According to what I read on the profile of the artists, Ylia + Eva Geist, I expect Umm, a live “improvised” music show, to find its basis in their experiences as DJs and their interest in electronic music. I did not imagine such a diverse audience of all ages, including children.
Ylia and Eva stand on two separate tables, facing each other and the audience, covered with equalizers, cables, and audio tools, the lights glowing gently in the darkened room by the light of a few candles. Eva walks slowly as she wafts incense smoke. A sound of sea waves begins to spread throughout the room. The music maintains that sense of calm, of distance, evocative of something liquid and aquatic.
The room is colored by delicate purple lights. Between the two artists is the glow of an LED spotlight, which in my imagination becomes a sea lighthouse. The light bounces between the two without favoring either, and in one sense visually reflects the musical balance of the performance, with Eva moving to Ylia’s structure and rhythms.
After the first twenty minutes or so the music becomes more rhythmic. I cannot say for sure when but the fluid combination of their sounds at some point becomes hypnotic and relaxing. Eva occasionally and unexpectedly helps herself to more traditional instruments, starting with an ocean drum that adds a textural imitation to the sound of waves. The instruments that follow change as the nature of their music changes, and the sounds become more metallic, such as that of a wind chime, a jew’s harp, and a Tibetan bell. As I expected, however, one of her most powerful instruments is her voice: the artist repeats phrases into the microphone until even those become just sounds, notes, gurgles.
Most of the audience listens attentively, despite having been left with permission to enter and leave the room, while some take advantage of this opportunity as if they were just browsing. If at first I was surprised by this freedom, I later realized that instead, as a matter of fact it is of no bother, it somehow enhances the experience: there is something familiar and warm about seeing that people can behave freely. In this environment, full of shadows and echoes, of smooth and gradual changes, it seems as if the seated spectators have just decided to share the same dream for a few hours.
Ylia is able to change the pace and atmosphere in a way that never loses the viewers’ attention, and it seems that, without using words or gestures, she is always in perfect agreement with the other musician, as if she is able to understand her in advance.
This trance-like state seems to be interrupted when the wailing of a baby girl is heard from the right. Eva and Ylia smile, then the sounds of the children’s vocal experimentation increase; they are part of the sounds they have recorded and sampled for the performance. As the last instrument Eva brings out a flexatone, which produces more playful, springy sounds. Before long the recorded child’s voice is joined by Eva’s, who teaches her daughter her first words.
When the music and the show end, it is revealed that not only Eva and Ylia are behind the production of this show but also their respective daughters. Umm has been a musical cradle where people learn and experiment together quietly, getting to know each other, growing up without even paying attention.
Chiara Stella Landi, October 11, 2024
Ylia + Eva Geist, Umm, Digitalive.Romaeuropa Festival, Rome, 11.10.2024
images (cover1 ) EvaGeist – Live2 © 2017 (2-3) Eva Geist. © Davide Palmieri
The article by Chiara Stella Landi is part of the Intraspaces editorial project, the sixth edition of Backstage /Onstage, born from a partnership between the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome, Romaeuropa Festival, and Arshake to bring, since 2018, a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts of Rome behind the scenes of the Romaeuropa Festival. Each year a different editorial project has emerged to flow into the dedicated page that grows as one big archive. The 2024 edition, Intraspaces, ventures into the intrastitial spaces, that is, all those places of connection that connect technologies, artists, space, spectators, sometimes even extending to the territory, where the different institutions that this event manages to involve are located. Participating in this edition were: Giovanni Bernocco, Daniele Bucceri, Stella Landi, Lidia De Nuzzo, Francesca Pascarelli, Anton Tkalenko. Visit the project homepage and the archive of past editions here.
