Some evenings you walk in not quite sure what you're about to hear, and leave not quite the same person. That's what we're after at DAS HAUS with Ora Mystica — and we think MNEMØSYNE might be the duo to pull it off.
The premise sounds simple: two voices, two instruments, two musicians drawing from opposite ends of musical history. But what Eugénie De Mey and Michaël|le Grébil Liberg have built together is less a concert and more a kind of inhabited time. Their programme moves between Gregorian chant sung during times of war, the visions of Flemish mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp, and the love songs of troubadour Jaufre Rudel, then folds quietly into the 20th century, into the near-silence of Morton Feldman, the open structures of John Cage, and the modal drones of Ornette Coleman. These aren't two separate worlds sitting side by side. They bleed into and quietly illuminate each other. The question that runs underneath all of it: what does it mean to reach for the absolute through sound? It turns out to be equally at home in a medieval abbey and an American loft in 1962.
Eugénie De Mey carries a low, smoky mezzo that can drop into chest warmth or rise to something crystalline and light, shaped by years of early-music immersion, musicology and choral conducting across Brussels, Paris, Lyon and Geneva, with contemporary music and dance in her bones from the start. She founded TROBAR PROJECT, devoted to encounters rooted in medieval song, and co-created MNEMØSYNE with Michaël|le, the duo through which she now brings together it all: Gregorian monody, medieval women mystics, improvisation, and the slow-burning minimalism of composers who asked music to do less and mean more.
Michaël|le Grébil Liberg is harder to pin down. An artist who is working in the tradition of the old trobars: part early music performer (Hesperion XXI with Jordi Savall, Alla Francesca, ClubMedieval), part composer for theatre and dance, part maker of poetic and cinematographic essays, and the inventor of a hybrid bowed instrument called the cetera øscurå, a bowed cittern that sits somewhere between the medieval and the imagined. Everything Michaël|le does feeds into what they call the Inner Chapel Initiative: an ongoing, deeply personal investigation into time, the unconscious, and the aura of things at risk of disappearing. Their latest film essay, 137, was selected for festivals in Granada and Genoa. Tonight they bring that entire accumulated world into a room with sofas and strangers, which, if you think about it, is exactly what the mystics were doing too.
Some sounds have been waiting 800 years to find the right room. We think DAS HAUS on a May evening might be it.
Food:
Before the concert, we gather around a delicious, seasonal vegetarian/vegan meal by our chef Miguel — an essential part of the DAS HAUS experience. Food is prepared in limited quantities, so arrive early or better reserve a food add-on while booking your ticket to be sure to join the feast.
Schedule:
19:30: doors, drinks & food
20:30: start concert
21:45: end concert & drinks
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