sounds queer?

Sounds Queer? is a Vienna-based collective working on the intersection of electronic music, sound art, and queer activism. We share knowledge and tools because we believe that music can create a safer space to exchange experiences and express yourself. A synthesizer can be a feminist spaceship to challenge not only rules in music but also social norms. We organize workshops, collective jams, performances, and shows.

Sounds Queer? was founded in 2014 by Zosia Hołubowska as a flying queer synthesizer laboratory. Since then, it offered workshops on electronic music and queer sound in Poland, Austria, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, and Australia. Currently based in Vienna, SQ? transformed into a collective, when Adele Knall and Violeta Gil joined the team. Adele Knall is a visual artist, radio producer, musician, and cultural and social anthropologist. Violeta Gil Martínez is a culture manager, tech nerd, and musician.

The idea of the project is to create a safer queer space through music. Such a space is understood as a situation where different experiences can be celebrated and privileges challenged. That means the inclusion of different non-normative gender expressions and sexualities, as well as racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds and various types of bodies and their abilities. "Queer" refers to the critical, non-normative approach to understanding gender identities and experiences and sexual desires but it also relates to a type of radical, intersectional feminist activism, that reclaims the pejorative term "queer" and offers different thinking on society, community, and knowledge-production in general.

In SQ? we're trying to experiment with the idea of the "queer sound", constantly asking ourselves what that would mean. How would queer sound? What is queer sound? The basic inspiration for the project is an idea of a marginalized body producing a marginalized sound by Airek Beachamp and Abi Bliss claim that a synthesizer is an ultimate feminist instrument, thus making electronic and computer music a perfect space for questioning the rules of gender performance and music composition. We want to promote electronic music both as an interesting area of sound art investigation and as a new way of self-expression. As artists, we are researching the topic of queer sound in our works, but we don’t want to provide the participants with any hints. Rather, we are interested in collective discussions and discussions through music-making.

www.soundsqueer.org