Lee Ranaldo is a musician, visual artist and writer, best known as one of the co-founders of the legendary band Sonic Youth, which helped shape the sound of alternative rock from the 1980s on. Alongside his musical output, he's also exhibited visual work and published poetry, journals and writings on music. In recent years, Lee has been performing “Contre Jour” with his partner Leah Singer - immersive sound and light shows featuring suspended electric guitars and swirling projections. His acoustic solo piece “In Virus Times” came out on Mute Records in 2021, and Sonic Youth dropped the archival live album “Walls Have Ears” in early 2024.


Performing a live soundtrack for the film “Quick Billy” (1971) by filmmaker Bruce Baillie, a key figure in American independent and avant-garde cinema, this promises to be an unmissable and unpredictable encounter between Lee Ranaldo's experimental music and Bruce Baillie's experimental cinema. Ranaldo will perform alongside Brazilian percussionist Luís Bittencourt in this concert.

For Felicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, midi instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both French and English.

''Watching 'Les yeux sans visage' - as a teenager in the 1990s - had quite an impact on me. Not only was it not only a fantastic '80s song by Billy Idol inspired, it really is a great black-and-white horror film about freedom, women's empowerment and image." - Felicia Atkinson

John Carroll Kirby is a Los Angeles-based pianist, composer, and producer known for his distinctive blend of jazz, new-age, soul, and electronic music. He has collaborated with artists like Solange, Eddie Chacon, Frank Ocean, and Steve Lacy. His synth work on Solange’s “Cranes in the Sky” and a 2024 Grammy nomination for Lacy’s “Bad Habit” cement his reputation as a sought-after studio talent. Kirby has released eight solo albums, ranging from the tropical-jazz fusion of “My Garden” to the meditative “Conflict”, the ensemble-driven “Septet”, and the more electronic “Dance Ancestral and Blowout” (2023). He has also composed for film, scoring the award-winning animated feature “Cryptozoo” and the 2024 feature “The Luckiest Man in America”.

Nika Milano is a Venezuelan-born audiovisual artist based in Mexico City. Her multidisciplinary practice spans photography, experimental video, analog synthesis, sound, and film. Influenced by structuralist cinema and feedback systems, she explores the interplay between organic processes and technology. 

At the Curtas Vila do Conde concert, Kirby will perform in a duo with Irish keyboardist Rory McCarthy, who has collaborated with names such as Connan Mockasin, Mac Demarco, and Beck.

With its world premiere at this year's Berlinale, “Monk in Pieces” portrays the journey and unique language of composer, performer and artist Meredith Monk. With interviews with David Byrne and Bjork, Billy Shebar's film elegantly reflects Monk's profound cultural influence, broadening the horizons of artistic expression.

A documentary narrated by Rita Lee herself, “Ritas” is an immersive journey into her world, taking us from her personal life to her creative process. Moods, loves and backstage. Feminism and its battles. The charisma of the hermit, and her metamorphoses on stage. Oswaldo Santana's film reveals the intimate side of the rebel behind the queen of Brazilian rock.

“The Koln Concert” is for many the best live album ever recorded.  Fifty years later, “Koln 75”, a film by Ido Fluk that premiered at the Berlinale, revisits the story of Vera Brandes, who, as a teenager, brought Keith Jarret to Cologne. This is the story of the obstacles and challenges she had to overcome. An out-of-tune piano. Keith Jarret's genius and whims. An iconic concert that came close to not taking place. The power of music and the idealistic giddiness of youth.