ISLAJA aka. MERJA KOKKONEN (FIN)
Islaja, the artistic moniker of Merja Kokkonen, is a Finnish composer, performer, and visual artist celebrated since the early 2000s for her haunting vocals and dreamlike melodies. Emerging from the Finnish experimental and psychedelic folk scene, she has thrived in a continuum of shape-shifting, blending earthy mysticism with “warped and left-field” electronics.
Islaja’s music is a dream, abstract and enchanted but grounded in
the earthiness of a Finnish forest floor.
Kim Gordon
Often compared to Björk or Syd Barrett, and fused with the vocal noir of Nico, Islaja’s work is characterized by an early-millennial digital-DIY approach and a significant artistic vision aimed at transcending genre boundaries. After spending over a decade in Berlin as an active collaborator with the all-female Monika Werkstatt collective (founded by Gudrun Gut) and releasing music internationally (Ecstatic Peace!, Fonal, Not Not Fun), she returned to Helsinki in 2024, deepening her roots in the Finnish art scene. Merja continues to garner international praise for her unique blend of Nordic myth-making and the digital-era vanguard.
Her most recent release, Angel Tape (Other Power, 2023), refers to a mid-80s cassette that circulated among religious groups and allegedly captured the voices of angels, which she had listened to as a child. Reflecting on the recorded layers of aural debris accumulated with each generational copy, Islaja found her sonic space in the non-locality of the magnetic imprints on this techno-spiritual artifact.
LUCY DUNCOMBE (UK) AND FERONIA WENNBORG (NO)
Lucy Duncombe is an experimental singer and artist from Glasgow. Woven from an arcane stream of vocal arabesques, she creates sonic textures that resonate equally with pure pop form and abstract digital artifacts. You’ll feel synthetic gushes bubbling with glitch and doo-wop. Hers is a whirling neo-avant-garde that churns up abraded bits of musical sediment into transient impressions.
Feronia Wennborg is an interdisciplinary artist and musician based in Norway. Her work flows between performance, installation, sound, and digital media. Rooted in recording practice and digital processing, she captures the traces of intimacy and friendship, interlacing them into oceanic landscapes that blur the boundaries between human presence and technological mediation. Pulsating with fragmented vocal echoes and textured digital artifacts, her work facilitates environments where the social and imaginative potential of listening unfolds.
assembling air
The duo’s recent project, assembling air, emerges from their fluid neo-experimental practice that reimagines voice and sound as living, evolving entities. Working together since the early 2020s, Lucy and Feronia have developed a queasily intimate relationship with various artificially inflected voice tools as a means of co-inhabiting their externalizing features. With this history of voice-based technologies in hand, the artists have trained voice-cloning software (Descript) on their own recorded speech, instrumentalizing this othered material to independently act in a virtual presence. Operated from behind keyboards, these vocal clones unravel themselves as clumsy social actors in asynchronous conversations woven into the sonic texture of their performance.
DAPHNE VON SCHRADER (AT)
Daphne von Schrader is an Austrian musician and visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of sound, ecology, and urban life. Working site- and life-specifically across diverse media, she crafts multichannel compositions and conceptual lecture-performances that probe our urban post-capitalist living conditions. Delving into the very foundations of existence, she investigates the physiological and biological effects of sonic frequencies, the scientific dimensions underlying the experience of listening organisms — whether human or microbial.
Daphne assembles acoustic collages that evoke medical (her)stories and articulate a critique of the contemporary. Her narratives involve phenomena ranging from inflamed organs and microorganismic allegiances, to the effects of noise pollution and hope in sustaining biodiverse ecosystems. Moving fluidly from macro to micro, from aerial perspectives to intimate close listening, she weaves together noise particles, sound quanta, love song, and inaudible frequencies into ever-shifting environments. With a self-described approach of “making music like a dolphin,” Daphne introduces a playful, experimental spirit to the neighbourhood of the 8th District.
Daphne is a founding member of the interdisciplinary Klub Montage collective, as well as an active participant in Vienna’s Sandkasten Syndikat and a long-standing collaborator of the art community Semmelweisklinik.
Funded by the Vienna City Council MA 7 Kultur and the District Council Josefstadt.
