Chintan Upadhyay (voice) with Beate Gatscha (pakhawaj)

With roots in Vedic chanting, dhrupad has long been a powerful means of inner exploration through sounds handed down in an oral tradition. Chintan learned this art from Pt. Uday Bhawalkar, one of the great masters of the tradition.

A dhrupad performance has two main parts: first, the alap, an abstract elaboration of the raga using sound syllables such as ri, num, and naa, some of which derive from Sanskrit words and verses; and second, the bandish, the lyrical or poetic section, accompanied by the pakhawaj, the traditional hand drum played tonight by Beate Gatscha.

Greg Malcolm, solo guitar

Leather and Lacy: Greg Malcolm (guitar), Michael Griener (drums) & Dan Peter Sundland (electric bass) 

With one guitar in his hands and two more resting at his feet, surrounded by springs, resonators, knives, bows, and assorted toys used to set the strings vibrating and awaken their resonances, Greg Malcolm employs an ever-changing array of materials and a rich palette of timbres to create a hypnotic musical form built on the repetition of elusive melodies enveloped in acoustic drones. Malcolm likes to think that every sound follows a precise movement and is shaped as much by the tool chosen in the moment as by the instrument itself. Somewhere between the blues, minimalist repetitive music, and a Cage-inspired approach to the prepared guitar, his sonic world evokes both the vastness of the desert and the jolting rhythm of an unpaved track.

Leather and Lacy is a noise/folk-oriented reinvention of Steve Lacy compositions played on multiple simultaneous guitars using contact mics, extra strings, and springs, without external effects or processing.

Alexander von Schlippenbach (piano)

Rudi Mahall (clarinet and bass clarinet)

Dag Magnus Narvesen (drums)

The Schlippenbach Trio has been an institution on the European improvised music scene for over fifty years. Alexander von Schlippenbach started the trio In 1970, with Evan Parker on saxophone and Paul Lovens (and later Paul Lytton) on drums. The lineup changed in 2020, when clarinetist Rudi Mahall and drummer Dag Magnus Narvesen joined von Schlippenbach.

Von Schlippenbach traces the trio's distinctive instrumentation back to his formative influences: “Among my earliest favorites in jazz, which also gave me an idea of sound, were certainly the Benny Goodman Trio and Quartet with Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson and Gene Krupa in the 1940s and 50s. The absence of the bass—nowadays often overturned—gives the music a certain context: more clarity and transparency. Later I got further confirmation of that by listening to the live recordings of Cecil Taylor, Jimmie Lyons,  and Sunny Murray at Café Montmartre."

John McCowen, solo for bass clarinet 

Luurankouni:  Lauri Hyvärinen (electric guitar) & Félicie Bazelaire (double bass & electronics)

John McCowen's musical life has become an obsession with discovering a polyphonic language on a historically monophonic instrument: the clarinet. This has led him to a unique acoustic vocabulary that is similar to a shifting soundscape of electronic feedback. John's multiphonic approach is based in drones, difference tones, and beating harmonics as a means to showcase the compositional potential within a single, acoustic sound source.

Luurankouni's music is inspired by minimalist, ecstatic drones, diaphanous rhythms and chilling silences. The name means "skeletal dream" and was borrowed from a Finnish translation of poems of 15th-century Japanese monk and author Ikkyū, whose meditations on mortality, impermanence, sensuality, and dreams resonate with the duo's imagination.

Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet & electronics) & Sara Persico (voice & electronics)

Matthew Ryals (modular synthesizer) & Eliad Wagner (modular synthesizer)

Sofia Jernberg (voice), Espen Reinertsen (saxophone), Kit Downes (piano) and Ole Morten Vågan (double bass) are joined by spoken word artist Fiston Mujila

Jernberg, Reinerstsen, Downes and Vagan join Congolese writer and performer Fiston Mwanza Mujila, whose highly musical practice treats text as material for improvisation, moving between speech, song, incantation and vocal sound in close exchange with the musicians. 

Quentin Tolimieri, record release concert: Monochromes II for solo piano (elsewhere music 2026)

Augustin Braud, solo electronics

In the newly released Monochromes II, Tolimieri delves even deeper than in his earlier Monochrome pieces to explore the countless sonic possibilities and resonances that the piano can produce. Aiming to allow the inherently interesting qualities of the material itself to emerge naturally from the structure, he reduces the material to its simplest form by eliminating elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and formal development wherever possible. By stripping away these normally fundamental elements, listeners are able to hear all the complex resonances the piano produces—all the sounds that would go unnoticed when overshadowed by active melodies.

