News:

25.04.2025 – live at 'Snakes and Ladders', Berlin, Germany
july 2025 – residency at Q-02 Brussels with Cis De Gendt and Lawrence McGuire
october-november 2025 – record release on Riforma music label

archive of events

performance:

2024
ocober 6: text score for portable speakers and tuning sofware, Gallery SKALA, Poznan, Poland
august 23: workshop performance, Slug Gallery, Leipzig, Germany
august 3: live [multichannel], bučení festival, Lubna, Czech Republic
july 27: live, cashmere radio, Berlin, Germany
july 25: live [multichannel], Himera, Turku, Finland
june 5: live, Algomystica, Panke, Berlin
feb 19: live, Rīgas mākslas telpa, Riga, Latvia

2023
nov 19: live (absence administration) [multichannel], "default den haag", The Hague, Netherlands
sep 16: fixed media, "Music And The Wende, Now", ĢIT, Riga, Latvia
aug 8: live (absence administration), "Sound Textures", Obscura Radio, Zlin, Czech Republic
aug 4: live [multichannel], bučení festival, Lubna, Czech Republic
jul 29: live, cashmere radio, Berlin, Germany
jun 23: live electronics for an experimental dinner by Trang Ha, The Grey Space in The Middle, The Hague, Netherlands
jun 16: [4-channel] fixed media composition, final project presentation, Institue of Sonology, The Hague, Netherlands
jun 7: performative lecture, residency final presentation, SODAS2123, Vilnius, Lithuania
apr 29: live OPEN SODAS, SODAS2123, Vilnius, Lithuania
march 24: live with Sáof (Liza Kuzyakova), Crawl Space, The Hague, Netherlands

2022
aug 29: live (absence administartion), Lastadija, Riga, Latvia
aug 22: live (absence administartion), Ostrava, Czech Republic
aug 20: live (absence administartion), Bučení festival, Lubna, Czech Republic
aug 20: live (absence administartion), Bučení festival, Lubna, Czech Republic
aug 14: live (absence administartion) Hlukovæ Mysetria Vol XIII., Punctum, Prague, Czech Republic

2021
aug: live with Martin Hurych, SVITAVA, Brno, Czech Republic
may 2: collective performance, processing live radio streams from the globe for Sound Camp London with Max Baraitser Smith, Giulia Francavilla, Martin Hurych

other:

2024
october - november: composition for 'Beta Circus' work in progress performance 'ONE TWO THREE, AND NOW YOU ARE A TREE!' with Ana Jordão, Vincent Kollar, Krista Burāne, Mārtiņš Eihe and Nikola Suhareva, Riga Circus, Riga, Latvia
auguts 29-30: sound design for audio play by Artūrs Čukurs, Homo Novus festival, Riga, Latvia
june 28: generative composition based on asemic writing for Cecilie Fang, The Hague, Netherlands
feb 2 - 29: sound installation for Beate Poikāne's solo exhibition, Rīgas mākslas telpa, Riga, Latvia;

2023
nov 7: sound art and cooking performance with Trang Ha, "Hiccups 2", Quartair, The Hague, Netherlands
sep 27: fixed media for a film program, "Glued & Screwed", Film Huis Den Haag, The Hague, Netherlands;
jun 8: sound installation 'object study 3' as a part of 'Retrospektropija' group exhibition, Liepājas Muzejs, Liepaja, Latvia

2022
may 27 - 29: sound installation 'obs1' at 'Sonology Sound Installation 2022', Het Hem, Amsterdam, Netherlands
apr 20 – may 22: sound installation 'missing' at 'Hellsports' group exhibition, 427, Riga, Latvia
apr 11: kids workshop presentation with Hilde Wollenstein, REWIRE festival, The Hague, Netherlands
feb 19: live visuals for Liza Kuzyakova and Amos Peled, Art Science Studio, The Hague, Netherlands

