Kiezsalon at DAS MINSK
Tickets
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko
Agua Dulce—Ale Hop & Laura Robles
Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko performing Гільдеґарда at Unsound 2024. Photo by Helena Majewska
June 12, 2025, 7 PM
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko
Гільдеґарда (‘Hildegard’ in Ukrainian) is a reimagining of Hildegard von Bingen's music. It combines the vocal sound production approaches of authentic Ukrainian folk singing with the modular synthesis techniques drawing from high mediaeval polyphony and monophony. This approach, brought to life by Oleh Shpudeiko, known as Heinali, an electronic music composer reimagining Early music in modular synthesis, and Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko, a singer practising authentic Ukrainian vocal tradition, brings to the fore the paradoxical viscerality inherent to Hildegard's visionary writing. It serves as a mirror, reflecting, processing and transcending the wartime experience and exploring the raw spirituality emerging from it.
“Agua Dulce” is a collaboration project by Berlin-based artists Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) and Laura Robles, and also the name of the most popular beach in Lima, Peru, near where both artists lived during their childhood, houses apart, without ever meeting one another. Years later, the pair joined forces with Robles on a self-built electric cajón and Cárdenas on electric guitar and electronics. Together, they explore rhythmical structures that form the backbone of the complex Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions – a broad term used for the various musical developments that occurred in the last two centuries at the shores of the Peruvian Pacific. Their music is a radical deconstruction of these rhythms focusing on the cajón, the Peruvian box drum that enslaved peoples made from fruit boxes when Spanish colonizers banned the more familiar foot drum in the 19th century.
Ale Hop (Alejandra Cárdenas) is a Peruvian-born artist. Cárdenas began her career in Lima’s underground music scene in the 2000s. Her work encompasses various formats such as live shows, albums, multimedia artworks and research. Her live performances merge the physical qualities of sound with raw affective states. She builds layers of sound by maneuvering an intricate repertoire of electric guitar techniques to create music of deep intensity. In the past year, she has initiated various collaborative practices, including Agua Dulce with percussionist Laura Robles, radically mutating Afro-Peruvian rhythms, and Near and Remote Activation Practices, with sound artist Tatiana Heuman, which draws inspiration from South American organology and storytelling. She has presented her work at festivals and institutions such as UNSOUND, MUTEK, Sonic Acts, CTM Festival, Taiwan C-LAB, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Somerset House Studios; and released albums on Nyege Nyege, Buh Records, Karlrecords and Superpang.
“There’s heart-thumping tension and catharsis as the musicians aim to reconnect the Peruvian percussion instrument with its slave roots” – THE GUARDIAN
“the results of ‘Agua Dulce’ offer absorbing solutions to contemporary music’s burning question of “where to next?” – BOOMKAT
“nothing short of amazing” – THE WIRE
Laura Robles and Ale Hop, Photo: Kasia Zacharko
Shed, Photo: Birgit Kaulfuss
DJ Shed
When it comes to music, Techno has been playing an integral and defining role in Shed’s life for more than 25 years. For René Pawlowitz, it all started in the early 1990’s, shortly after the Berlin Wall had come down. Growing up in the city of Schwedt, located near the Oder River close to the border with Poland, FM radio was pretty much his one and only window into the world of popular culture. Berlin-based radio stations—DT64 and Radio 4U—and its DJs Monika Dietl and Marusha provided musical knowledge and inspiration, something the bleak wasteland of the federal state of Brandenburg did not offer. Tracks from Detroit, Chicago and Berlin became the formative soundtrack of Shed’s youth, who had just witnessed that history could actually be re-written. Soon after, him and some friends started travelling down to Berlin for the weekends, spending endless nights at clubs like E-Werk, Tresor or Elektro. He soaked up rave culture, realizing its sheer power and the effect it had on people—an epiphany that fuels his music to this day.
Moving to Berlin in the early 2000s, it didn’t take long until he released his first EP. Producing tracks, stamping white labels, shipping them to shops—René Pawlowitz ran a one-man operation. EQD, Wax, Head High, WK7, Seelow: his list of pseudonyms is longer than many full discographies. From 2006 to 2010 he worked at Hardwax, Berlin’s legendary record store.
“Art comes from artisanship,” his grandfather told him—and that philosophy lives in his work. Shedding The Past, The Traveller, The Final Experiment—his albums are deeply personal and technically masterful. “I want to make music to which I can come back 20 years later and still feel confident about.”