Sound in the Garden 2026, Day 3 (Guðnadóttir & Slater // Slauson Malone 1)

From 12 – 16 August 2026, Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie once again presents the open-air concert series Sound in the Garden, featuring ambitious live concerts specially customised to the venue and a multi-generational line-up crossing genre boundaries. After four nights of live concerts, Sunday will be dedicated to special sound installations created in honour of Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya, who is presenting a site-specific fog sculpture in the sculpture garden of the Neue Nationalgalerie.

Oscar and Grammy-winning cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir is known for her heavy television and film scores such as Chernobyl and Joker, extreme minimalism and tectonic design to generate an overwhelming sense of cosmic terror. British sound designer and music producer Sam Slater won that Chernobyl Grammy right alongside Guðnadóttir. For their appearance at Sound in the Garden, they develop a new live set based on self-built instruments.

Slauson Malone 1 is the musical alias of multi-disciplinary visual artist Jasper Marsalis. In intense dialogue with collaborators, he inhales the anxieties of modern life and spits them out as sonic collages. Shifting abruptly between fractured jazz loops and lo-fi punk, flashes of soulful vocals and melody are violently cut off with roaring guitar. Existing within the same logic of a fast-paced unpredictable variety show, his cut-and-paste performances drip with syrupy existential dread and political frustration – an insidiously delectable genre-fluid counterweight to the harrowing that precedes it.