Reception Weekend presents

Susan Geaney:
Susan Geaney is a Kerry-based composer and improviser whose work explores deep listening, community engagement, and the interconnectedness of sound, space, and intuitive responses. Her practice spans experimental music, field recording, ecology, arts and health, improvisation, therapeutic play, dance, and poetry.
This new composition by Susan Geaney is being created especially for the event, highlighting the unique textures of the Uilleann pipes, performed by Kerry-based piper Robert Fell, and the Tombo Bass Harmonica, played by Susan herself. Incorporating pre-recorded tape material, the piece gradually weaves layers of drones, creating a dynamic interplay between live and recorded elements.

Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh:
Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh is a viola player exploring the tonal possibilities of gut strings and wood in both amplified and acoustic contexts.
Influenced by improvised, traditional and early music styles, she has released three solo recordings focused on exploring the instrument – Oreing (Fort Evil Fruit 2017), The Rounds (KRUT 2021) and most recently Live At Sonic Acts (Scatter Archive 2023).
An active collaborator, Nic Oireachtaigh has toured with experimental Irish bands Woven Skull and Cian Nugent & the Cosmos and has performed internationally with Josephine Foster and Circuit des Yeux. She has created music for theatre works by Isadora Epstein and collaboratively with Pat Thomas and Rhodri Davies. In May 2022 she composed New Mountain, Reaching Plane, a surround sound piece for orchestral and gamelan musicians as a commission for BBC Scotland’s Tectonics Festival. Recent performances include a newly commissioned work by Natalia Beylis and a premier of Eliane Radigue’s Asymptote Versatile(1963-64) at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023.

Ryoko Akama:
A Japanese-Korean working with installation, performance and composition, residing in Huddersfield, UK. She is an artistic director for ame c.i.c., supporting DIY culture and underground art/music scene. She also co-runs the independent publisher mumei publishing. Her works sculpt domestic appliances and look-like-wastes into kinetic sounding contraptions with invisible energy such as heat, magnetism and gravity. Her site-specific works infuse both aural / visual occurrence as one entity, creating ephemeral situations that magnify undefinable relationships between noise and silence, time and space.
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Clara de Asis:
Clara de Asís is a composer, performer and producer who explores the correlations of acoustics, spatiality and the praxis of attention. Her work accounts for material and sociopolitical relationality in the processes of engaging with sound, and is grounded in the elasticity of perception. She incorporates electronics and sound synthesis to idiosyncratic combinations of diverse materials, found objects and traditional instrumentation.
Her compositions, often developed collaboratively, juxtapose structural precision to areas of indeterminacy, drawing from an interest in experimental intonation, timbral research and the junction of rational and irrational systems.

Along with her solo practice, she has created a wide variety of works in association with other artists and within long-term alliances, spanning across multidisciplinary collaborations such as film and dance. She has performed extensively across Europe, the United States and South America. She has been an artist-in-residence at Experimental Sound Studio (Chicago), Tsonami (Valparaíso), Q-O2 (Brussels) and EMS (Stockholm), among others. Her music is released on the labels Another Timbre (UK), Elsewhere (US), Erstwhile (US), Marginal Frequency (US), Pilgrim Talk (US), Blank Mind (UK), among others.

Clara de Asís is the co-Artistic Director of the Göteborg Art Sounds festival and runs the publishing platform Discreet Editions, a record label that fosters interactions between experimental contemporary music and earlier traditions.

Born in the south of Spain, she is currently based in Rotterdam (NL)

Ryoko Akama & Clara de Asis ”share a respect for the integrity of small sounds, which they present in uncluttered assortments. One electronic wave might flow into another; two different varieties of metal percussion are struck at different rates; some crackling static sits in proximity to gentle, woody clatter within a vast field of silence.”
Bill Meyer – Dusted Magazine

Viola sounds don’t get much more raw and gritty than the ones produced by Ireland’s Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh. That’s especially true when she performs in concert… what makes Nic Oireachtaigh’s work so deep is that she doles out her fiery sounds with patience and forethought, so that even the most all-out noises… are balanced with moments of reflection and pause.”
Marc Masters – Bandcamp Daily

Produced by David Lacey &  Aonghus McEvoy

Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland

Reception, the long running Dublin-based series of concerts that focuses on cutting edge experimental music & performance will celebrate 9 years of activity with the second edition of ’Reception Weekend’ festival on February 14th & 15th at Project Arts Centre, Dublin 2 & Tengu, Dublin 1. 2025’s programme focuses on artists who explore temporality in unique ways & ranges from durational minimal compositions to ecstatic club music to free improvisation and outsider pop.

Since 2016 Reception has sought out new music & sound pieces which evade easy categorisation often blurring the lines between composition & improvisation, performance & installation. ‘Reception Weekend 2025’ is our most ambitious and wide-ranging programme to date bringing together composers and performers from 3 continents.

Over the course of the weekend Reception will present 4 concerts featuring Irish artists & musicians Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, Susan Geaney, Dunk Murphy & Aonghus McEvoy alongside legendary minimalist composer Eliane Radigue (performed by acclaimed instrumentalists Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies & Dominic Lash), Chicago footwork innovator RP Boo, New York experimentalists Jack Callahan & Jeff Wittscher, celebrated Japanese composer & sculptor Ryoko Akama and French guitarist & composer Clara de Asis.

Susan Geaney will present a new world premiere commissioned by Reception. The festival will also see the first Irish performance by RP Boo and the Irish premiere of Eliane Radigue’s Occam Ocean.

Weekend passes available at www.receptiondublin.com