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, and an accompanying set with Berlin colleagues.

Greg Malcolm plays a self-designed adapted guitar built by New Zealand luthier Peter Stephen. Fitted with additional pickups, the instrument allows him to amplify sounds that are generally avoided, including guitar-body noise, strings vibrating behind the nut, scrapes, and other incidental sounds. 

Malcolm’s solo performances typically involve three guitars. One is played with his foot and used for percussion, while another is activated by an e-bow or several mini-fans to create drones and additional texures. Playing all three guitars at once, Malcolm creates a hypnotic sound of evolving melodies, built upon layered drones.

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 Vagan (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

Augustin Braud, solo electronics

The music of pianist, composer, and improvisor Quentin Tolimieri is extremely minimal and reduced, sitting closer to a kind of sound sculpture than to traditional concert music. Through the removal of various syntactical structures from his music (for example harmony, melody, counterpoint, or rhythmic gesture) his work attempts to reveal the depth and range of complex sounds that the piano is capable of producing, sounds that are oftentimes obscured or overwhelmed by these various syntaxes. I 

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 is a low-frequency duo of Mattie Barbier & Weston Olencki whose work exists at the intersections of “fuck around” and “find out”. Both members are classically trained trombonists but abandoned that ship a while ago and have been performing as a duo since 2014. They mainly 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.

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:

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)

Intermission

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