HYENAZ are Berlin-based sound and movement artists Kathryn Fischer aka Mad Kate and Adrienne Teicher. The dance tracks, soundscapes, performative installations and a/v works they produce are based on the sonic shapeshifting of field recordings gathered in the process of site-specific works.

Since 2015 HYENAZ have been working on a music, performance and sonic research project they call “Foreign Bodies,” a slow movement journey to explore relationships of “bodies in motion and bodies in resistance”, be they human or of other sentience. Central to this project is the idea that the body is disappearing: from social interactions blasted into the corporate cloud, to machine intelligence tangled in the systems that govern life, to techno-futurists fantasies of an age where analogue flesh has vanished into digital consciousness.

Their first release for Foreign Bodies PROXIMITY was an act of listening and learning from non-human animals, frogs in particular, to think about how proximity changes relata between bodies. The track premiered in the poetry journal Interim as a/v poetry–a contemporary dance music video with integrated text that the duo choreographed and edited themselves. A virtual sculpture PROXIMA debuted at the Near-Field Communication Digital Art Biennale and is now traveling around Europe.

Their second release, Columns, is HYENAZ’ response to militarized violence. The track, which sounds like industrial techno, is built entirely from vocalizations and organic percussion scavenged deep within a cave outside the pilgrimage town of Częstochowa, Poland.

They are now releasing the a/v work and remixes PERIMETER on June 3rd 2021. With Foreign Bodies HYENAZ build on their reputation as visionary performers. Electro superstar Peaches called HYENAZ a “performance monster duo” in The Guardian. They have performed twice at Berlin’s world famous techno mansion Berghain as part of Your Moms Agency’s Digital Art Meets Music series and once to support CHRISTEENE and have been energetically touring the world, from SXSW to the MIDI Festival Shanghai; from techno festival Garbicz to the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, where HYENAZ produced Spectral Rite with the visual artists Sylbee Kim and Nico Pelzer.

The body has always been central to the work of HYENAZ, but Foreign Bodies examines questions of embodiment with an ever sharpening focus. In a frame from PROXIMITY, text flashes on the screen asking: HOW MUCH OF MY BODY COULD I LOSE. Another frame asks: DO YOU RECOGNISE ME / MY / YOUR SOVEREIGNTY and DOES OUR PROXIMITY BIND US? The pain of having and being a body in the 21st Century fuels HYENAZ drive to bring bodies together in a room and fight alienation.

Retired drag queen. Ex-DJ. Resident at my house.

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