Assuming sound as a universal language, “Switching Codes” looks at music as a mutable and ever-shifting means of expression. The evening of live performance and a DJ set takes place at the relatively new Trauma Bar und Kino, a hybrid venue and cinema in a recently developed part of Berlin’s Quartier Heidestrasse. Here, a new culture is developing—around audio and video, URL and IRL—where old and new codes come together in a composite visual and sonic vocabulary for an emerging generation of non-prescriptive artists existing in the shadows of the curly pop continuum. It’s a place where everything goes, and everyone gets it

Operating at this nexus of good and evil, reality and fiction, individuality and collectivity, “Switching Codes” represent the endless possibility of forming identity and experience within the unified yet singular space of Trauma Bar. It allows performers to create their own reality and open the “Fluid Wor(l)ds” theme to the endless, shapeshifting and code-switching possibilities of real and imagined material and virtual worlds. In creating this kind of outward-looking intimacy, interdisciplinary producer, performer and visual artist x/o presents a live set of loose narratives, contrasting sonics and butterfly evolution allegories to create a cathartic soundtrack that is both ethereal and aggressive. Improvisational lyricist, producer and sound artist Elvin Brandhi uses sound and the voice as an expansive language transgressing intrinsic systemics and inherited syntactical etiquettes. Musician, poet and “punk god” Debby Friday explores themes of ritual and feminine aggression, as well as discourses of power, forces of diaspora and the aesthetics of eroticism in her experimental audio-visual and cross-genre performance. Georgian rappers KayaKata draw on themes of physical, social and psychological liberation, largely inspired by the trauma of growing up in civil war and economic turmoil, to expand their “ghetto sci-fi” universe beyond music and into text, animation, short films, comics, and more. QUALIATIK brings her background in neuroscience to a distinct conversation between the concrete and the abstract into music, triggering a breakdown of defenses and launching the listener into a dauntless state of self-confrontation. Together, the lineup asks, “what is it that connects us when we peel back the layers of contemporaneity, going beyond the perceived unity of a singular subjectivity to collectively listen?”