2021
dec: AR composition/digital sculpture 'I used to take walks here, evading the pavement lines' at 'EKONAUTI' group exhibition, Liepaja, Latvia
aug 2: fixed media composition for an installation by Dora Ramljak, Brønshøj Water Tower, Copenhagen, Denmark
jul 23 - aug 1: video installation at 'BANKETS II' group exhibition, DOM gallery, Riga, Latvia

2020
dec: calendar based work 'Let us therefore see, O human soul, whether present time can be long' as a prt of group exhibition 'Māksla garākai dzīvei', Liepaja, Latvia

Homage to Cornelius Cardew and Sabri Moudallal

... text score and software ...

for portable speakers and built-in microphones, 2024-10-06

A sound performance/open score for any number of performers, portable speakers and a tuning software. In its core it’s quite simple – the performers walk around the space and try to exchange frequencies with each other, while a diy web sound synthesis and processing software I wrote is on their devices and detects these frequencies (like a non-quantified tuning device for string instruments).

Notes:
The performance has an open goal to exchange existing frequency sets between speakers. The sets are changing in accordance to the sounds of the environment where the performance takes place. In the particular cases it involves an environment where the harmonic content of 'Layali' by Sabri Moudallal can be cought by the frequency detection program. There is a great amount of noise in the system, thus the navigation of the noise is greatly trusted upon the performers choices.

... stream here ...

radio, 2024-08-09

A selection of songs, interviews and spoken word from the Digital Archives of Latvian Folklore.

All rights belong to Archives of Latvian Folklore, Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (garamantas.lv ).

A personal thank you to the director of Archives of Latvian Folklore Rita Grīnvalde for supporting my work with the archive and allowing it to reach a wider audience on its 100 year anniversary.

Notes:
The archive consists of approximately 280 audio recordings spanning across the time frame starting from 1960’s up until 2020’s documenting the distinct oral culture of the five historic cultural regions inside Latvia as well as Latvian speaking communities in such far regions as Bashkortostan and Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia – preserving the songs and stories of the politically deported during the USSR occupation of Latvia. The value of the archive is of great importance, since it documents both contemporarily preserved and already extinct spoken word and folk music traditions in Latvian and Latgalian languages.

I wanted to focus on different depths of audio quality, how it gets articulated by the noise envelopes of the voices present on the recordings across the listening duration, on the coughs and sneezes, and laughs, and all of that being out of tune.

Andrejs Poikāns · Live18022024 excerpt (a wing and its trajectory)

a wing and its trajectory

computer music performance, Rīgas mākslas telpa, Riga, Latvia, 2024-02-19

The performance is a complimentary piece to Beate's Poikāne's exhibition “Parade of flying episodes” that has greatly been inspired by Gaston Bachelard's writings on the poetics of flying in dreams. The performance attempts to work with the bodily sensation of flying through a set of simple morphologise, expressed in a few mathematical functions for treating time and spectrum – parabolic, linear, exponential, stochastic.
tools – custom additive synthesis algorithm written in SuperCollider

Notes:
The performance was presented alongside a soundtrack which I recomposed out of the initial one made speciffically for Beate's object-theater piece 'PARADE OF FLYING EPISODES' in 2023.

The initial soundtrack for the performance was recorded and put together in collaboration with Beate in a sound studio in Vilnius, Lithuania, during 2023. Using foley and modular synthesis, we attempted to explore different morphologies of the experience of flying (ascending, falling, gliding) and recorded the desired snippets of matching forms.

For the installation view, I decided to re-compose the original soundtrack for long-durational playback, resulting in a 25-minute loop. Given that the timeline of the performance was no longer relevant, this iteration presented the possibility of working with slower musical development, as opposed to the dedicated track format. This time, the piece revolves around a single morphology—a parabola, a shape associated with one possible trajectory experienced when flying in a dream. It was mainly composed using algorithmic techniques in SuperCollider.
two excerpts can be found here

"Under The Nose: explorations of a silent voice"

MA thesis, Institute of Sonology, The Hague, 2023

This thesis describes the voice as an entity existing at the crossroads of perception and imagination. As such it brings with it many questions regarding listening and subjectivity. These ideas are developed further by providing examples from cinema, sound art and computer music.

