Amoenus Recordings III: Christian Duka - Aural / Embodied Cinema

Amoenus Recordings II: Sharon Gal & Christian Duka

Amoenus Recordings: Label Launch

Amoenus Presents: Amoenus Recordings

Amoenus presents: XOLO

Introspective Electronics x Experiment Intrinsic

Aural Cinema

Amoenus presents: Formant Value, Jin Synth, Eight Fold Way & Avsluta b2b Christian Duka

Spatial Audio Workshop

Amoenus presents: Stone, Nexcyia, mu tate and Avsluta

Listening Together

INFINITE MONKEYS

Free Improvisation in Spatial Sound

Exploring Spatial Sound: A week of learning and creating in a 4DSOUND system

Live Coding Spatial Sound

The Listening Body

Sound Slick by The Inner Ear

Avsluta & Atau Tanaka

GUTZ

FUTURESHOOK

Immersive Audio R&D

Amoenus is a musicians-led, cooperative cultural organisation that promotes the development of music as a multi-sensory, participatory experience.
Our work focuses on shifting the way in which music is experienced today: departing from the traditional one-sided mode of consumption, we consider audiences as creative participants.

We acknowledge music as a dynamic agent for societal and cultural transformation, believing that the evolution and broad adoption of immersive sensory technologies can have a significant, transformative impact worldwide. 

Amoenus originated a series of immersive events organised at Aures London by London based artist Christian Duka following “UR: Human Presence”, a multidisciplinary artistic experience presented at Aures London in 2018. These events were organised to provide local artists with the opportunity of working with spatial audio in their own practice and present it to the public.

Following a series of immersive music events carried out in 2019 at Aures London in Waterloo, Amoenus was set up as a charitable cultural organisation and received a grant from Arts Council England to build a 16.4 audio system in order to carry out their work independently. The sound system was installed at IKLECTIK, a community space in central London that promotes experimentation in music and contemporary art from 2020 to 2023. There, the Amoenus sound system facilitated and enhanced more than 200 events as part of IKLECTIK's programme. Amoenus’ own curatorial works explore the intersection of various fields encompassing electronic music, free improvisation, interactive & participatory arts, performance art and new media practices.

In London, Amoenus also organised a workshop at Central St Martins university, exploring ecological contexts through spatial sound and a 5-days course on spatial sound at Stone Nest in central London (Shaftesbury Avenue) in collaboration with Amsterdam-based creative studio 4DSOUND. Outside of London, Amoenus led a workshop at Birmingham Open Media with a group of 40 neurodivergent individuals.

Amoenus collaborates with:

• The Bath House, a not-for-profit community space with a cafe, bar multiple event spaces and studios. They host many permanent local businesses, as well as offering a wide range of workshops and events that change weekly

• PELL ENSEMBLE, created in 2014 by Choreographer, Dance and Digital Artist Rebecca Evans. Her work uses interactive and immersive technologies combined with dance to engage audiences and communities in both the making and performance process.

• 4DSOUND, an Amsterdam-based studio focusing on spatial sound as a creative medium. Since 2007, 4DSOUND has been at the forefront of some of the most creatively challenging and technically complex projects using spatial audio in the context of architecture, music, opera, fashion and research.

• Candy Mountain, a design, project development and production studio, driven by transforming ideas into reality, exploring the outer realms of technology, specialist craftwork and sound creation. 
  

   

• The Studio in Bath, led by creative producer Nik Rawlings, they support artist residents and business partners to develop projects through grant applications, business development, networking and events, as well as working with university colleagues to engage students in resident activities and internship opportunities.

  
  

VISION STATEMENT

The Locus Amoenus is a theme recurring in modern and classic literature, it means “a place without walls”. Many authors identified it with a pleasant place-non-place for the refreshment of the soul, where the protagonists of their works found refuge from dangers and hardships. For Homer the Locus Amoenus was the island of Calypso, for Boccaccio it was a place of safety away from the plague pandemic.

Today, Amoenus is actively working to create spaces that, through the constantly evolving entity of sound, enable us to imagine new realities founded on the principle of the human being as a creative entity. Its conceptualisation stems from a recognised need for local communities to imagine how futures like this can feel like before they can take the right steps "in the world" to actualise them.

Amoenus currently focuses on the use of immersive sound technology as a tool to be used experimentally for such communal acts of world building.