Listening Room is an exhibition where soundworks are presented on an octophonic surround soundsystem. Housed in the glass pavilion of Zone2Source in Amstelpark, it invites visitors to listen with their whole bodies – to engage with the immersive, relational, and ecological qualities of spatial sound. Think of the exhibition as cinema for the ears: an inward journey shared with others.

Please note that the works are not performed live, but exhibited in an 8.2-channel setup. A single purchased ticket is valid for any Listening Room programme – the tickets are not marked by date or time!

Timetable

Elizabeth Davis – Syrinx I, 2026, 20 min
Chris Watson – El Tren Fantasma, 2011, 20 min
Miodrag Gladović – the last trace (non-intentional), 2026, 20 min

Elizabeth Davis, also known as Wilted Woman, constructs intricate sonic systems from algorithmic logics and analogue grain – delicate balances of control, error, and finely tuned noise. Syrinx I centres on the black-legged kittiwake: its sharp, circling calls reimagined through overblown duck-call whistles and synthesised timbres. After time spent in Tromsø, Norway, watching and recording the endangered birds, Davis began building a parallel sound-world – less documentation than transformation. The piece grows from this fieldwork, translating avian voice into an expanded, imaginary ecology.

El Tren Fantasma (The Ghost Train) – created by Chris Watson, one of the world’s leading field recordists and a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire – carries listeners across Mexico on a rail journey that no longer exists, built from recordings made aboard one of the country’s final coast-to-coast passenger services. First performed at the 10th Sonic Acts Festival, this work from the Sonic Acts Archive has been newly re-composed for the 2026 Listening Room. Its layers of engines, voices, wind, and wildlife form an atmospheric portrait of a route that has since disappeared.

Miodrag Gladović’s the last trace (non-intentional) grows from years of luminoacoustic research and unconventional recording, shifting attention toward the sounds that arrive by accident – errors, artefacts, unintended resonances. These fragile traces, once peripheral, begin to steer the work, altering scale, timing, and spatial perception as they surface and dissolve. What unfolds is a composition shaped as much by chance as by design, where hidden material rises quietly to the surface and redirects the whole. It is also a farewell to a chapter Gladović unofficially calls ‘Rozalia – studio for noise and silence’, closing twelve years of experimentation with a piece that listens for what was never meant to be heard.