Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo

Hanno Leichtmann (electronics, percussion), Magda Mayas (piano, clavinet), Nils Ostendorf (trumpet, electronics), Sara Persico (voice, electronics) & Valerio Tricoli (Revox B77) 

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Giallo is a new project initiated by Hanno Leichtmann and is influenced by the musician and sound artist’s love for the soundtracks of the Italian crime and thriller movie genre of the late 1960s and 1970s commonly known as "giallo" (yellow), which was named after the dominant color of the covers of the pulp novels that inspired it. 

The project pays homage to them and the legacy of the composer-performer collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and one of its leading figures, Ennio Morricone, who also composed dozens of giallo scores. 

Mark So & Manfred Werder, the inferior part of the stars (2025- ) for voices, portable tape recorders and typewriter, paper and notebooks, evidences, traces, objects

Mark So and Manfred Werder have been working together intensively for 20 years, exclusively in the United States and México. They essentially work on long-term writing projects that emerge from a practice that reflects the fragmented everyday. There is nothing but inscription, into the earth and bodies, papers and tapes, as the earliest of techniques in the cosmologically impenetrable that is cultural history.

with kind support from Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia

Get Lost Vol. 7

Solo sets by Toshimaru Nakamura (no-input mixer), Tetuzi Akiyama (guitar) & Gert-Jan Prins (electronics, percussion), with an opening reading by Rebecca Lane 

David Watson (highland bagpipes, smallpipes) & Tony Buck (percussion)

David Watson and Tony Buck met and started improvising together almost 30 years ago in a loft concert in Brooklyn. They've since shared stages in many parts of the world, releasing a trio record as Glacial with Lee Ranaldo and their duo LP Ask the Axes on Besom Presse in 2019.

Heather Stebbins & Ning Yu, Spirals for piano and electronics 

Heather Stebbins, solo electronics

Sound artist Heather Stebbins and pianist Ning Yu make music through iterative, cooperative improvisation. They use a variety of tools, instruments, and electronic devices to build conceptual and technical frameworks designed for experimentation and play. Stripped away from their traditional roles of composer and performer, their work together confronts habits of their individual practices. Over time, their ongoing dialogue has grown into a shared language, one that finds its fullest expression in SPIRALS, a multi-movement work that explores the intangible and malleable nature of sound and experience thereof.

Michael Pisaro-Liu performs in a three-day retrospective spanning his early, middle, and recent works.

• Rhododendron (2024) for solo electric guitar and electronics

• Mind Is Moving IV (1996) for solo contrabass

• asleep, street, pipes, tones (2009) for clarinet, electric guitar, fixed media

Michael Pisaro-Liu (electric guitar, electronics), Jon Heilbron (contrabass), Katie Porter (clarinet), Seth Josel (electric guitar) 

with kind support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant  

Michael Pisaro-Liu performs in a three-day retrospective spanning his early, middle, and recent works.

May 29 Friday

• Interference 1 (2003) for cello, electric guitar, live electronics, record player

• moss (2004) for spoken voice, 2 woodwinds, piano, vibraphone

Peter Tracy (cello), Seth Josel (electric guitar), Eric Wong (live electronics), Jessica Gaynor (record player), Michael Pisaro-Liu (spoken voice), Lucie Nezri (spoken voice), Katie Porter (clarinet), Lucio Capece (clarinet), Quentin Tolimieri (piano), Michael Weilacher (vibraphone) 

with kind support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant  

Michael Pisaro-Liu performs in a three-day retrospective spanning his early, middle, and recent works.

May 30 Saturday

• The Narrow Path (2020) for solo vibraphone

• Asleep, Forest, Melody, Path (2013) for open instrumentation

Michael Weilacher (vibraphone), Joe Kudirka and Ensemble (Lucio Capece, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Federico Pozzer, Ángeles Rojas, Lucio Tasca)

with kind support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant  

Flocks: Werner Durand & Uli Hohmann present their debut album Flocks (Karlrecords 2026)

Estelle Schorpe, In My Ears (for Maryanne) for live electronics

Werner Durand & Uli Hohmann shape drone soundscapes based on their self-built wind and stringed instruments, Persian percussion, and subtle electronics, drawing additional inspiration from Krautrock as well as Jon Hassel's "fourth world" aesthetics.  

Estelle Schorpe's In My Ears (for Maryanne) highlights several aspects of Amacher's work: amplitude dynamics, sound-walk-inspired temporal structure and, above all, the musical exploration of distortion product otoacoustic emissions. The composition encourages the creation of "perceptual geographies," to use Amacher’s terms, by making space, body and ear resonate at the same time. 

