Carmen Villain
In co-production with the Athens Conservatoire

Curated by Stavros Gasparatos

Carmen Villain presents Music from The Living Monument

The diverse sonic worlds that Carmen Villain has built over her career are shaped by her natural curiosity about sound. Her music hits a sweet spot between the languid yet vibrant pulse of dub and cosmic fourth-world* influences, creating evocative granular soundscapes and melodies with hints of instruments such as flute, voice, and clarinet. Her most recent studio album, Only Love From Now On, received rave reviews and was featured on multiple year-end best-of lists, including Pitchfork and Resident Advisor, with the latter hailing it “a masterpiece of jazz-informed ambient and downtempo.” Last year, she released Music from The Living Monument, a commissioned composition for Eszter Salamon’s contemporary dance performance with Carte Blanche. Carmen has brought her atmospheric live performance to prestigious venues and festivals such as ICA London, Berlin Atonal, Dekmantel, and Mutek. She has collaborated with an array of luminaries and like-minded artists, including Actress, Arve Henriksen, Biosphere, Huerco S, Dj Python and rRoxymore. Carmen Villain is half Norwegian, half Mexican, and lives in Oslo.

* Fourth World: a term coined by composer Jon Hassell to describe a musical concept that merges elements of the primitive with the most contemporary trends in electronic music—originating not from the First or Third World, but from an imagined Fourth World.

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The Subset Festival, the multifaceted music platform launched in 2023, held by the Athens Epidaurus Festival in co-production with the Athens Conservatoire, returns refreshed but always with a focus on the dialogue between contemporary music and new media.

Named after a mathematical term (subset ⊆), Subset Festival weaves together diverse versions of contemporary musical creation, incorporating a wide variety of artistic trends. From June 4 to June 8, the Conservatoire venues will host musical ensembles and soloists, established and up-and-coming alike, both from Greece and around the world, visual and sound installations and performances, as well as open-call workshops.