Actress & Suzanne Ciani / Aleksi Perälä

Actress and Suzanne Ciani come together at Biennale Musica 2025 in an iconic transgenerational musical meeting to present the Italian premiere of their new musical collaboration, Concrète Waves. Though the respective practices of Actress and Ciani arise from two distinct generations and artistic backgrounds, both artists share an unrelenting drive to experiment with expressive languages with a richness and singularity that eludes classification in any style category. Their new collaboration merges the organic fluidity of Ciani’s Buchla expressions with the rhythmic eclecticism of Actress’ so-called “R&B Concrète”. In this quadraphonic performance, natural and industrial worlds overlap, producing a space of sonic friction and complementarity. Concrète Waves offers a speculative soundscape shaped by two artists who have redefined the expressive limits of their practice and their idioms, creating a work that is both conceptually rigorous and sensorially expansive.

GRACE is a musical work structured as a passage from West to East, shaped by an original approach to additive synthesis and a bespoke microtonal tuning system. The piece explores new sonic territories, drawing from natural ratios and mathematical constants – phi, pi, and the Fibonacci-Pingala sequence – whose properties shape the organisation of partials within the sound. The composition is structured as a series of evolving states, reflecting a search for unity within a dualistic cosmos. Each layer of sound carries traces of this dualism – Yin and Yang – woven into the harmonic and rhythmic language of the work. A two-part structure guides the ear across phases of internal and external attention. The instrumentation begins with elemental waveforms – sine, saw, and square – standing in for Western synthesis traditions. As the work unfolds, it travels eastward, arriving at timbres and textures inspired by Indian classical instruments such as tabla, khol, and dholak. GRACE draws from millennia of musical knowledge and extends it through contemporary synthesis, creating an idiom that speaks where language ends—a world within a world.