EVENT

Beams & Bumps: Asuna and Yasushi Yamashita (live) & Dana (DJ)

Social Hub with Concerts & DJ-Sets

ASUNA is a Japanese sound artist who began creating experimental music and sound installations at a young age in the late 1990s, thereby becoming a key figure in Tokyo's experimental music scene. Alongside his first major work Each Organ, a sound installation that re-examines the concept of etymology, he has produced performative installations such as 100 Toys and 100 Keyboards, which utilize numerous tiny toys or toy keyboards to create a multi-layered plastic universe of drones, loops, sonic moiré patterns, and occasional pop implosions.  Yasushi Yamashita is a Japanese musician, composer, and co-founder of Inoyama Land, a pioneering project in Japanese electronic music that spans nearly four decades and remains active to this day. Founded in the 1980s together with composer Makoto Inoue, they initially produced music for theater plays during long recording sessions. They caught the attention of Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra), who produced their highly acclaimed debut album Danzindan-Pojidon (1983), before they joined the Japanese ambient music scene known as Kankyō Ongaku.  At a memorial concert for Ryuichi Sakamoto in 2026, both decided to collaborate: Based on the improvisational playing of guitars, synthesizers, and toy instruments, a free and unexpected album titled Before Sunset, Street Corner, Cafe Fabre was created, which has recently been released on the labels Kanu Kanu Recordings and HEADZ.  This evening is accompanied by Dana – DJ, producer, and member of Spirax e.V. In her sets, she moves between fragile ambient and club sounds, characterized by contrasts of introspective atmospheres and hypnotic rhythms.

Beams & Bumps Social hub with concerts and DJ sets

The new event series ‘Beams & Bumps’ brings unheard sounds into the light, shakes up our listening habits, and sparks new perspectives.

It invites people to come together regularly, linger and engage in spontaneous exchanges. Over drinks at a cosy bar, the Weltkulturen Museum presents a programme of unconventional, trans-traditional musical and sound practices, performances and DJ sets – free from the boundaries between genres, cultures or time periods. Sometimes the artistic works make an acoustic reference to the museum’s collections; at other times, they stand entirely on their own. The series thus expands the Weltkulturen Museum’s musical focus whilst simultaneously creating space for new forms of exchange.

The format breaks with conventional concert structures and offers space for open, communal interaction. Among other things, twelve historic chairs – once used at Goethe University and later at the Weltkulturen Museum – provide opportunities to linger. For ‘Beams & Bumps’, they have been redesigned by artists: the uniform seating has been transformed into individual, idiosyncratic, one-of-a-kind pieces – a visual and material echo of the programme’s sonic diversity.

Admission: 5 euros