...PDF...

[screenshot from "Der Himmel über Berlin", 1987]

"egg I3301"

performance, /w Trang Ha, The Hague, Netherlands, 2023-10-07

A performance for systematically boiling a large amount of eggs.

The work explores simple algorithmic sequences and the choreography of the waiting room, driven by a fascination with contemporary bureaucratic interactions.

Notes:
partly inspired by György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes.

the work is a continuation of a 3-year long colaboration with Trang, resulting in experimental dinner performances accompanied by specifically made music for the occassions, mostly from recordings of the making of the dinners and envirnomental recordings

"obs1" (Object study 1)

Fixed media 8ch / site specific – 10 min

In the work “object study 1” I attended to the formant structure that partly characterises the timbre of human voice. It is also a quality that has been explored more greatly specifically due to the aid of computational techniques. From the point of view of psychoacoustic, the voice signal contains specific peaks in the spectrum that characterise such timbral differences as those which allow one to distinguish ‘vowels’ in speech, song and utterance.

I conceived of the work known as “object study 1” while doing a course in sound art guided by Justin Bennet in 2022. The class was presented with the possibility of making a sound installation in the 200-meter-long shooting gallery in the basement of het Hem, Amsterdam. When I thought about the specificity of the space and my own intentions of its use, I imagined a long pipe, or perhaps a long vocal tract. Since it is closed at both ends, I thought about the physical sensation of humming to oneself. In this situation, the mouth is closed, and the voice resonates in the body surrounding the vocal mechanism. Humming can also be understood as a musical act aimed at one’s own embodied experience compared to overt singing with an audience.

"obs2" (Object study 2)

...download...

Stereo/ generative ~ 10 min

“Object study 2” is a software adaptation of the sound installation “object study 1”. I used the possibilities of using routine based compositional techniques in SuperCollider to adapt the previously described work to different spaces of presentation. I had this in mind already while making the first rendition of the piece, but the main reason of not choosing this method in the first place was due to the site specificity of the het Hem shooting gallery, which presented specific mixing conditions. The result of revisiting and adapting this work has led me to explorations in aleatoric possibilities of executable code composition, formalisation, and other algorithmic approaches.

"I used to take walks here, evading the pavement lines"

...web version...

Augmented Reality sculpture and a complimentary electronic composition, thoughts on direct contact and distance, Liepaja, Latvia.

"missing"

a custum made speaker, raspberry-pi, 3 color prints

A study of long durational digital sound transformations of a single pop song, each alteration is propogated in space once per hour, 427 gallery, Riga, Latvia

"Let us therefore see, O human soul, whether present time can be long at"

...web application...

print, software

The church-bells ring, an echoing reminder of the presence of God. It’s the alarm, announcement of the daily yoga class at 9:30; 12:00 – drive to the mall; business meeting at 15:00 – discussion of the marketing plan for the new line of shampoos.

Throughout the automation of our daily whereabouts, as it is the case for electronic calendars and events on facebook, boredom along with spontaneity (the sort of ‘spontaneity’ that peaks outside the commercial realm) have been excluded from late-capitalist societies. This also goes for the possibility of novelty – in a world where a constant flow of notifications is a norm it is impossible to do intellectual work or daydream. Mark Fisher in his 2012 essay “Time wars” even goes as far as to say that “Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone**”. The work invites viewers to schedule boredom, spontaneity and absurdities in their daily lives via mobile virtual calendars.

*St. Augustine “Confessions” **M. Fisher “Time wars”

"bigBit(beta)"

...download (mac)...

A 3D game built in Unity that deals with the topic of post-digital labor and afterlife.