Yan Jun & Kai Fagaschinski, Graveyard Processions (Ni Vu Ni Connu 2024)

Kai Fagaschinski (clarinet, voice, umbrellas, objects & field recordings)

Yan Jun (voice, slippers, objects & field recordings)

Graveyard Processions is the first joint recording by Kai Fagaschinski and Yan Jun. The Berlin-based clarinettist and the sound artist and vocalist from Beijing blur the lines between improvisation on the one hand and record production as well as composition-after-the-fact on the other. The four pieces on Graveyard Processions work primarily with Jun’s voice and Fagaschinski’s playing and also add a plethora of other sounds to dizzying effect. This is the sound of two prolific artists—the former active across different media and as a vocal experimentalist, the latter a fixture in Berlin’s Free Scene—vastly expanding upon their possibilities.

Tan Shuoxin, solo electronics

Shuoxin Tan was born in Beijing and works as a composer and sound artist in Cologne. She researches algorithmic acoustics, sound ontology, and Lacanian topology.

Seth Josel (electric guitar) and Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson (bass clarinet) present the German premieres of works by Michael Pisaro and Peter Ablinger.

Program:

Michael Pisaro, asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009) for bass clarinet, electric guitar and electronics (dedicated to Phill Niblock)

Peter Ablinger, 1-32 (2002) for electric guitar and fixed media

Interpretations and improvisations based on Ned Collette’s wide-ranging songs in duos, trios and full band. 

Chris Abrahams (piano), Ned Collette (guitar, voice, songs), Steve Heather (percussion, drums) & Fredrik Kinbom (bass)

Labor Neunzehn's Cluster #40

Felicity Mangan (electronics, field recordings) presents her recent solo LP release, String Figures (Elevator Bath). Created in the summer of 2024, the six pieces on String Figures sample and combine the resonant timbres of strings and electromagnetic textural fields with field recordings from wetlands. These elements were shaped through digital processing into polyphonic, angular assemblages.  

Jonas Mekas, Walden (1ère bobine) (1964-69, 16mm, 30'), the first reel of Mekas' Walden (Diaries, Notes, Sketches) 

The duo of James Hoff and Ben Kudler, under the name Radical Democracy, create live audiovisual works that incorporate hacking in real time. They are currently presenting a new work using hacked security cameras located throughout the world, mining their content for live visuals and sound. Accompanying this, they use the geocoordinates of the cameras to control oscillators and sample banks to soundtrack the visual experience,  interlocking the visual and audio through GPS and data hacks. All hacking is done in real time and the works are entirely improvisational, depending on where the cameras are cracked. 

Although Makoto Oshiro's primary medium is sound, he also combines other elements, including light, electricity, and the movement of objects. In live performances, he uses self-made tools and instruments that are based on electronic devices, everyday materials, and junk. His installation work handles sound as a physical and auditory phenomenon and focuses on characteristics such as vibration and interference. He is also a member of the live installation/performance group The Great △(夏の大△) with Takahiro Kawaguchi and Satoshi Yashiro and runs the label Basic Function.

The Arcarde Orchestra:  A Tribute Concert for Dean Roberts

Is there a right way to remember someone? Probably not. Like the filming of a written story, it will

necessarily betray the collection of images, sounds, impressions, projections that we created for

ourselves. After Dean Roberts’ passing, many of us felt the need to come together in his absence,

to commemorate him as a friend and as an artist. Music and a little irony felt—if not the only right

way to do so—one that felt natural to us.

Inspired by his seminal 1998 record All Cracked Medias, we thought of coming together as the

"cracked" pieces of an imaginary band, taking on an equally scattered and performance-based

approach to music-making. The open-endedness, the loose form, the glitches, the unpredictable

cracks in the seemingly uninterrupted surface of sound, the space and the moment as part of the

piece, the stratification of sound. There is something extremely powerful about something, or

someone, that could fall to pieces at any moment, yet doesn’t. The tension, the energy, and the

beauty that reside in the very unpredictability of the unsettled parts of a whole.

On this evening, we, Andrea Belfi, Adrián de Alfonso, Margareth Kammerer, Stefano Pilia,

Emanuele and Elisabetta Porcinai, and Valerio Tricoli, will be performing a continuous piece for

percussions, guitars, voice and tape, in which nothing has its given place but somehow does

ultimately fall into place. We’ll be drawing from Dean’s repertoire in our many different but

equally personal ways, in the hope of creating a space for joyful remembrance.

Tashi Dorji, solo guitar set and trio with Jamie Stewart (guitar, electronics) & Tony Buck (drums)

Tashi Dorji is a guitarist and improvisational musician. Tashi’s idiosyncratic take on the instrument, one defined by movement and profound openness to technique, adds up to a post-colonial disembowlment of guitar traditions. His recorded output includes solo releases such as We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit (Drag City 2024). 

