Name: Soundscapes in the Garden 4
Start: 2025-08-30T11:00:00+02:00
Location: Neue Nationalgalerie

This event is an all-day event as part of the extended visiting hours of "Lange Nacht der Museen." Starting of at 11am in the morning, the pieces will start on a rotating basis, every hour on the hour, to coincide with the beginning of Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture sequence. Please make sure to arrive well before the beginning of the piece you'd like to witness. Doors to the garden will be closed immediately after the beginning of the fog sculpture sequence.
During the last week of August 2025, the music series Soundscapes in the Garden at Neue Nationalgalerie will feature three evenings of ambitious, site-specific live concerts by five internationally admired and respected musicians. Coinciding with Lange Nacht der Museen on Saturday, August 30th, there will also be a day of special, musical tributes to the fog sculpture by the iconic Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya (*1933), which has been on view in the sculpture garden throughout the summer.
Soundscapes in the Garden introduces a new dimension to the music programming that Neue Nationalgalerie has presented in and around its iconic sculpture garden since its early years – beginning with the »Jazz in the Garden« showcases in the 1970s and 1980s, which featured greats like Alice Contrane and Keith Jarrett, and continuing with the more broadly defined mandate of »Sound in the Garden« since the reopening 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—something that may be experienced while wandering among the garden’s plants and sculptures just as fully as in the focused immobilization enforced by conventional concert halls.
At the Neue Nationalgalerie, the spatiality and site-specificity of all live concerts is based on an immersive d&b Soundscape audio system, which will be specially installed in the garden for the duration of the series. Soundscapes in the Garden encourages audiences to understand openness and closure not only as major themes in the architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie, but also as categories for experiencing sound and music.
This final night brings together three unique voices of great depth. Known for his precise, almost architectural approach, Carsten Nicolai's work as Alva Noto draws on mathematics, code, and natural phenomena to shape pieces where sound and image feel inseparable. He crafts sound with a precise, minimalist touch, blending glitch and pulse into tightly woven sonic textures coexisting in delicate balance with rhythm and silence.
The legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto bridged experimental electronics, pop, classical composition, and film music, treating each project as a chance to explore new textures and moods. The work of Sunn O)))'s Stephen O’Malley explores sustained tone, resonance, and scale - often using extreme volume and slow tempos, he builds music that emphasizes the physical presence of sound.