TRK. SOUND CLUB: a case of experimental music concert season

This paper builds on my experience as music curator of TRK. SOUND CLUB, a series of concerts started in March 2016 and dedicated to experimental music, often featuring electronics. As a curator willing to propose cutting-edge and experimental music to our audience, we continuously face questions such as: what is experimental music nowadays? What is innovation? Where does (sound) research lie? In techniques, creative process, ideas or in the combination of those elements? In this paper I would like to articulate the answers that we have developed in our practice as curators in the last few years and the directions we are expecting to pursue in the future. While TRK. was born in the frame of the musical programming of Tempo Reale, we continuously strive to offer an artist profile that is rather uncommon. This profile can be described as: 1) not necessarily trained in conservatories, universities or academies; 2) artists who are both creators and performers of their own works (consequently, who do not write traditional scores or instructions to transmit their pieces to a performer); 3) artists who come from other artistic fields, such as visual art, video art, sculpture, etc.; 4) artists who create works that challenge the concept of “form”, oscillating between concert piece, improvisation piece, and sound installation. The reason for these choices were the will to demonstrate that music research nowadays is not happening only in academic environments, but there is an effervescent, lively and complex “outsider” musical scene that is pushing the limits. Also, our goal was to schedule this kind of musical program in the frame of an institution whose history is strictly interconnected to the highbrow contemporary musical scene