Jamie Stewart is a musician and songwriter, best known as the founder and central member of the band Xiu Xiu. They have also worked on collaborative projects such as Creep Show (with Grouper’s Liz Harris) and Xiu Xiu Plays the Music of Twin Peaks (2016) and have contributed to theater, film, and art installations.

Tony Buck is a drummer and composer widely known as a founding member of The Necks. In addition, Buck is active in numerous projects across improvised and experimental music, performing with figures such as Jon Rose, Magda Mayas, and David Watson, and releasing solo work including Unearth (2017). 

Felix Henkelhausen Quintet

Wanja Slavin (alto sax), Uli Kempendorff (tenor sax), Valentin Gerhardus (piano, electronics), Felix Henkelhausen (double bass) & Leif Berger (drums)

Felix Henkelhausen first began writing for quintet in 2016, work that culminated in their album debut Misanthropic Tendencies (2021). The band toured widely in 2023, resulting in most of the material on their new release The Excruciating Pain of Boredom (2025). According to Henkelhausen "Improvisation and interplay take center stage in this production, and the material is meant to serve more as a springboard to explore these areas more quickly or easily—perhaps even more so than on the first album."

MAM test kitchen #4

MAM.manufaktur für aktuelle musik and Sarah Hennies perform music by Juan Hidalgo (arranged by Sarah Hennies) and a new collaborative work between Sarah Hennies and the ensemble.

Program:

Juan Hidalgo, Rrose Selavy. 6 moldy pieces for 6 sound fountains. an endless zaj etcetera  (arranged by Sarah Hennies)

Sarah Hennies, new work

Alexina Hawkins (strings), Sarah Hennies (percussion), Paul Huebner (trumpet), Sabrina Ma (percussion), Sun-Young Nam (piano) & Sarah Saviet (violin)

with kind support from Musikfonds e.V.

Asmus Tietchens, solo electronics

Asmus Tietchens began recording sound experiments in 1965 with electronic musical instruments, synthesizers and tape loops. Peter Baumann of Tangerine Dream heard a recording of Tietchens’ music and offered to produce an album; the result was the album Nachtstücke in 1980. In 1984 he recorded Formen Letzer Hausmusik for Nurse With Wound’s label United Dairies. On this release he began moving toward more abstract sound collages. Tietchens specializes in irregular patterns of sonic abstractions that are suspended in gray drones to create cold textural voids from external references. His music is often inspired by and refers to the texts of the philosopher Emil Cioran.

Martina Bertoni (analogue synthesizer) & Stefan Schneider Monti (hybrid synthesizer)

Martina Bertoni and Stefan Schneider Monti's music is certainly not confined to the quality of their chosen instruments; rather, it's a curious proposal for spaces of encounter, of unlimited negotiation, and of uncontrolled asymmetries, where the resonant, singing oscillators effortlessly coalesce into a multilayered blossoming interdependency. 

Martina Bertoni is a composer and cellist whose work is focused on embodied sound practices and post-instrumental identities. Stefan Schneider Monti is perhaps best known as a collaborator of Hans Joachim Roedelius, Sofia Jernberg, Garth Erasmus, and Katharina Grosse not to mention his duo SO SNER with bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer. He is also the founder of the record label TAL.

Vidya Dengle (violin) with Shridatta M G (tabla)

Vidya Dengle is a Hindustani classical violinist trained in the Guru–Shishya tradition under Ustad Zahoor Ahmed Khan of the Delhi Gharana. A regular performer on All India Radio, she has appeared at major festivals in India and given concerts across the globe. Since 1997 she has also conducted workshops in Hindustani music at various colleges and universities in the United States. She has been honoured as Guru at the Lalit Kala Kendra, Pune University, where she continues to impart traditional knowledge to selected disciples. 

Nicolas Collins Playdate, featuring Nina Guo, Okkyung Lee & Michael Thieke

New and revived pieces for players and programs.  A few ideas, some structure, and a little software by Nicolas Collins. Creative execution by Nina Guo (voice), Okkyung Lee (cello) and Michael Thieke (clarinet).

Achim Kaufmann, piano

Frank Gratkowski, clarinets and alto saxophone

Wilbert de Joode, double bass

Achim Kaufmann, Frank Gratkowski, and Wilbert de Joode first performed as a trio in early 2002 at a small venue in Amsterdam. Since then, they've toured internationally on a regular basis, continually developing, deepening, and enriching their musical rapport. The trio's work is documented in a string of notable albums: kwast (Konnex 2004); unearth (nuscope 2005); palaë (Leo Records 2007), geäder (gligg 2012), and oblengths (Leo Records 2016). In 2023, they released their first vinyl album, Canberra, recorded live at the SoundOut Festival in Australia.

Kaufmann/Gratkowski/de Joode combine the transparency of early 21st-century chamber music—silence, the moving into and out of noise regions, textural juxtapositions, the relics of almost tonal harmony surging up then evaporating just as quickly—with the energy, rhythmic momentum, and unpredictability of jazz and other rhythmically more aggressive musics.