Tenebrae, extrait 1

“João Alegria is an essential figure in the Portuguese underground music scene. With a prolific career spanning over a decade, the guitarist – as he prefers to be called – embodies artistic commitment, resilience, and a deep devotion to crafting dark, experimental soundscapes. The numerous albums the Lisbon-based musician has released testify to a sonic vision akin to its object of study: unhurried and unperturbable, yet continuous and tempestuous."

— João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

“You paint for fame & status, I paint for freedom & awareness”, reads one of the vertical graffiti that Mr.Paradox Paradise painted on some Berlin building. Likewise, there is nothing in João Alegria’s art that is done with the intention of fame or likes. He spent more than a decade editing with recognition limited to the “community” of sound nomads. “I’ve been doing this for some time and I don’t have a very wide audience”, he admits. However, who knows, knows. And who knows, like it. João Alegria’s music is for connoisseurs. Perhaps that will always be the case.
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However, the unique contours of his art, combined with a stubborn aesthetic consistency and prolificacy, are the characteristics that simultaneously nest and vitalize it. The unconditional and obstinate way in which this “guitarist” – as he likes to be called – has created his work is a rare case of perseverance. His motivation? It’s not entirely explicit, but somewhere between the love of music and the physiological need to create lives the truth of João Alegria. If he lives because he breathes, he seems to make music because he has to live. One senses in his speech an inevitability of cathartic genesis that surreptitiously emerges between the lines like a figure wandering through the night.
João Alegria can also move through the shadows, but his music definitely points to the heavens, full of verticality” 

– João Morado (Beats for Peeps, Cosmofonia, Jazz.pt)

Composer of contemporary classical music.

Occasionally I play (piano, bass) or do some field recording.

Dmitry Burtsev (b. 1992) is a composer, sound artist, and improviser.
His artistic research unfolds between two complementary poles. The first is personal, exploring memory and forgetting, subjective topographies of place, and the oscillation between speech and silence. The second pole is collective, focused on culture and language, critically rethinking traditions and their clichés. At the intersection of these areas, Burtsev develops a distinctive approach to music. Composing becomes both a form of self-expression and an encounter with the material as the "other."

Dmitry’s music consistently highlights the social aspect of sound. For him, composition is not only the creation of autonomous works, but also a question: How can sound express the pressing issues of society? This approach has resulted in projects in the fields of chamber music, sound art, performative works, and theatre.

Dmitry graduated from the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 2017, where he studied composition under Vladimir Tarnopolsky. Since then, he has worked as an assistant to composer Sergej Newski, gaining valuable professional experience. At the same time, he was active as an accordionist in Moscow’s free improvisation scene, performing at experimental festivals such as RichterFest and Noise and Fury.

The environments in which Burtsev lived have played a central role in his music. For over a decade, he resided on the grounds of a former forestry estate outside Moscow, moving between the urban soundscape and the forest. This duality sharpened his reflection on how environments shape perception, leading to several works with field recordings. Among them are the performative composition “Symphony for Urbanites” (Moscow Urban Forum, 2019) and the performance “Personal Experience” (Sidur Museum, 2019). In the latter, Burtsev improvised with his own archival recordings in a Max/MSP patch.

From 2018, he collaborated with politically engaged theatre, composing for works addressing collective trauma, such as “Schitalka” (on the Georgian-Abkhaz War of 1991, longlisted for the Golden Mask Award) and “Govorit Moskva” (on Stalinist terror, premiered in 2022).

Following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Burtsev emigrated to Azerbaijan, where he became active in the Baku Contemporary Music Society and engaged with local traditions. In 2024, he began the master’s program at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf under José María Sánchez-Verdú.

His music has been performed by ensembles such as Studio for New Music, MCME, and Kymatic, and by soloists including Sergey Tchirkov, Natalia Pshenichnikova, Pavlos Antoniadis, and Leonard Dering. It has been featured at festivals such as Another Space, Territory, Moscow Forum, ISCM PAN Music Festival in Seoul, ReMusik, Baku Contemporary Music Days, and Voices Berlin. He has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the Open Space Laboratory (2017, Grand Prix), Russian Music 2.0 (2020, laureate), and the DAAD Scholarship (2025).

Lam Tin Yan, Marcus, is a Hong Kong sound composer and trumpet player who studies acoustic, acousmatic, and live electronics composition at the Hong Kong Baptist University under the guidance of Dr. Eugene Birman, and electronics with Dr. Christopher Keyes and Dr. Stylianos Dimou.
As a composer, his string quartet Hidden Fruit premiered on the RTHK Radio 4 by the Romer String Quartet as a finalist in the Hong Kong Composers’ Guild New Generation Composer 2023. His acousmatic piece New Ec0-existence is selected for the MA/IN Festival 2023/24. He was the trumpet improviser and recording artist for the new multidisciplinary work in City Contemporary Dance Company’s recent show, Living Up to Death that ran in Freespace in West Kowloon Cultural District. He was also awarded the best performer in the Renaissance Foundation Content Creator Camp 2023 for his multi-disciplinary work, What’s Moon’s Gender? He was recently selected as a finalist in the second NC Wong Young Composers Award 2023-24. 
As a pop musician, he programmed sound for 2022 International Arts Carnival, in the theatre play produced by Hong Kong non-profit art organization Every Life Is A Song. He also played trumpet and flugelhorn in the global tour of cantopop artist Terrence Lam at the O2 Arena in the UK, and The Venetian in Macau.

Tenebrae, extrait 1

IRCAM