During the last week of August 2025, Berlins Neue Nationalgalerie presents the open-air concert series Soundscapes in the Garden, featuring ambitious live concerts specially customised to this venue, featuring five internationally renowned musicians. For the Lange Nacht der Museen (Long Night of Museums) on Saturday, 30 August, a day of special sound installations will take place in honour of the Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, who is presenting a site-specific fog sculpture in the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie until 14 September 2025.
Image above: Loraine James, 27.8.2025, Soundscapes in the Garden, Neue Nationalgalerie, Foto: Ivor Alice.
Soundscapes in the Garden follows in the tradition of innovative concert formats that have repeatedly taken place in the museum’s sculpture garden since the Neue Nationalgalerie opened—from the Jazz in the Garden events of the 1970s and 1980s, where artists such as Alice Coltrane and Keith Jarrett performed, to the Sound in the Garden series, which has been established since the building reopened in 2022.
The clarity and precision of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, together with the ephemeral poetry of Fujiko Nakaya’s fog sculpture, serve as parallel inspirations for understanding to conceive of music as a spatial art form. d&b audiotechnik is providing an immersive d&b Soundscape audio system that allows participants to experience the music intensively as they wander wandering among the garden’s plants and sculptures.
PROGRAM
Wednesday, 27 August 2025
Loraine James (Live)
Blackhaine (Live)
Doors: 6.45 pm
Early Bird-Tickets: 19 € + fees, Booking: de.ra.co/events/2228866
This performance features Loraine James, an electronic producer and composer whose sound draws from a life steeped in musical variety. Growing up on Enfield’s Alma Estate in North London, she absorbed her mother’s eclectic taste of heavy metal to calypso, alongside her own teenage immersion in emo, pop, and math rock. Teaching herself production with a laptop and MIDI keyboard, she began blending R&B, drill, pop, and IDM into an unmistakable signature.
Joining her is Blackhaine, a British artist whose practice fuses drill, noise, choreography, and theatrical installation into a form that’s both physical and volatile. Emerging in 2020, his performances are informed by northern English life and a stark, uncompromising politics. On stage, movement and voice collide in an exhausting ritual of repetition, improvisation, and intensity—sometimes leaving him bruised or bloodied – as he dismantles his own catalogue and reconstructs it in shifting combinations of noise, punk, ambient, avant dance, and spoken word.
Thursday, 28 August 2025
Hania Rani presents Chilling Bambino (Live)
Doors: 7.45 pm
Early Bird-Tickets: 19 € + fees, Booking: de.ra.co/events/2228868
This performance showcases Hania Rani, whose music creates a space where piano melodies drift into electronic swells and dissolve into silence. Raised in Gdańsk, she began playing piano at the age of seven. After formal classical training in Warsaw and further studies in Berlin, she started shaping a sound more focused on mood than genre: delicate yet purposeful, combining the precision of classical technique with the improvisatory feel of jazz and the immersive textures of electronic music. Away from her main body of work, Rani channels a more experimental streak into her alter ego Chilling Bambino. In this project, she trades the quiet poise of her piano for the tactile energy of synthesizers weaving dark-tinted harmonies and pulsing rhythms into hypnotic, live-wire performances.
Friday, 29 August 2025
Limpe Fuchs (Live)
Pantha du Prince (Live)
Doors: 6.45 pm
Tickets: 19 € + fees, Booking: de.ra.co/events/2228870
The performances of Limpe Fuchs blur the boundary between sculpture, ritual, and music. A practitioner of sound as physical material, the German artists fashions her own instruments from wood, stone, bronze, and metal, moving through space with improvised gestures that awaken acoustic and visual resonance. Rooted in the experimental traditions of the late ’60s and sustained across decades, her work demands the listener’s full presence: landscapes of sound, as fragile and elemental as a thought.
Pantha du Prince is a German producer and conceptual artist whose sound lurks in the space between techno’s pulse and mythic abstraction. He shapes music as one might design architecture, delicately balancing shimmers of bells, textured percussion, and natural field recordings into compositions both kinetic and introspective. His work consistently probes the tension between the organic and the synthetic, unfolding immersive worlds where rhythm and atmosphere act in equal measure.
Saturday, 30 August 2025
In dialogue with Fujiko Nakaya:
Alva Noto
Stephen O’Malley
Ryuichi Sakamoto
11 am – 2 am (rotating every hour)
Free admission with a valid museum ticket (Lange Nacht der Museen)
Fujiko Nakaya (born 1933, Sapporo) gained international fame in the 1970s for her immersive fog sculptures, which transcend the traditional boundaries of sculpture by creating temporary and boundless transformations that engage the audience and lend the atmosphere a malleable form. Until 14 September 2025, the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting a new site-specific fog sculpture by the Japanese artist in its sculpture garden, which monumentally and ephemerally plays around Mies van der Rohe’s iconic architecture.
The Lange Nacht der Museen offers an opportunity to experience the fog sculpture from a new perspective. Nakaya has repeatedly brought her sculptures into dialogue with music and sound art. The fourth day of Soundscapes in the Garden continues this tradition, combining the fog sculpture with hourly sound installations by selected musicians who have worked or continue to work closely with Nakaya: In direct exchange with the artistic estate of Ryuichi Sakamoto, pieces were selected that Sakamoto composed in relation to Nakaya’s fog sculptures. Alva Noto and Stephen O’Malley, on the other hand, will compose or rework new musical works especially for the installation at the Neue Nationalgalerie.
Under the name Alva Noto, artist Carsten Nicolai (born in 1965 in KarlMarx-Stadt) is one of the leading figures in contemporary electronic music. Inspired by science and mathematics, he creates minimalist soundscapes, often characterized by codes, error structures, and coincidences. His performances have taken him to renowned museums worldwide, including the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. His multimedia works combine music with visual and spatial installations. Nicolai has been a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts since 2015. His work consistently transcends genre boundaries and combines art, science, and technology.
Stephen O’Malley (born 1974, Seattle) is a guitarist, producer, composer, and visual artist, known as the co-founder of Sunn O))), KTL, and Khanate. For over two decades, he has shaped the drone and experimental music scene with interdisciplinary work characterized by great stylistic breadth and depth. He has collaborated with Scott Walker and Jim Jarmusch, as well as research institutions such as IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), and EMS (Stockholm). O’Malley’s concerts are dense sound rituals of minimalist, electrified guitar sound and expansive resonances.
Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) was an influential Japanese composer, pianist, and producer. He rose to international fame in the 1970s as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sakamoto went on to compose many award-winning film soundtracks, including for The Last Emperor and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. Since the 2000s, he has worked increasingly with electronic and avant-garde acts, often with Alva Noto. His last works, including the album 12 released in 2023, show a reduced, introspective style. Sakamoto remains unforgettable as a stylistically versatile sound visionary.
The exhibition by Fujiko Nakaya is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and Lisa Botti, Curator at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Assistant curator: Nikola Richolt.
WHEN?
Wednesday, August 27 to Saturday, August 30, 2025
Opening hours:
Wednesday, August 27, 2025: from 6:45 pm
Thursday, August 28, 2025: from 7:45 pm
Friday, August 29, 2025: from 6:45 pm
Saturday, August 30, 2025: 11 am to 2 am
WHERE?
Kulturforum Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie
Potsdamer Straße 50
10785 Berlin
COSTS?
Wednesday, August 27 to Friday, August 29, 2025: 19 EUR
Saturday, August 30, 2025: Regular 15 EUR, Reduced 12 EUR
