to 10, 2023, at the ZKM | Karlsruhe