Kevin Richard Martin Takes the Heaviest Music He Has Into a Theatre

Kevin Richard Martin has spent decades working at the end of the frequency range where bass stops being a musical element and becomes a physical condition. Sub Zero, presented with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland, sits firmly in that territory: slow, enormous, and far more interested in pressure and duration than in rhythm. Opening Transmissions XVIII at Teatro Rasi on 19 November puts that music in a seated theatre rather than a club, and the choice does more work than it appears to. Sustained low frequency in a room full of standing people competing with a bar is an endurance event. In a theatre the silences register, the long builds do what they were designed to do, and the physical impact arrives without having to fight for attention. The collaboration matters too. Moumneh and Oberland both come from contexts where drone, improvisation and song are not separate disciplines, and putting three artists of that kind together produces something closer to a live score than a gig. For a festival whose stated theme is encounter, coexistence and memory, it is an unusually literal piece of programming: three practices meeting in real time without any of them dissolving. One practical note for anyone going. Sit back rather than forward. Music at this frequency builds differently a few rows from the stage, and the entire advantage of a theatre is that, for once, you get to choose where the sound reaches you.

Appearance: Transmissions XVIII, Teatro Rasi, Ravenna, 19 November 2026.