focus: default#25 - 27.02.2026 with Allan Gilbert Balon & Uta Guan Hey, Marc Baron, Nirantar Yakthumba
more information on our upcoming program in collaboration with Korzo
default#25, Friday, 27th of February, Korzo Theatre, Prinsestraat 42, The Hague,
For the program of default#25, taking place on the 27th of February in collaboration with Korzo Theatre, we look forward to hosting an evening with performances by Allan Gilbert Balon & Uta Guan Hey, Marc Baron, and Nirantar Yakthumba. Read more about the program and the artists performing below.
As this will be the only default program taking place this spring, we are pleased to invite you to this special event.
doors at 19:30, performances start at 20:15.
Tickets* | €10 / €20
*We recommend buying tickets online prior to the event. If the tickets are sold out, there will be no ticket-sale at the door.
Allan Gilbert Balon & Uta Guan Hey
Allan Gilbert Balon (b. Guadeloupe) is an artist and composer, working with sculpture, sound installation, composition and performance. Uta Guan Hey (b. China) is a writer, visual creator, and filmmaker. Together they have founded the publishing house xyä édition – a variable geometry press entity geared towards writing, sound phenomenon and inner engineering technologies – which publishes handmade books and audio.
At default#25, the artist duo will be presenting a performance for piano, objects, voices, and electronics, following some of their recent works: Allan’s ‘The Magnesia Suite’ (released via Recital in 2024), his site-specific installation in MoMA PS1 (New York, 2022), performances at Cafe OTO (London), iv projectspace x STUK (Leuven), and ‘O LUNA – LIVE MUSIC AT STUDIO BLEU PARIS 13/05/2025’ – a recording of Allan’s and Uta’s duo performance published via Balon’s website. The latter functions as a compendium of recorded pieces, (graphic) scores, drawings, writings & performance works, showcasing Balon’s approach through multifaceted disciplinary lenses.
Balon’s ‘The Magnesia Suite’ had stricken us upon its release with its own assembled, unhurried world, where a flowing air and some (sound) poetic absurdness in its fringes is arranged around intimate piano playing, mixing in a sensation of presence throughout tape recordings, organs, field recordings, performative voice, and percussive objects.
His earlier releases have explored solo piano recordings (‘So Lo Piano Works Vol. 1’, Wry Press & Séance Centre, 2023), as well as the possibilities and limits of communication and related technologies (‘High Latency Communication’, a house of saturn, 2023), including pieces for tuba, piano and voice.
Marc Baron
Marc Baron (b. 1981) lives and composes in Paris. Having been shaped by his early involvement in improvised music, Baron for almost 20 years has been dedicating himself to the work of electroacoustic composition using tapes and analog processes. The form that it takes – acousmatic concerts, radio broadcasts, records, specific live performances, or, more rarely, installations – depends on the music itself, while letting these specific listening contexts or spaces determine its parameters.
In both his recorded works and live performances, he creates meticulous music that encompasses not only the harsh and heavy but also the fragile aspects of the tools he uses, while capturing the contingencies arising from material processes that interweave acoustics, electronics, and magnetics. The complexity of sound’s qualities and their assembling is at the core of his music, posing our listening towards this specific tension between a semblance of realism and the desire for abstraction, making use of cuts and creating shifts with perspectives.
Marc regularly captures the domestic and unspectacular – “I am not interested in any sound more than any other” –, as they are conceived within the specificities of the magnetic medium (its limitations, diversity, and aesthetic determinations), including his working with the process of demagnetization of tape both in his recorded works, as well as in the form of performance gestures during concerts.
His practice builds further on a long tradition of tape music made for loudspeakers, although it is the self-reflexivity of its format and its mechanics that makes Marc’s work particularly distinct. There are the sounds that he gathers, those that he makes up, and above all, there is what comes to his ears, sometimes by accident, when the material is worked on in the studio, by the tape itself, by the microphones. The micing of those sounds themselves as well as the micing of the process of working on those sounds in the studio proposes some sorts of ars poetica of the recording technology – as if letting us listen to the (studio-)practice of making electroacoustic music itself, and therefore to its conjoined listenings.
His works have been released on labels such as Erstwhile Records, Cathnor Records, Holidays Records, Potlatch, Eich, Moremars, and Glistening Examples. He has collaborated with Jean-Luc Guionnet, Lucio Capece, and more recently has released collaborations with Jean-Philippe Gross (‘Black, Pink, and Yellow noises’, 2022), Mark Vernon (‘post-chance’, 2024), and Éric La Casa (‘Contrefaçons’, 2025). His new solo album ‘Soleil-Néon’ is planned to be released on Penultimate Press this year.
Nirantar Yakthumba
Nirantar Yakthumba is an artist from Nepal currently based in The Hague. In his work, Nirantar investigates tone, instrument building, and collective practice from an information-oriented perspective. In particular, he explores how variations in informational constraints – structure, redundancy, noise, (in)determinacy – are articulated with and within a work, and how such a practice of variation can be a technology for prompting transindividual introspection, challenging preconceived notions, and making space for difference in relational configurations. For his performance at default, Nirantar will be presenting a new instrument that he made in 2025.
Nirantar is also the artistic director of the Kali Ensemble, and is engaged both as a performing musician in the ensemble as well as a composer within a collective of artists who regularly compose for the ensemble.
About Us
default den haag is a non-profit curatorial initiative focused on the presentation of creative contemporary sound and performance in the Hague, curating and organizing their nomadic sound series with an international focus on experimental music and sound art performances since 2022, next to occasionally hosting accompanying talks and lectures. - read more