Calling all sound enthusiasts and producers; music lovers, artists and poets; vocalists, sonic experimentalists and acoustic adventurers from across the globe; local historians and community groups with stories to tell about the cultural, physical and economic transformations of their respective areas and experiences within them. This is an invitation to participate and help create:

The Sound of the Multitude.

A programme and timetable of the submitted contributions for the current festival will be created and curated*.

Possible suggestions for contributions might include, (but are not restricted to), music of any kind, field recordings, vocal or text-based pieces, talks, interviews, sound art, sonic experiments, sound essays, and the like. Through the introduction of this culturally productive disruptive-acoustic layer to the quotidian soundscape of the Ruhr area, we aim to create a sonic environment for the dynamic activation of visitor groups, passers-by or performers, serving as a setting for meditation or dance, soundtrack screenings or whatsoever idea you might come up with. The Sound of the Multitude operates as a rallying call, an instrumentarium and a channel for the different (often unheard) voices and sounds of a manifold, multitudinous, society: A society characterized by both the migration routes of different generations and phases of industrialisation and post-industrialisation; of digital, local and global developments. Starting from the question of who we are as a society, Nik Nowak confronts the conundrum of virtuality with materiality, making the relationship between privacy and the public sphere in the 24/7 digital age the subject of discussion. The project, which extends and entangles the local and the global, is a real life platform for cultivating a subversive and emancipatory subculture — digital and analog — to gather not alongside sound but to actively immerse in it.

* We do not tolerate any form of hurtful language, favoritism, abuse, discrimination, marginalization or insulting behavior because of skin color, gender, religion, ethnicity, background, religious belief, sexuality, gender identity, caste, socioeconomic class, disability or age. We do not accept racism, sexism, colourism, homophobia, biphobia, interphobia and transphobia or hostility, Islamophobia, antisemitism, fascism, ableism, age discrimination and other and/or intersectional forms of discrimination.

Ok, lets go