Phantom Streams. Alexander Tillegreen
11 April 2026, 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 20:00 — Liepāja Concert Hall Great Amber, Chamber Hall
Alexander TILLEGREEN (1991)
Phantom Streams
Alexander Tillegreen’s “Phantom Streams” is part of a series of works that he started developing during an artistic research fellowship at Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt Germany. The pieces are creating auditory illusions that allow the listener to hear words inside of their own mind that are not necessarily acoustically present. Instead, the listeners hear words that are based on their own linguistic background, cultural embedding and psychological subconscious. Furthermore, the listener’s head and body movement and engagement in the space can alter the inner word stream. In this way, the listener becomes a co-creator. When composing the illusion, a two-syllable word is fractured and played through several loudspeakers in rhythmic displacements.The gender of the voice also may become difficult to decipher, and often it is also the case that the listener may experience a blurry state and multiplicity of voices coming from each loudspeaker.
ALEXANDER TILLEGREEN is a visual artist and composer based between Copenhagen and Berlin, currently artist-in-residence in London. Working across print making, painting, sound installation, sculpture, and composition, he explores how perception, abstraction, and embodied listening shape meaning and activate the subconscious. Tillegreen’s practices function as parallel, mutually informing fields, marked by a continual cross-pollination of methods and spatial thinking. The visual works operate as resonant spaces in which rhythm, spatiality, and chromatic tension activate sensory responses. His sound works investigate how language, voice, and psychoacoustic phenomena shape perception. Through the phantom word illusion, he examines how perceived words and meanings arise through resonance, embodied attention, and the listener’s linguistic and cultural background. Using spatialised audio and structural layering, Tillegreen creates listening environments that foreground shifts in perception and the active role of the moving listener.
Tillegreen’s work has been the subject of numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions, including Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, CCA Glasgow, Museum Tinguely, Basel, O–Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, FuturDome Museum, Milano, Kunstverein Göttingen, Kunstforeningen GL Strand, Copenhagen, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and the National Gallery of Denmark. He has presented his music at festivals and venues including STRØM Festival, Roskilde Festival, CTM Festival, ISCM World New Music Days, Darmstädter Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, and Nordic Music Days.
Each session lasts 10 minutes. The 16:00 session is followed by a 40-minute creative workshop.
Organized by: Great Amber in cooperation with the Latvian Composers’ Union