From Thursday 22 to Sunday 25 October 2026, during Amsterdam Dance Event, Futures of Listening presents Currents — four days of spatial sound in the Bagagehal of Loods6.
Two parts of it are free, and one of them is an open call that closes imminently.
The open call first, because of the date
Gathering Sounds: Spatial Sound Meetup — Sunday 25 October, 13:00–18:30.
The invitation is to makers working across the spatial sound spectrum to bring something from their practice into the room: a tool, a patch, a speaker build, a piece in progress, a field recording, a research question, a score. You can apply for a 30-minute presentation slot.
What selected participants get:
- An Early Access 4DSOUND Engine License
- One ticket to a Currents event of their choice
Selected participants will be notified by 13 October, which means applications are effectively closing now. Questions go to info@4dsound.net.
Two things make this worth the ten minutes it takes to apply. The list of acceptable things is unusually honest — “a piece in progress,” “a research question,” “a patch” are not the usual currency of a call for presentations, which normally wants finished work with a title. And the framing is explicit about why: Gathering Sounds is part of a series of community events built to make room for exchange outside formal presentation contexts. This is a call for people to show their working, not their portfolio.
Entry to the meetup itself is free with a ticket.
Also free: the Ambrio workshop
Workshops & Demos: Ambrio & Spatial Sound — Saturday 24 October, 13:00–17:00. Free entry.
Open to anyone active as a DJ or live performer: a demonstration of Ambrio’s new spatial mixer, hands-on time with it, and discussion with both the artists using it and the people who built it. A spatial-sound masterclass is also indicated as part of the programme.
Presented by AMBRIO, CTM Festival and Futures of Listening — the same CTM that ran the Spatial Audio Experimentation Lab call we covered, and the connection is not a coincidence: Futures of Listening is a consortium partner on that lab.
The space is the argument
Currents is sited in the Bagagehal of Loods6, and the building’s history is doing programmatic work rather than decorating the press release.
Loods6 was built in 1921 by the KNSM shipping company, stretching nearly 180 metres on the waterfront of the IJ. Its lower floors took cacao and coffee unloaded from ships arriving from the Caribbean, Central and South America and the Netherlands Antilles — and FIBER’s own description does not skirt what that means, noting the building’s daily rhythms were shaped by those maritime routes “and the colonial histories woven through them.”
After the war, KNSM converted the eastern end into a first-class passenger terminal for its 1956 centenary. Travellers moved up through the building: from the Bagagehal on the ground floor, where luggage was sorted and stacked, up a sweeping stair to the Kompaszaal, and out along a walkway to the ships. When the company left in the late 1970s the building nearly went; artists moved into the empty halls instead, and by the mid-1980s there was a plan to keep it as a home for art. The Bagagehal — heavy columns, concrete, “the quiet gravity of a crypt” — became an exhibition and events space in the 1990s renovation.
FIBER’s claim is that the hall becomes an instrument: “its length, concrete and columns shaping how sound is heard.” For spatial audio that is literal rather than figurative. A long reverberant concrete space with regular structural columns has strong, predictable modal behaviour and a lot of early reflection off hard surfaces — it is not a neutral room you place a system in, it is a filter the system has to be composed against.
The programme
Three sound systems with three different ideas of what a sound system can be — 4DSOUND, in:resonance and Sol Systems — combining in shifting configurations across the four days, with audiences moving freely through the space.
- Configuration I — Thursday 22 October, 19:30–23:00. Andreas Tegnander (live), Hugo Lioret (live), Rrose (live), Liza Kuzyakova (live). Presented by FIBER Festival, 4DSOUND and in:resonance, with Sol Systems.
- Configuration II — Friday 23 October, 19:30–00:00. Nadia Struiwigh (hybrid live), OK EG (live), State OFFF (DJ), Wata Igarashi (live), Zohar (DJ). Presented by FIBER Festival, 4DSOUND, CTM Festival and AMBRIO Sound, with Sol Systems.
- Configuration III — Saturday 24 October, 19:30–23:00. Casimir Geelhoed (live), Loek Frey (live), nthng (live), more TBA.
Two names worth flagging for this audience. Andreas Tegnander is a Norwegian media artist working between sound, sculpture and architecture who builds his own instruments for site-specific installations — speaker elements, cables, sensors and computers assembled into kinetic landscapes. Liza Kuzyakova is a composer and sound artist in The Hague working with non-conventional loudspeaker configurations, computer synthesis and site-responsive strategies. Both are closer to this site’s usual territory than the DJ billings suggest.
FIBER is also looking for volunteers during ADE, which is the other free route in.