Augustin Braud is a composer and musician active in the fields of instrumental and electroacoustic music. He has received commissions and collaborated with the Klangforum Wien, the Neue Vocalsolisten, the Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra, with premieres taking place at the Eclat, Présences and Musica festivals and at the Philharmonie de Paris. Following the release of the piece Trônes Amoncelés on Opal Tapes and several live performances in France, he will release his first solo album, In search of the infinite, on Ici, d’ailleurs in late 2026.  

RAGE Thormbones  (Weston Olencki & Mattie Barbier) and Etienne Nillesen present a new acoustic work for two trombones and extended snare drum.  

RAGE Thormbones use trombones to produce sculpted masses of high-density sound, carving metallic resonance and subcutaneous tones to make rooms feel really heavy. They aim to shift the role of brass instruments away from vocal virtuosity and more toward their true selves as improvising organic air compressors—physically-modeled synthesis transcribed back into the acoustic domain.

Etienne Nillesen's solo work is built around two specially tuned snare drums, set in a precise microtonal relationship determined by the drum’s own acoustics. Rather than rhythm or attack, the music is about the relationship between pitches—the overtones, interference patterns, and harmonies that arise between them—sound that fills a room, changes character as it moves through space, and is heard differently depending on where and how one listens. 

Zhu Wenbo Zhao Cong and Manfred Werder Stefan Thut

There is a deep artistic and aesthetic bond that brings these two duos together: Their musical sensibility is spectral, each smallest sound as single event is carried out with a profound love, and at the same time both duos work with performative gestures that, transcending completely the limiting concert halls. find their ultimate manifestation in the open public space.

This is the core of the quartet's raison d 'être: there's no essentialist ideology regarding the sensorial surface and frame of the works but a profound sense for the interrelation of everything that is. Interrelation means here that the music of both duos never imposes itself dominantly against its immediate world; there's always a situational transparency. Or said from an other perspective, there’s always a certain opacity in the events of their music; they never want to make the complexities of the actual world disappear.

That said, the great artistic challenge for the duos ZHU WENBO ZHAO CONG and MANFRED WERDER STEFAN THUT to gather as a quartet is precisely their great difference within that great bond. We could say, the bond is rather conceptual while the difference is contextual. Concepts hold the world together while contexts are like the world's enriching singularities. (MW) 

Satoko Inoue (piano) performs work by Jo Kondo.  

Satoko Inoue is a Japanese pianist specializing in contemporary music. She joined Kondo’s Musica Practica Ensemble in 1986 and has since maintained a long association with his music, recording several albums devoted to his piano works.  

Program: All works by Jo Kondo (1947-)

A Dance for Piano “Europeans” (1990)

Metaphonesis (2001)

Trochaic Thought (2009)

Three Winter Months (2019)

A Contemplation (2013)

Sight Rhythmics (1975)

Interlude (2017)

Pomegranate (2020)

with kind support from Japan Foundation

Satoko Inoue (piano) performs work by Yuji Itoh, Toshiya Watanabe, Yuka Shibuya, Linda Catlin Smith and Hauke Harder.

Program:

Yuji Itoh (1956–): Yuruginaki-kokoro (2011)
Toshiya Watanabe (1974–): Leaf Veins (2016)
Yuka Shibuya (1981–): View from the Round Window 2 (2018)
Yuji Itoh: Meletan (2011/2014)

Linda Catlin Smith (1957–): Unbroken (2017)
Hauke Harder (1963–): STAR Nr. 74 (2001)
Yuji Itoh: Itsuwarinaki-kokoro II (2015–2022)
Yuji Itoh: new piece, world premiere

with kind support from Japan Foundation

TAK Ensemble performs Weston Olencki's when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean (record release concert)

Laura Cocks (flute), Madison Greenstone (clarinet), Marina Kifferstein (violin), Charlotte Mundy (voice), Ellery Trafford (percussion)

Dylan Kerr, selection of sean-nós and other traditional songs

Borrowing its title from the psychogeographical excursions of W.G. Sebald, when the great fires … takes its own journey through real and imagined histories of electricity, using myriad perspectives and mythologies around electrical force to re-enchant its ubiquitous presence throughout our recent past. The musical settings are as varied as their source materials: slow-burning, mesmeric drones constructed from the harmonics of 60Hz ground hum, crackling textures of the electromagnetic ether, field recordings taken at Nikola Tesla's first AC power plant in Niagara Falls, and a speculative contrafactum of old Irish balladry.  

Sean-nós (meaning "in the old way") singing is a traditional Irish solo vocal practice that is usually unaccompanied and in the Irish language. Each singer has their own personal interpretation of the songs, as they are learned by ear and one may decide to make changes that suit their expression of the song and its story. It often features highly ornamented and melismatic melodic lines (with significant regional variation), free, speech-like rhythm and a nasal tone.