Crispin Lord (voice), Emma Rothmann (voice), Tom Foskett-Barnes (keyboard/electronics) 

Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik e.V. presents a video-concert of Fall, Touch, Crash. Tom Foskett-Barnes, Emma Rothmann, and Crispin Lord explore the idea of the “free fall” in bodily, institutional, and public contexts. Each of the three episodes—Fall, Touch, and Crash—marks a moment of rupture: a loss of control, a transgression of boundaries. The performance brings new music, embodied social practice, and video material into dialogue through a range of abstract and concrete means.

Billy Roisz and Dieter Kovačič (aka dieb13) have been mainstays of Vienna’s electronic, improvised, noise music and experimental film scene since the 1990s. Roisz’s work focuses on the links and gaps between visual and auditive perception, using various electronic instruments, electric bass guitar, cathode ray tube TVs, video projectors, synchronators and sometimes computer to generate sound and image. dieb13, best known for his turntable music and as founder of the experimental music platform klingt.org, uses turntables, self-cut vinyls and self written software for his musical works across many different fields. His film works include photo films ("schnitzel") as well as abstract digital and analog works.

Roisz and dieb13's collaborative film works have been shown at Berlinale, Karlovary Film Festival, IFF Rotterdam, Hong Kong Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival and SXSW Texas.

Melt All the Guns

Devin Gray (drums), Ralph Alessi (trumpet) & Myslaure Augustin (piano) 

Drummer and composer Devin Gray presents Melt All the Guns II, the second release by his Melt All the Guns Trio, featuring trumpeter Ralph Alessi and (new to the band) pianist Myslaure Augustin

Ustad Irfan Khan (sarod), Matyas Wolter (surbahar & sitar), Markus Schlaffke (rubab) & Sanjib Pal (tabla)

Ustad Irfan Khan traces a musical journey from Kabul to Lucknow, following the transformation of the Afghan rubab into the instrument now known as the sarod—a development closely tied to his own musical lineage. The concert features instrumental raag music in solo rubab, sitar, and sarod sets with tabla accompaniment, alongside an unaccompanied sitar performance. 

The Understated Songbook is a text score first performed as a duo by Koen Nutters and Bryan Eubanks. The project has since been expanded as a framework for structured improvisations with larger ensembles. This version is performed by an ensemble comprising a trio, shadow trio, and brass and reed sections.

• Trio: Bryan Eubanks (synth), Koen Nutters (double bass), Sam Hall (percussion)

• Shadow Trio: Hunter Brown (computer), Mike Majkowski (double bass), Felipe Araya (percussion)

• Brass: Elena Kakaliagou (french horn), Carina Khorkhordina (trumpet) 

• Reeds: Michael Thieke (clarinet), Chris Heenan (bass clarinet) 

Dragon Life performs animals and goddesses

Marie Krüttli  (vocals, piano), Marina Tantanozi (flute), Mathilde Vendramin (cello), Otis Sandsjö (saxophone), Peter Meyer (guitar), Jérémie Krüttli  (bass) & Fabian Rösch (drums)

Marie Krüttli’s Dragon Life draws on the boundary-crossing work of Meshell Ndegeocello and the finely shaded songwriting of Benjamin Biolay. The result is a hybrid music of rhythmic intricacy, melodic directness, and candid lyrics about love.   

The Handover

Aly Eissa (oud), Ayman Asfour (violin) & Jonas Cambien (Korg Minilogue xd and Farfisa)

The Handover release their new album in June following their debut album The Handover (Sublime Frequencies 2024). The trio combines the delicacy of classical Arabic music with the raw expressiveness of Egypt's rural and shaabi music, peppered with a good dose of psychedelic improvisation, kraut riffs and experimental sounds.  

Erosão Percussion Trio 

Mariá Portugal (drums, voice, percussion), Emilio Gordoa (percussion, live electronics) & Burkhard Beins (percussion, electric bass)

Originally formed to bring Portugal’s 2021 album Erosão to the stage, Erosão Percussion Trio has taken on a life of its own, performing worldwide and releasing Erosão Percussion Trio on Kassiani Records/Fun in the Church. The album features new material that builds on their shared exploration of percussive sounds and voice. 

The Pitch 

Boris Baltschun (analog synthesizer), Koen Nutters (double bass), Michael Thieke (clarinet) and Morten Joh (vibraphone, tape delay) with Jules Reidy (guitars)

Founded in Berlin in 2009, The Pitch began as a quartet playing a hypnotic form of structured improvisation full of acoustic exploration and electronic intervention. In recent years, they began their collaboration with Jules Reidy, releasing Neutral Star on Miasmah Records in 2023.