Sofi Paez at Detect Festival: A Luminous Rebellion Against the Digital Noise
In an era where the meaning of live music is constantly being redefined, Detect Classic Festival 2025 invites us to pause and reflect.
Against the backdrop of Schloss Bröllin’s historic grounds, from August 8–10, the festival will weave together classical, electronic, and experimental sounds, challenging audiences to rediscover the raw, unmediated power of performance in a digitized world. At the heart of this exploration is Sofi Paez, a pianist, composer, and storyteller whose journey from San José, Costa Rica, to Berlin’s avant-garde music scene has culminated in her breathtaking debut album, Silent Stories.
Signed as the first artist to Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community, Paez crafts music that is both intimate and expansive—where grief, nostalgia, and quiet revelation coalesce into something luminous. Her compositions, like the haunting "Por qué" or the tender "1123", are more than songs; they are confessions, whispered to an audience she once feared facing. Yet here, at Detect Classic, she’ll share them live—an act that feels increasingly radical in a world of endless digital replication.
Q: What inspires you most when you’re writing and composing your music?
I get inspired by life itself. For me, creating music is such an emotional outlet; it helps me bring feelings up that sometimes I can’t really put into words. It can be my own experiences or someone else’s… even just simple things like a sunny day in spring, the birds outside my window.
Q: Your debut album Silent Stories was created during a time of grief and healing, following the loss of your grandmother. How do you see music and art as tools for personal and collective resilience?
Music has always been a powerful tool for us humans. I think now more than ever, people want to feel connected. There is so much division that it's easy to fall into this hopelessness state of mind. Music can give a sense of not being alone – of hope. Someone might be going through the same things as we are, and that might make the road a little bit less hard.
I honestly don’t know where I’d be without music in my life. It has been with me through some of the darkest periods of my life (listening and creating it), and it helps me put things into perspective. It’s kind of like a detox when you create something that’s coming from the deepest part of you.
Q: Detect Classic Festival is all about close connections between artists and audiences. What kind of experience do you hope to create in that space?
I am really excited to be a part of it. I didn’t get a chance to go to many festivals when I was growing up, so I always think of this as my chance to experience them. I hope that people can come and have fun. It can be hard sometimes to truly disconnect from all of our worries and daily life, and I just hope that at Detect, people can enjoy every single note and be in the present moment.
Cover photo Mariam Wo Ching
Sophia Hegewald,
Detect Classic Festival 2025 is organized by Detect Sounds gUG in collaboration with the Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania Festival and supported by the German Federal Cultural Foundation’s “tuned – Network for Contemporary Classical Music,” the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the Aventis Foundation, the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation, and other cultural partners.
