Niko de Paula Lefort (a.k.a. nikoLFO, shaddah & Nicolas Lefort) is a sound artist based in Berlin. Aurality, his experimental research and practice, highlights vibrational affects and percepts as the essential relation between the self with the other. His work encompass different aspects of sound making, from composition and performance to field recordings, instrument building, radio making and interaction design of performative environments.

Niko’s various solo and collaborative projects, such Aurality, Sahddah Tuum, SUM Instruments or Hanz Memorial have been presented worldwide in festivals, venues and museums at CTM (DE), Bozar (BE), Norberg (SE), Berghain (DE), HeK (CH), Guggenheim Museum (SP), Musikinstrumentenmuseum Berlin (DE), Desonanz (MK), AudioRebel (BR) among others. He released sonic documentation of his work on Portals Editions - label he co-founded in 2014 -, Emitter Micro, Aufnahme + Wiedergabe, and remixes of fellow artists on Eotrax and Clan Destine. He is a co-founder and curator at Archipel Stations Community Radio.

He holds degrees in Visual Arts (Paris I), Generative Art / Computational Art (UDK), Music Technology: Interaction, Intelligence & Design, and Experimental Sound Practices (Calarts). He currently studies Dhrupad singing with Amelia Cuni.

Vibrational Affects & Percepts | Aural Ecologies

Complex relational systems and their psychophysiological impacts mark out my artistic practice: as a composer, performer, sound and radio artist I am interested in the harmonic space (microtonality), geophony and biophony (field recordings), radio transmission as in transmission art, interaction design (in dialog with technological means such as DIY electronics, Machine Learning, instrument building, modular synthesis), and in abstracting and re-contextualising the foundations of different musicological and ethnomusicological structures - a minimalist approach (I also study Dhrupad singing in the Dagar tradition since 2018, the most ancient living form of Hindustani music, considered « an attitude towards Sound »), to work outward from these tap roots to articulate a comprehensible Aurality, new perspectives on vibrational affects and percepts.