Listening Session #1: Halim El-Dabh w/ Kamila Metwaly
05 Jan 2026
SOU Initiative presented in Chiang Mai a listening session with Kamila Metwaly, Artistic Director of MaerzMusik (Berliner Festspiele), exploring the sonic continuum of Halim El-Dabh — a pioneering Egyptian composer and electronic music visionary.
The session focuses on Taabir El Zaar (1944), one of the earliest electronic music works, composed in Cairo. Emerging from ritual and early electronic manipulation, the piece dissolves boundaries between ceremony and technology, archive and futurity.
Through listening as an ethical and political act, Metwaly opens space for re-orientation — hearing El-Dabh’s work not as fixed heritage, but as a living, unfinished archive that continues to resonate across diasporas and contemporary sound practices.
Listening Session #2: Audrey Chen | Beamsplitter
20-21 Jan 2026
BEAM SPLITTER – Audrey Chen and Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø is a duo for amplified voice, trombone and analog electronics, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed.
SOU will present Beamsplitter’s first concerts in Thailand at Noise House Lat Phrao (Bangkok) and at Rong Sa Dang (Chiang Mai) on the 20 and 21 of January 2026 respectively.
BEAM SPLITTER have been touring globally since 2015, playing over two hundred concerts in a wide variety of spaces and contexts, bringing their own brand of highly amplified dialog, which is as intimate as it is equal amounts raw and entirely exposed. They join together their two individual voices into a distinct language that delves beyond the borders of the corporeal elements of un-processed voice and trombone, while utilizing analog electronics to offset their hyper extended physical play.
INDEX OF THE PAST
Prior to SOU, members of the founding team initiated e x t a n t a t i o n (2016–2019), a Chiang Mai–based platform for experimental practice, artistic exchange, and public programming. Selected activities are indexed here as part of SOU’s longer lineage of situated cultural infrastructure-building.
Hai Anh Trieu is a Vietnamese-German filmmaker, we screened her film Birds of a Feather on the 03 Jun 2019 and organized a screening tour of the film at Sàn Art (Saigon), Six Space (Hanoi) and Jam (Bangkok)
FRAUD (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo) developed their work Seeing Like A Tree from 01-30 Apr 2019 and presented their research on the 28 of Apr 2019. They structured a performance that interrogate algorithmically generated patterns based on the modelling dynamics of predictive systems used in the governance of natural resources, using Teak plantations as a case study.
Hung Tzu Ni developed a site specific performance during her residency stay and performed Seven Days Of Insomnia on the 17 of Aug 2019 at extantation. She explored the reciprocal relationship formed between light and sound. As each element is respectively constructed and embodied in a given space. An analog light sequencer is triggered by a crystal prism and step motor, structuring the space with refracted light, the occasional appearance of rainbow-colored light, and the reflections that trace an orbit around the contours of the space.