Saber Rider | Vinyl -terror & -horror
The Athens Epidaurus Festival at the Athens Conservatoire

Curated by Stavros Gasparatos

Saber Rider

Saber Rider’s music is based on the creation and transformation of improvisational material drawn from both acoustic and electronic sources, resulting to audio collage experiments with ambient and dream pop aspects. Her first album, Heaps (2021), was released digitally and in tape form by the Just Gazing Records label. In the end of 2022, a live improvisational LP was created jointly with Αnna vs June (Submersion Records).

Saber Rider is a composer, producer, performer, DJ, ballet piano accompanist, post-production engineer, sound designer and piano teacher. Her work focuses on on electronic/electroacoustic composition, sampling and free improvisation. She studied piano and composition in Athens and London as well as Brazilian percussion and music for image. Furthermore, she has been the manager of the British jazz record label F-IRE Collective.

At the Subset Festival she will perform tracks from Heaps and

new compositions, in collaboration with her long-standing fellow musician

and multi-instrumentalist Dimitris Chatzizisis (Foken).

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Vinyl -terror & -horror

Greta Christensen and Camilla Sørensen, the artistic duo from Denmark known  as Vinyl -terror & -horror, explore the turntable and vinyl record in their rawest form.

The visuality and physicality of the record grooves allow them to transform the  playback medium into sculptural objects. Their broken records – reassembled into “cut-ups” like a collaged image – deliberately interrupt the musical flow of the samples, facilitating looping patterns and unexpected structures, while mixing found sounds across a wide spectrum of genres, ranging from classical, folk and schlager music to vintage movie sound effects. In live concerts and sound installations, Vinyl –terror & -horror constantly push the idea of the turntable as an instrument to its limits.

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The Subset Festival borrows a mathematical term (“subset” ⊆) for the name of an avant-garde new music festival held as part of the Athens Epidaurus Festival at the brand-new stages of the Athens Conservatoire. This five-day event will incorporate a wide range of artistic works, in the hopes of bringing diverse versions of contemporary musical creation and presentation into contact with each other. Within these five days, the three Athens Conservatoire stages will host by turns musical ensembles, sound and visual installations as well as musical performances in a multifaceted and particularly extroverted musical platform.

Drawing on a series of works chosen by the Athens Epidaurus Festival open call, artists from around the world, established and up-and-coming alike, will present their works in Athens and converse with one another, involving every one of us in this dialogue. With that in mind, participating artists will share their modus operandi with the audience in the form of special workshops and discussions. At the same time, directors and curators of similar events from across the globe will have the opportunity to be familiarized with the diverse contemporary Greek music scene.

The Subset Festival includes two commissions to contemporary Greek ensembles, TETTTIX and Trigger Happy, both of which are creating new works/installations for the Festival at the new stage of the Athens Conversatoire. Furthermore, established contemporary music artists, Greek and international, are participating (Ergon Ensemble, Vinyl -terror & -horror, MMMΔ & ALEM) as are avant-garde electronic musicians from Europe, Greece (Saber Rider) and foreigners (Robert Henke, Kali Malone, Hekla, Sébastien Roux), some of whom are making their Greek debut. Special emphasis will be placed on the outreach of the programme through laboratories by Triger Happy, TETTTIX, Sébastien Roux AND Robert Henke in collaboration with Goethe-Institut Athen.